Share the Pain and Do Our Part

I have this theme running through my life – a theme of indecision.

My brother John is an imminently sane and successful guy who gives fabulous counsel for just about any situation without ever making you feel he’s telling you what to do. He’s got all the proper language for counseling and, other than for the language of politics, he and I can talk about anything. He has advised me many times to simply make a decision. “You can always make another one.” This is probably the single most critical thing that I have not learned to do. I’ve touched on it already, and probably will again. But I thought I’d mention it in regard to publishing since some of what I’ve written lately has little to do with that, and yet it does in a larger sense. Finding the time you need to write and to pay attention to the less creative details that go along with “the business of writing” is part of the path to publishing. So is having a point of view.

I’m most fond of my new book for it having a real point of view. I’m not messing around. Somewhere along the way I figure I must have made a decision about that. It’s kind of the way I feel about “applying” for jobs. I must have already made a decision that a job is needed and seeking one the sensible thing to do…because I’ve gotten out and applied for them. The only issue I have with the current job I mentioned yesterday is that it requires a bigger decision than those I’ve already made by applying, signing papers for background checks, and getting shots. Most jobs – you can make a decision to take them – and almost as easily make a decision to quit when something else comes along. I’ve registered with temp-agencies for just this reason.

But once a thing gets rolling, I tend to feel it may be “meant to be.” There may be someone out there who needs me; there may be a need in me that will be met too. My heart must have called me to this even if I feel wracked by indecision. The same is true with the book work I’ve been doing.

I wrote Nouk Sanchez the other days – she’s a fellow O Books author. She endorsed “The Given Self” and, besides that, returns my emails in short order. So I asked if she’d share a little about the process she went through with her book and how she managed to come out the other side. She replied again, even though she’s about to take off on a month-long European tour with “Take me to Truth.” She said she spent the first year working 12 hour days researching, writing emails, etc., and then spirit took over and she’s done no more marketing since. She also said, “I can’t explain it.” I believe her. Nouk is off to Europe so I can’t write her back just now to ask her how much, if anything, she thought the 12 hour days over the first year had to do with getting things started. Do we have to do our part, and once we do, “spirit” takes over? Or is all the effort pointless?

Another “spiritual” author I contacted gave it all over to spirit. It wasn’t anything she did. Spirit brought her the contacts and resources she needed.

If you feel you’ve followed the ways of spirit or creativity and you keep getting poorer, you can start to feel that your intuition or inspiration might not be working quite right. On the other hand, you might feel like you’re staying open for the fall, the dark night of the soul of the culture, that you might be in it up to your eyeballs for good reason, or that following your vision is worth it. In “The Given Self” I call this “Standing in the mud fashioning new clay.”

Maybe it’s a refusal to face facts. Maybe it’s seeing where I am as where I’m meant to be. If there are people out there who are certain in these uncertain times, they’re far more gifted than me, or else they’re the ones deluding themselves. Hard to say.

I can only tell you not to listen when those who hear of your challenges tell you that you’re giving way to anger, fear, or uncertainty, or call you cynical or unwise or hopeless. Do not listen to your own inner voice if it tells you to give up and not keep moving toward your dream. These are the times. We can’t help but face the challenges and the conflicts they bring, and this is a good thing. We are turning to face them. We are turning together. We are beginning to see each other face to face where we can’t help but share the pain and do our part.

Waiting for the Lottery?

I feel as if I can’t commit to anything other than what I’ve been doing the past ten years or so (which is a little more than writing books). I did commit – to a coffee shop that failed – signed a contract for a full five years and couldn’t quite stick it out. I began leaving it in the hands of my daughters part-time about when A Course of Love came out and, a year or so short of the years I signed on for, turned it over completely. That was my original intent, yet the circumstances didn’t quite match it. The business wasn’t successful as it was going to be in my imaginings, and failed under my daughter Mia’s watch, which was a miserable experience for her (the rest of us too, but hardest on her).

I’m leery now of making other commitments that aren’t vocational in nature. Sometimes I have this feeling that you can’t go through life feeling as if you can’t commit and leery. That waiting for your books and your vocation to come together into a life that provides a living is a bit like waiting to win the lottery. The odds aren’t with you. But then I fear I don’t have quite enough faith or trust and often leave choices unmade.

Book writing alone is one of the most intense, shot-in-the-dark experiences a person can undertake. Add writing spiritual books in whose messages you see glimmers and sometimes flashes of life-changing and world-changing wisdom, and the hope, or whatever it is, compounds. Doing anything else feels like giving up…and not in that way of surrender…more as if you’re too wimpy to hang in there.

I say all this as I contemplate taking a “companion” job assisting one or two older people to stay in their homes. I’d like to do it. I feel I’d be good at it. And then that little voice inside of me says… “What if?” What if you get into it, and someone is depending on you, and the opportunity comes along (finally, at long last, as you always knew it would) to live your vocation?

It’s funny. I had an orientation today. The director of the place said, basically, how nobody is in it for the money and that if you just want a “paying the bills” job you won’t last. But then he said, “Of course, if I won the lottery I probably wouldn’t be here. I’d be fishing or golfing…” and he laughed. He said we all have to work to pay the bills and he understood that – but it couldn’t be only that when you’re companioning a vulnerable person who will quickly grow to depend on you and even love you.

