I wasn't going to write this post. It didn't feel necessary. After all, it's pretty easy to slip away from a party when hardly anyone noticed you were there. But then I wondered if maybe someone else out there is quietly reevaluating a lifelong dream (for the time being, anyway), and maybe they'd want to hear this.
So, here it goes:
I am not writing anymore.
This is not a permanent thing, and I say that with a decent degree of confidence. Writing is something I've always done, since the moment I knew how to scrawl words in a notebook. But lately the joy that writing used to bring me has gone missing.
It's not something that happened all at once. I didn't wake up one day and say, "Screw it, I don't want to do this." It's been a slow unraveling, with quite a few contributing factors.
Last year I had
two books release from two different publishers. To say it was a frustrating experience is an understatement. Nothing felt the way it did when
LAST YEAR'S MISTAKE came out in 2015. The excitement others showed for my debut was nowhere to be found, including from my publishers. I know this is normal - and I use that word very loosely, because debut culture is nonsense - but normal should be the last word to describe what I went through. Communication from my publishers was poor, honesty was not a priority. Or even an afterthought. There is so much more I could say here, but I'll leave it at this: I was devastated and disgusted by the time my books released, and unsurprisingly, both dropped off the radar immediately.
It didn't help that I had two launch parties, one in Georgia, and one in my home state of Connecticut, and the number of people who bailed on me was almost comical. Almost, if it hadn't been so hurtful. It was becoming a theme that people who used to care, people who were supposed to care, didn't. And as hard as I tried to shake it off, it still got to me.
In the midst of all this, I'd been revising a shelved manuscript that I truly loved. I'd shown it to my agent five years earlier, but this story was much darker than my debut, and not a book that fit neatly into a particular genre. He hadn't shared my enthusiasm for it the first time he read, so I'd put it away and forged ahead on other projects.
I couldn't forget about that manuscript, though. And so, years later, knowing I had an option book with one of my publishers, I threw myself into revising SHADOW PARK. I added some ten-thousand words and rearranged the majority of what I'd already written.
This time when I showed it to my agent, he was very complimentary. Far more so than he'd been after the first read, and I thought,
I got it right this time. But then he made it pretty clear that he still wasn't confident about how it would hold up in the market, and thought my best bet for getting it published was as my option book.
Well. Turns out it wasn't.
My editor loved SHADOW PARK, but felt that with it's paranormal and psychological thriller aspects, it was too different from my three published contemporary romances. I, on the other hand, didn't see why that mattered. My published novels hadn't exactly set the world on fire. BUSTED had under 200 reviews on Goodreads at the time. Why was I only allowed to write novels in the same vein as the ones so few people had read? It made me want to pull my hair out. And so, after a 45-minute phone conversation with my editor, 15 minutes of which was spent curled up in a corner of my office trying to hear over my then-4-year-old yelling at the bottom of the stairs, I agreed to come up with a list of revisions that we could use as a springboard to make SP a book that worked for both of us.
Less than 2 weeks after that, my editor announced she was leaving the company.
In August of 2018, SHADOW PARK was given to someone else in-house to review. But when the weeks turned into months with no one getting back to my agent or me, we decided to withdraw the manuscript and move forward.
Unfortunately, my agent and I very different definitions of "move forward." I was adamant that I wanted to go on sub with SHADOW PARK. He felt that it was a job best left to another agent.
And so, after seven years and three published books, I began 2019 unagented and down, but definitely not out. Not yet, anyway.
After I'd finished revising SHADOW PARK, I started working on a new contemporary romance. I was really enjoying it, too. But then I got stuck.
Every time I'd try to get the words flowing, a voice in the back of my mind would say,
If SHADOW PARK gets me an agent, no one is going to want this. They're going to want a manuscript more like the one they're signing me for. I'm wasting my time writing this.
I couldn't shut the voice up, because I had already lived the experience. When I wrote and published a contemporary romance as my debut, that became all anyone wanted from me. "Wanted," and yet those books got almost no marketing and no publicity, even when I begged for boosts of my own blind efforts at both.
