I’ve Been Ghosting My Third Book

Why it’s okay to not be a book-publishing machine.

Photo by Joseph Frank on Unsplash

My first book was published in 2008, and it was a book I’d been writing for most of my life. Even now, if I could change the book with the perspective I have as a woman inching toward my best-buy date, I would. Maybe I shouldn’t have held on to my anger so hard. Maybe I should’ve written that loss is tricky — once you think you’ve defined it, it changes form. I ached for my mother; I missed burying my face into the thicket that was her hair.

How do you live with loving someone, hating someone, and forever feeling stuck in the space between the two? Maybe I should’ve written about that.

My second book was published in 2017, and it felt like a bloodletting. I’ve learned not to listen to people who tell me to write every day. I’ve never been that kind of writer. Shackled to a blank page. Hitting my daily word count regardless whether the words were worth deleting. A story comes to me in a torrent, fully-formed, and invariably there are weeks when I’ll write a hundred pages and then a four-year period where I’ll write nothing at all.

It took me two years to write and gut-renovate my novel, and two years to sell and publish it. Believe me when I say that I’d revise that book too, rewrite the entire third act if I could.

But I’ve learned it’s best to leave your books on a shelf. Like pencil marks on a doorjamb charting a child’s growth.

In the past two years, I’ve written a 230-page draft worth torching and 80 pages of another novel that stalled, sputtered, and died a cruel and quiet death. It got such that I’d label the file folders Basura One, Basura Two. And then there’s the business of publishing, a specter that never leaves, but lies dormant. Hovering in the periphery, it waits for when you’re at your most vulnerable. In 2017, I resigned my agent for a multitude of reasons, and the few I queried half-heartedly since — referrals from fellow author friends — repeated the same refrain: your writing is stunning but your Bookscan numbers are not.

Have you considered writing something other than a novel? Historical fiction? YA? A new genre where editors won’t penalize your second book’s lack of sales?

Sometimes it’s best to lie down on the floor and scream into a pillow while typing NO, NO, AND MORE NO. No one wants to hear that my first editor left, my second editor (who was the publisher) resigned, and my book was orphaned. Apparently, I should’ve been a snake charmer — waving my pungi, conjuring readers from dirt. That’s the business of book publishing: nothing matters unless it sells.

It takes everything in me to shutter that voice so intent on telling me that the book won’t sell, so why bother?

Bother. I’ve been writing since I was six, publishing since I was ten. I’ve been at this for nearly 40 years; I know I’m good. So, am I going to let a slew of myopic agents dictate my life? Bother. Open the laptop that takes twenty minutes to power up. Keep reaching into the recesses until you find your next fix. That spark. The characters that come alive in your waking hours. The scenes that arrange themselves like deck chairs on the Titanic. Your characters’ faces come into focus; their voices are loud and constant. The story unfurls, sweeping you up and swallowing you whole. Bother.

Your heart is on pause.

There’s nothing like the beginning of a book. Feverish first dates and a quickening heart. Knowing there exists so much possibility. Oh, the places you could go! Waiting for your characters to become slippery. No longer pressed under your thumb or obedient soldiers of your plot, they make a run for it. Steal cars and hurl maps and out of windows. They’ll speed, careen, and crash, and your job is to scrape them off the pavement, dress the wounds, and get them back on track. The beginning of a book reminds you the end always ends in the way you never expect it.

The first line is worth not showing up in front of a blinking cursor for months.

Make no mistake, there’s beauty in the discipline. When it comes to the research, outlining, and editing process, I am tethered to a routine. I prefer the familiar feel of a pen marking up paper (I edit on hard copy), the rhythm of editing and hand cramping, and the satisfaction of transforming garbage into gold. Of printing out the next draft. Knowing it’s better. Closer to fine.

But then I make the mistake of looking up friends who were peers when I was a promising commodity and spy their book options, the Netflix deals, the fawning NYT book reviews. I preach loud and often about not falling prey to the business of writing instead of the art of writing itself and still I sometimes say loud and often: you’re a failure. You’re a loser. You made the biggest mistake in 2009 taking that fancy job at a fancy agency when you could’ve stayed at HarperCollins, could’ve networked into oblivion. Could’ve written the big book that will make made your name.

And then I have to call myself down from the ledge. Quit it with the self-flagellation and the whining. Remind myself the choices I made felt right at the time, and maybe I needed to steal a car, throw a roadmap out the window and crash the car in a ditch in a desert to become the writer I am now. Now, the work is scraping myself off the pavement and making sure I get back on track.

You are where you are meant to be. You should be grateful for everything you have. I say these words loud and often until the cruel taunts become the smallest sound.

But I also have a problem with commitment — the problem being I don’t like it. My longest relationship was two years and it felt like decades. I recede from the labels girlfriend and wife. The idea of marriage sends me into anaphylactic shock. Rings feel like glittering guillotines. I once tried on a wedding dress and broke out in hives. It takes a lot for me to stay because I’m the kind of woman who sleeps on top of the sheets, not between them. Foot easing off the bed, ready to run.

So it’s no shock that it takes me a decade to write and publish a book. Writing essays and short stories come easily to me because they’re one-night stands, pretty things that could be abandoned. You can sneak out in the middle of the night. It’s the sort of writing that doesn’t require the level of commitment a book demands. With a book, you have to linger, you have to be in love instead of in want. You have to be comfortable in its company.

It takes everything in me to not leave because I know the result is worth the stretch.

Every summer, I make a plan. This will be the year I write the book. This will be the season I commit. And then something happens — dental surgery, a cat crisis, yet another financial crisis — and I allow that something to keep me off course because I’m comfortable with crisis. It announces itself, it’s brash and all-consuming. I know the shape and make of it and how to navigate it, but what I can’t fathom is the quiet discomfort of commitment. And the summer eases into fall and yet another year passes.

It’s only recently that I’ve realized I’ve been setting myself up for failure. Forcing a ring on my finger, squelching into that wedding dress. The last time I wrote a book, it was a tsunami. It came out of nowhere and it was exhilarating. Perhaps instead of pressuring myself with arbitrary deadlines, I can write smaller pieces, essays, short stories. I can read more. I can live more. I can try on shorter essays and stories and determine if they fit, if they’re worth cleaving to for the long haul. I can come to the place I was in when I wrote my last book. The last time I fell into a deep, deep love.

Because even when you’re not writing the big thing you’re still writing.

What I’ve learned over the course of my career is this: everyone’s career goes at a different pace. I have prolific friends who publish exceptional books every 1–2 years. One of my closest friends hasn’t published in 15 because motherhood and life have taken hold, but she’s okay with that. The next book will come when it needs to come, she tells me. Another friend has been working on her memoir since I’ve known her and she’s content with the work and the joy it breeds. She doesn’t need to publish; she just needs to write.

Some people have told me that I wait too long between books. They ask what happened as if the only acceptable answer to the gap would be some unimaginable illness or nuclear catastrophe, to which I respond with a shrug and say I wasn’t ready. Much like a resume gap — life happened.

I didn’t realize love was on a manufacturing schedule. I’m not a machine or a widget on an assembly line. I’m a person who’s devoted her life to words, to finding ways in which I can use words to bond myself to people even amidst my crippling fear of commitment. And cultivating those relationships takes careful time and study. A love that is ardent and unyielding. And if that means that it’ll take me longer to find my next great love, I’m okay with that.

Because I’m a human, not a book-writing machine.