Oh, the conflict that began to brew within me. “Am I waiting for the lottery?” Man. Waiting on God feels like that sometimes. And the choices of following your heart about the toughest around….

I Feel

6:31 Sun not yet up. A nice dark feeling woods, still, with spots low to the ground and around the edges untouched by light. The eastern sky hovering between white and pink as the sun gets ready.

I sat down thinking “I need a procedures manual for my life.” You know you’re in trouble when you think something like that. And when your arms ache and you’ve got what feels like a toothache coming on, and this is what you write about first thing in the morning when you’re in your cabin looking out at a not yet bright day with thankfulness, watching your cat watching you through the window. The cat you wanted to boot in the butt for standing at the door indecisively even though he does it every morning, only squeezing through when you’ve grown impatient and let the door begin to close and at the last moment, with a quick whip of his tail, he makes up his mind, or whatever it is cats do. That’s about how I feel. Whatever it is that I do it is not the doing of a mind made up.

Oh, I know mornings, and feelings of inadequacy and questions of “am I doing the right thing,” and thoughts that get me out of bed even when I’d rather sleep in on mornings dark and cool. When the thoughts arrive I get up, feed the cats, wait at the door for Max, walk the fifty paces from door of house to door of cabin, watch the sky brighten and the trees gain distinction against the sky.

Oh, I know mornings, and feelings of adequacy too, and the messages that arise and the words that accompany them, the ones that aren’t strident, are often gentle, at times visionary. I pay attention.

This morning’s thought was, “I need to use the words “I feel” more often.” It seems like a message in between – not quite chastising, not quite gentle – but still revealing.

I feel:

An Elbow In the Ribs Can Get You Launched

I’ve fallen into a lull from which I know I need nudging, and not necessarily a gentle one – more like an elbow to the ribs nudging. I sent an email to a friend with “help” in the subject line hoping she’d assist me in getting focused on this book stuff. She called and gave me the kind of nudge that feels gentle at first – the kind that comes of a bunch of casual seeming questions like, “What’s your message?” – and “No, not the long version. What’s your book about in a sentence?” Things like that. I was lying on the couch while we talked but as soon as we hung up I felt that elbow in the ribs. Do you know how hard it is for a book writer to say anything in a sentence? I quickly wrote four pages trying to find my sentence. I came up with things like, “I wrote “The Given Self” because I need a life.”

I also made a document out of endorsements, a review, my bio, and some questions and answers. Then I made the call to the Barnes and Noble’s where I had my first book signing/launch event all those years (12) ago. After getting the recording that invited me to stay on if I wanted to speak to a book seller, I got a very nice young woman and asked if there was an event coordinator on staff. She said there was and gave me her direct dial number. This community relationships manager was thoughtful enough to leave her email on her message. And so, I’ve sent off my first “marketing package.”

I have a second-choice launch site in mind, which I won’t mention since second-choices always seem kind of…well…second best.

Talking to a friend yesterday and saying I was trying to arrange this thing she asked why I need one. I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t have an answer. I can’t even remember now what I said to her. But I know I need an event. It’s like a ritual. It’s a beginning and it’s an ending. It brings closure and it launches the next phase. Okay, it’s a way to get your family, friends, and potential readers in one place and sell books too, but I know it’s for inner reasons this time.

There wasn’t anything like a “launch” for my second book, “A Course of Love.” I didn’t really want one, had no energy to arrange one, and would have shown up only hesitantly if my California publisher New World Library had set one up. I was in the throws of that spiritual thinking that says you don’t do those “commercial” kinds of things for a spiritual book.

Afterwards…after the book came out so quietly that no one knew about it…then I had this feeling of loss…or something. It’s hard to describe or define the need you have for some acknowledgment of the great journey that a book is. Not having any fanfare is kind of liking coming home from a long trip and finding no one waiting at the terminal to welcome you. I can’t say why this is, but I’d just as soon avoid it this time.

Endorsements -- Or how do you know it's good?

I was left with the question of, How did I really know if my book was any good?

This is a horrendous feeling – the not knowing. I’ve been writing for a while so I get to this place of not wanting to burnout my upfront readers, (I mean really...I could write a dozen final drafts) or at least I tell myself that. But I think I also don’t really want to know if my reader-friends think my work-in-progress is good or not. When I get on a roll, and it feels good to me, I want to stay there. It could be faith and it could be burying my head in the sand and I know it.

I’ve written lots of manuscripts I never even tried to publish for not wanting to go through all the publishing rigmarole. When I heard about this place that made it easy, I just went to town on the current thing I was writing, finished it up, and sent it. It's not as if I'd send off any old thing. I'm always passionate about what I'm working on. It's just that this all came together quickly. Just as I'd heard, (O Books was suggested to me twice in a short period of time, once by a reader and once by an author), O Books didn't take six months to decide.

Two weeks later I had an answer and a contract.