What was the point? So, 20K words in, I stopped writing the contemporary romance. Instead I jotted down preliminary ideas for another book, one that made more sense as a follow-up to SP. Despite being pretty excited about it, looking back, I realize I was trying to stay one step ahead of everything that anyone else might want from me. And that is simply not possible.
I also began querying SHADOW PARK, determined to prove that this book deserved a place on shelves. Between February 11th and March 31st, I queried 12 agents. And when 6 of the 12 requested the manuscript fairly quickly, I was confident that I was on the right track.
This is where things get sticky. Sticki
er, I guess.
It's always been my preference to query in small batches, gauge the results, and revise either the query or the manuscript accordingly. With 6 requests from 12 queries, I knew the query letter was in good shape. But I also knew that if my requests turned into rejections, I'd want to revise the manuscript before sending more queries.
And so I waited.
Everyone knows that publishing moves at a snail's pace. Everyone also knows that it's useless to compare experiences, because no two are the same. But when I queried LAST YEAR'S MISTAKE, I had two offers of rep within 3 weeks of submitting the manuscript to the requesting agents. I thought there was a good chance that my track record would be at least *somewhat* similar.
Not this time. 10 weeks later, I had only heard back from one agent: a very kind rejection.
Now you'd think that in these 10 weeks, I would have been busying myself with SPs follow-up, the project I'd started outlining when I stopped writing my contemporary. You would be wrong.
Not only did I now have my 5-year-old home for the summer, no family nearby to help out, and my husband spending inordinate hours at the office, I was also still stuck. I couldn't get a solid hold on my newest idea, could not work out the details to fill in the skeleton. I was stressing myself out, and beating myself up. Not only over the book, but over everything. I felt like I was doing a million things half-assed, both professionally and personally, because there was SO MUCH that needed my attention all the time. Spending hours trying to untangle the words knotted in my brain meant there was never enough time for bills and cooking and dishes and laundry and errands and parenting, and when I'd let those things go in order to concentrate on my writing, I only ended up with nothing to show for it.
I found that I honestly didn't want to write. And so, as the silence in Queryland stretched on and my hope waned, I did everything
but write. I even sat down and watched more than 20 minutes of TV for the first time in 6 years, which led to
falling in love with Stranger Things. I hadn't realized how badly I needed to just do nothing, and doing it felt great.
What didn't feel so great?
Being 16 weeks out with querying, and still only having one response.
I couldn't believe that in four months, only *one* of six agents had gotten around to reading my manuscript. So, on June 10, I sent nudge emails to the two agents who'd had SHADOW PARK the longest.
One sent a form rejection ten days later. The other ignored my email completely.
And so, as of August 22nd, nearly TWENTY-EIGHT WEEKS after sending my first query, I am still waiting on answers from 3 of those 6 agents, two of whom have had the manuscript since February.
By now, I'm assuming they're all passes. I'm assuming the manuscript needs more work, work that I haven't done yet in case I got feedback I could use as guidance. But here's the thing: I shouldn't have to assume. In almost any other industry, 28 weeks to give someone a yes or a no would be unacceptable. I, or anyone else, also shouldn't have to accept that sub-par treatment of smaller authors and their books is a publishing norm. Why is so much emphasis placed on a book's marketability when so few published books actually get sufficient marketing? None of it makes sense. And neither does stretching myself paper-thin knowing it will never be enough.
And so, for now, I'm walking away from writing. I need to get back to a place where I can sit down and write simply because I want to. I enjoyed it once, and I want to enjoy it again. But in order to do that, I need to distance myself from everything that's ruined it for me. I have so much disgust and resentment weighing me down, and without a bright side to balance the scale, it just doesn't feel worth it to keep going.
I won't feel this way forever. Creating stories is a part of who I am, and it's a part that I need to make whole and healthy again. I'm not there yet. But when I am, I hope that some changes have been made in the publishing world. I hope the list of things that authors just aren't supposed to talk about it isn't quite as long. And I hope to see you all on the other side.
- Gina
