Once upon a time — no, I’m not starting a blog with something as lame as “once upon a time”!
Then again, it is like a fairy tale — but I’m up to the part with the swamp, and the rodents of unusual size, and Baba Yaga with her hut on chicken legs trying to put me in her cookpot …
I’ve been writing all my life. My first recognized work was that Groundhog Day poem my third grade teacher posted on the classroom door. I’m not sure my sister, ten months older, has ever forgiven me for a day full of “Did your sister really write that poem?” It was the first time I’d been complimented on my writing.
My eighth grade English teacher kept all the poems I wrote in a folder, and gave them back to me when I graduated eighth grade. She told me to keep them, so I did. If she hadn’t told me that, I would have thrown them out, because I hadn’t gotten any indication from my parents that they were important.
When I was in high school, the people who sat around me in General Business class — well, let these lyrics speak:
John told me he would marry me
Right in the middle of Civics class –
I guess I never believed him;
You had to know how I was –
A girl who hid inside her coat
And startled at shadows, wrote poetry
That Marsha and Tammy read to him –
But I never wrote a poem for John.
John and Tammy and Marsha told me I needed to get published someday, and I realized that getting published would be a way to get the recognition that was so rare in my home life.
In college, my repertoire for poems (and later lyrics) fit one of two categories: “life sucks” and “there’s this guy.” Nope, I forgot the third — “life sucks because there’s this guy”. My first college boyfriend broke up with me on my birthday because he met a woman at a party he liked better. But, according to his fianceé, he kept all the poetry I wrote him, even though he “didn’t understand it”.
I was once a singer-songwriter, during grad school, until I divorced my guitarist. It was the first time in a long time where I was allowed to bring my writing out in the open for recognition. Those lyrics above were from that era, and time spent in open mic and in jam sessions exposed people to my writing.
It was only a few years ago that I wrote a novel. My first novel exists because I kept writing short stories around a dream I’d had, and my husband (not the guitarist) told me I might as well write a novel, so I did. And then I wrote more, and I improved, and I had a pile of novels on my hard drive. Three things occurred to me as I wrote novel #5:
1) These were novels, which were things that publishers actually liked to publish!
2) Nobody would ever see them unless I published them
3) I was hungry for recognition on my writing, and I hadn’t had any for 20 and a handful of years.
(Recognition, as you might have guessed from reading this essay, is a difficult subject with me. According to my mother, she never complimented me on anything because I was a gifted student who read at age 3 and she was afraid I’d get a “swelled head”. Instead, the school district treated me like a little prodigy and the praise I got from them wasn’t enough because it wasn’t from my parents.)
So I explored getting published. I started the traditional method, which was sending to agents, and I got a bit bucket full of electronic rejections. I wrote to a couple publishers directly, with equal results. I tried Kindle Scout, and neither time were my books ever regarded highly enough to pull into contract.
I decided to try Wattpad after a friend’s suggestion I publish something there, and I came out of terribly disillusioned. It appears that if one wants to be seen on Wattpad, one must carefully calculate how to “sell” the book. I admit that I have no talent for selling things — my pitch tends to sound like “well, if you have to read a book, you might not mind mine.”
So now I’m at a crossroads. Not as in “Will I keep writing?” but as in “How can I try to be heard/read without losing my humanity?”
Any suggestions welcome.
Words Like Me 