Member-only story
I’ve Been Ghosting My Book
Why it’s okay to not be a book-publishing machine.
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?
