Special Unicorn Summer

Facing down the proverbial drawer

It's officially summer, and I wrapped up my 19th year in secondary public education. I love being a high school librarian, but the end of the school year is an extremely stressful time. In fact, it's the most hectic, stressful week and a half of the entire school year. I have to collect back all of the textbooks, library books, and devices from the approx. 2,000 students, and, the worst part, we have to reconcile the library accounts of all ~500 seniors before they graduate. I fight with a lot of seniors and their parents and I get lied to a lot right to my face and I really, really don't enjoy it.

BUT it's summer now, and I have six whole weeks off. My summer is shorter now that I'm a librarian, but that's fine, because now that I have kids my summer break is also considerably less relaxing than it used to be. I saw a post somewhere recently that said we are expected to be with and entertain our kids 24/7, but when we were kids our parents got 12 entire hours free of us while we were outside playing in a ditch. My neighbors and I were playing on the railroad track behind my house, not in a ditch, but this is absolutely true. I have to entertain my children every moment, and if I look away from them for a second they pick up YouTube and I feel like CPS is going to haul me away or their brains are going to slide out of their ears or something. Keeping them constantly entertained is exhausting, and there are already days I wish I was back at work because it is much more chill and I actually get to relax. I am currently typing this from an indoor trampoline park because it means 90 minutes of sitting uninterrupted with my headphones and my computer - it's absolutely worth the admission cost.

It’s ridiculous that this is the most peaceful writing spot I’ve found lately

I also bought us a bowling summer pass, so we can bowl 2 games every day all summer long (+ shoe rental!). We've gone twice and it has already paid for itself. This was a hilarious purchase because I have always been pretty terrible at bowling, but I don’t care. If you know me at all, you know that when it comes to anything resembling a sport, I'm not a competitive person. I'm just not. I just enjoy throwing the ball down the lane and if it hits some things, then yay. But I truly don't care about trying to get better at the game or my score or who wins.

We turned on the bumpers and my 9 y/o still beat me

What I am competitive with, however, is myself.

Which is why I'm frustrated with querying.

I first queried literary agents in 2011, which might as well have been another lifetime ago. Querying was all VERY DIFFERENT in 2011. All of it. Like, literally everything about it all. And in 2011, because of a series of good fortune and happy accidents, I got a great literary agent in, like, two weeks.

While I knew that the entire publishing landscape today was completely different than in 2011 and everyone was telling me things were so much more difficult for everyone and that everything is taking longer and is so much more of a trash fire, some part of me was like, hmm, but I am a special unicorn, so maybe it will only take me like two weeks again.

Obviously

HA. It is taking considerably longer than two weeks.

I do have quite a few full manuscripts out with quite a few great agents, but I have also gotten a heap of rejections. Despite the ADHD rejection sensitivity I have in my real life, I actually take writing-related rejection pretty well - I'm able to compartmentalize it somehow and recognize that it isn’t personal. (Well, most of the time.)

But, since this is taking more than two weeks (you know, just a smidge longer), I'm also trying to mentally prepare myself for the very real possibility that maybe this isn't the book.

Maybe I won’t be getting an agent with this book.

This is a hard pill to swallow for me, because (this is a big admission for me) I'm not one of those writers with a bunch of books living on my hard drive or in the proverbial drawer.

Literally every book I've ever written has ~done something~.

AVOIDING DRAMA was the first book I ever wrote, which is absolutely bonkers when I think about it. It's the book that taught me how to write a book, and I wrote and re-wrote it a bazillion times, but then I queried it, and, like I said, it got me an agent in like two weeks. It did go on sub and (THANK GOD) it didn't sell, but it did get me an agent. (It’s about a girl who was kicked off of her HS dance team for hazing a freshman and joins theater to fill the hole in her schedule. There is a romance with a theater dork, there is a video game subplot, and there is a mystery regarding the hazing that I added in when I was pitching the book to an agent once and she looked bored while I was talking, so, in a desperate attempt to get her attention back, I said “and she also tries to solve the mystery of what really happened with the hazing!” and that made her look interested again, so I went back and wrote it into the book. This book has now been farmed for parts like an organ harvesting operation.)

IN REAL LIFE was the second book I wrote. I sent it to my agent and she told me it wasn't ready yet.

PUSH GIRL was the third book I wrote in a four month fever dream. I wrote that book knowing it would be published.

Then I fixed IN REAL LIFE and we sold it.

Then I got my MFA and wrote 80 pages of a novel called THAT GIRL about a girl who cheats on her boyfriend with her sister's roommate for my creative thesis. I never actually finished it, but I wrote a lot of it, and it got me my MFA. (Should I revisit this one? Apparently no one likes girls who cheat on their boyfriends.)

Then I wrote a first version of THIS IS FOR TONIGHT that was supposed to be a companion to IN REAL LIFE, but that didn't work out. So, instead of shelving it, I completely rehauled the whole thing and turned it into THIS IS FOR TONIGHT.

So it's weird to mentally prepare myself for the possibility of this book, this one I’m querying, doing...nothing. Being something I wrote and love and having it ultimately languish on my hard drive.

I know that this is normal for pretty much every other writer. To not just have one languishing manuscript, but many. Dozens. And maybe it's time for me to have this experience. To go through this writer rite of passage like everyone else. (Like the rough querying journey I’m having, also.)

And…maybe this book did do something. Maybe it's enough being the book that shook me out of my deep funk and got me writing again. That's not nothing. That's a big something. Because of this book, no matter what happens with it, whether it gets me an agent or it collects dust in a folder on my hard drive, it got me back out there. Writing, querying, participating in the writing community again, checking back in with that part of myself that I thought might have been lost after having kids and the huge lifestyle change of a new FT job, and wandering too far away from it all.

This book made me a writer again. That’s not nothing.

If it does nothing else, at least it did that.

Anyway, I’m drafting something else now. In stolen moments at the trampoline park or when Mr. Beast is doing some parenting for me (don’t tell CPS) during my all-too-short summer break, I am trying to write another one. And maybe that one will do something and maybe it won’t.

Maybe my proverbial drawer will fill up. Who knows. But whatever happens, at least I know I’m a writer again.

Happy summer, everyone.