Out Of Love and In Again

From Zero Words to Published Novel, Part 1

In January 2019, I didn’t want to write anymore.

Falling out of love with writing had been a slow creep; years of shoving my words into the too-small box of academic history, of drafting begging letters in my fundraising jobs, of trying to craft pitches for articles and nonfiction proposals. Writing what I was told to write, or what I thought other people would want to read.

The feeling of writing because the words wanted, no, needed, to flow out of my fingertips? Writing for myself? I hadn’t done that since my late teens. Back then, I’d written poetry in the breaks between classes and on long nights alone in my dorm room, gone to creative writing workshops during the summer, even won a local poetry competition.

But now in my early thirties, my creative well was bone dry, the bucket banging forlornly on the sides.

Or so I thought.

A few years before, I’d started reading romance novels seriously. I’d always dipped my toe in the genre - I read romance-adjacent authors like David Nicholls and Jennifer Weiner, and I’d watched my fair share of romantic comedies, from Bringing Up Baby to 10 Things I Hate About You. But with Trump’s election, I desperately needed to read something that would reassure me that humans weren’t all bad, that it was worth trying to be optimistic. I started with Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ entire backlist, then plowed through all of Marian Keyes. Then I found Sarah MacLean’s recommended romance list, and I was really off to the races! These books had all the giddy pleasure of the movies I loved, and I was eating them up like popcorn.

So one day in January, after learning that no agent wanted to look at my latest nonfiction proposal because I didn’t have a platform, and no editor was interested in my latest journalism pitch, I decided to go to bed at two in the afternoon. Pull the comforter over my head, go to sleep, tomorrow would be another day.

But as I was lying there…I find it hard to write this because there’s such a thin line between imagining and hallucinating…I saw and heard them. A shy, self-conscious teenage girl at party, desperate for somewhere to be alone. Opening a door to a dark room, seeing a couple, another girl and a boy, making out. The boy made eye contact with the girl in the door….and she rolled her eyes at him.

Who were these two? What were they to each other?

I shot out of bed, ran to my laptop, opened a Google Doc. An hour later, I had the prologue of a novel, having never written fiction before in my life. The boy and the girl had names, personalities, a second-chance love story in the making. For the next few months I woke up every day excited to spend time with them, to see where they could go.

By June I had a 300-page book called I’ll Be Seeing You, and the friends I let read it told me that it was wonderful, which gave me the confidence to try to get a literary agent. I polished a cover letter, read and re-read my first ten pages, then sent emails off into the ether. And waited…and waited…and waited. (With rare exceptions, publishing works in weeks and months, not hours and days.)

As you might have guessed, this novel is not the novel that’s getting published next month. I re-read parts of it now and I completely understand why - there are the beginnings of something great, in the dialogue and Owen and Laura’s sparking chemistry and in my turns of phrase…but just beginnings. I had a lot more work to do before I could write something that fulfilled that promise on every single page.

But the agents I’d applied to had said: you’re a great writer, but not this book. The first part was just enough fuel for me to open another Google Doc, a fish-out-of-water romance that I was calling Lark Ascending. Best of all, I’d included an excerpt from I’ll Be Seeing You in my application for the Northern California Writers’ Retreat, and I’d gotten in. I’d be going to the Santa Cruz Mountains for four days of creativity…in mid-March 2020.

Stay tuned for Part 2 - creating through a pandemic, learning how to take criticism and avoid the sunk cost fallacy, and writing THE BOOK.

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Some fun tidbits from Part 1:

-Halfway through drafting I’ll Be Seeing You, I discovered Frank Ocean’s spacey, melancholy version of “Moon River”. It’s been the first song on every single book playlist I’ve made since, and my husband knows I’m deep in creative flow when he hears it playing on repeat.

-The two main characters of the book were pretty heavily inspired by the MCs of Sarah MacLean’s One Good Earl Deserves a Lover, which is still one of my favorite historical romances (and has the exceptionally rare red-headed hero). If you’ve not read her work before, I would begin with Nine Rules to Break While Romancing a Rake and work forward chronologically. The worlds she writes are interconnected, and you get the pleasure of watching a great author’s style evolve.

-In case you’re wondering - l’ll Be Seeing You will probably never be published in its current form. This is because the first hundred pages take place at a high school reunion, and while the people don’t exist and and the settings are fictionalized…it’s probably a little too emotionally honest for mine or anyone else’s good. IYKYK.

-And a quick shill - if you haven’t pre-ordered The Slowest Burn yet, click below to buy it from an indie bookseller, who loves and needs you more than Jeff Bezos ever will: