I Wanted to be a Writer. It Didn't Happen Until 35 (Part 3)

How I went from a firing and a failed novel to creating CHH

Part 1 and Part 2 here.

It was autumn 2018. I had just been “soft dumped” by my literary agent, Stephanie after an underwhelming book launch and a failure to secure a second book deal. My first instinct was that I had to prove her wrong by immediately writing another novel. Nick, always the optimist, thought that I should keep at it, maybe give her a few months (as opposed to her suggestion of a few years) and then return with a new pitch. But I feared that when Stephanie said I should return in a few years, she really meant I shouldn’t return at all.

I love complaining, if I can be funny with it, but I absolutely hate wallowing. The situation with Stephanie made me feel like wallowing was my only option, because there was no solution. I kept trying to figure out what my next move would be. Okay, so I shouldn’t bother Stephanie anymore. Should I find another agent? What about self publishing? After all, I still had two manuscripts that I thought were pretty good, and maybe Stephanie (and the publisher, I suppose) were outlier naysayers.

I knew I had done so much wrong when it came to my novel’s launch. I wasn’t ashamed of the quality of my book itself, but I knew I had fucked up when it came to the networking and PR part. But what else could I say—it wasn’t my strength. I hated it, and I was bad at it. And besides, I still did it, it’s just that nobody who was willing to speak with me had any influence. It made me realize that I had done everything backwards. Apparently, to be a successful author, you need to have a network of relatively influential people already baked in. I reminded myself it wasn’t my fault that I didn’t have that.

I remember Christmas 2018 vividly. I was put on a performance plan at work, which doesn’t sound like that big of a deal for someone like me, who has seen countless performance plans. Except that with my book failing, I had begun to feel like my job (which I didn’t even like that much) was the only thing I had left of a career. And I couldn’t even take solace in the fact that I was meant to be a mother as opposed to a “girlboss,” because Nick and I were going on eight months of unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant. I felt like all the parts of my life that made me happy or provided meaning were slowly being chipped away. Was I going to lose Nick next?

We were traveling to see my mom and brother at my childhood home, to celebrate Christmas. When we arrived, I settled in and breathed in the woodsy, dusty smell of my childhood home that I never noticed until I moved out. I tried to distract myself with the holiday festivities that had always been my favorite: my mom’s chocolate chip cookies, staying up late with her wrapping presents on Christmas Eve, and sharing a makeshift wine and cheese tasting with my brother in the kitchen until 2 AM.

My brother and I have always been very close friends, and he knew all about the situation with my book. He strongly discouraged me from jumping back in with a new book, even a self published one. “You need to take a step back and do something completely different,” he said. “Do something you enjoy, just for fun, and don’t think about how you would monetize it.”

“What the fuck, man? Like knitting?” I realized at that point that I couldn’t fathom doing anything without monetizing. Everything I created was something I envisioned getting paid for. Even if it was clearly never going to happen, like a fashion blog I kept up for two weeks where I posted the following picture in earnest:

“What about your Reddit trolling?” he said. “Just do that.”

“Oh, great idea, Einstein. I’ll be a professional Reddit troll when I’m thirty.”

I figured I might have en easier time doing something “just to enjoy it” if Nick and I weren’t also struggling to get pregnant. If I didn’t have my job, or my books, or a baby, what was I here for? Was my sole purpose really just being Nick’s Wife? I loved Nick more than anything, but I didn’t like the idea of all my happiness and meaning resting solely on him. For one, that put me in an awful spot if anything ever happened to him (and I worried about that quite often, one time forcing him to go to the ER for what turned out to be a pimple on his head.) Second, I don’t even think Nick liked the sound of that. Nick still, on some level, wanted me to go back to Stephanie with some new killer book and knock her socks off. Nothing would have disappointed him more than me announcing my sole mission in life was to be his wife. One of the first things he liked about me was my creativity and how passionate I was about writing. What would our marriage be like if I lost the first thing he ever liked about me?