That’s when I started to get the heebee geebees. And then, after five revisions, the endorsement process started and the first two people who agreed to read it didn’t like it! One said it sounded like a process I was going through and I ought to put it away for a while; when I came back to it I’d see it in a different light. Another said she wasn’t getting a strong “Yes.” That’s when I got freaked out and sent it to two friends with desperate pleas to read it that day if not sooner. Their enthusiastic replies kept me going until I got a couple of totally unbiased endorsements that knocked my socks off.

You can know in an intellectual way that you’ve got to stand by your work no matter what anybody says, but when it comes right down to having it happen it’s a whole different story. It makes you feel like a wimp to need anybody to tell you it’s okay, and it makes you feel bold to keep going, and you feel both ways at the same time and get all confused, and mainly wonder why you ever wanted to publish a book in the first place.

Three Pros and Cons of Non-traditional Publishing

1. You don’t need an agent.

Need I say more?

2. Disbelief in the Process

I’m already through the editing phase so I’ll have to tell you about that aspect of the process in retrospect. The funny part of it all, for me, was that the process was so weird, so different from what I’d experienced before -- and then too, there were continual updates coming from John Hunt, the publisher, about the state of the publishing industry -- that between the two, I really didn’t think the book was ever going to make it into print. Thinking this way, I left a lot of things undone that I could have and, according to the advice of the database, should have done much earlier. This added a lot to the intensity of the process, and was a matter of trust. I entered the process not really trusting in the outcome.

What changed my mind was the cover. I was writing to an e-mail friend about my doubts, and he went on line and found this reference to “The Given Self” with cover art and content copy. I’d had no idea it was there. I’m not a technological person and one of the things the extensive database of O Books did was overwhelm me. If I’d been visiting and using the database properly, I would have known the book had a cover. It was real!

You have to realize that part of this was about the lag time there is between the acceptance of a book and that time when the “making real” begins. In those months when nothing seems to be happening – well, it’s easy to imagine that nothing is happening.

Not long after discovering that my book had a cover, I discovered that my first draft had been typeset into what is called “first proofs.” This is always such a thrill. I printed it out and showed it to my family. When you’ve been writing as long as I have and publishing as little, it’s easy to at least imagine them imagining you indulging a hobby for which there is unlikely to ever be any returns. That look and weight of a typeset book helps a lot. So did my dedication page, which simply says, “For Henry.” Henry is my two-and-a-half year old grandson, and for any grandparents out there, you know how the grandchildren, especially the first (Henry’s my first and only so far), become the light of your life and hope for the future, the kind that can get you writing what you really want and need to write. (But I digress.)

3. Doubt

The scariest part of non-traditional publishing is that, with traditional publishing, the experts are there not only to correct your grammar, but to look at your book as a whole and tell you what fits and what doesn’t, what the reader might get and what the reader might not want to hear. It fascinated me that without that hierarchy of “people in the know,” I felt a keen since of responsibility, and at times, even keener doubt. (More on this when I get to endorsements.)

This is another case of the con being a lop-sided pro, and the coolest part is that it fit my book. Here I am, writing away about a given self that needs to come into being – a self you trust, a self that has a life and a point of view and isn’t afraid to claim it or admit to it (even when it’s not exactly widely shared)…and what do I encounter but a process that lets me go there and rise and fall by my own philosophy. Man. When there’s no one around to censor you, you can put yourself out on a very long and shaky limb.

Obsession

It’s been 18 days since I sent in the final revision of “The Given Self,” and I haven’t looked at it since except to print off the final. I set it on the coffee table in my sunroom office after I did and left it for a week. I couldn’t bring myself to read it. I knew I’d find something else I wanted to change and the changes I already made were scaring the shit out of me.

Revisions are not fun.

I revised this book more than any other I’ve published; major revisions. So it sat there.

The endorsement phase is behind me, but I had this one guy say he’d read it in September after getting back from a holiday and I was debating, while it sat, whether to take it to a copier before sending it. I didn’t. Now it’s not even a reminder sitting on my coffee table.

I wrote a cover letter to this guy telling him where I quoted from his book and saying, “I won’t mind if you read that chapter first.” It was my coy way of directing him to what I hope is a better chapter than my first. My first chapter is one of those chapters I really liked until just before having to send in the final and then it seemed to have numerous problems which I set about fixing. I’m scared to read it. Did I mess it up? The first chapter of all things?

There were a number of endorsements that I wanted but was pretty sure I wouldn’t get and I was right about them: the bigger name authors I know by association in one way or another were too busy or simply unreachable. But this guy. I didn’t even think about him until late in the process when I was getting frustrated and drained by that feeling you get when you’re doing something you don’t really want to do. I can’t remember now how he came to mind, but I’ll never forget the energy that started to pump back into me when he did. I Googled his name, Steve Almond, and he had a contact button with one of those little boxes where you can send an email limited to a hundred words or so. I wrote, “I’m in love with the little three-page chapter called “Heart Radical” in your book “Not that you asked” and I’ve got an odd little spiritual book coming out and wondered if you’d consider reading it and maybe giving an endorsement.” It was an impulsive moment. I hit send. Then I felt like an idiot. Couldn’t I have said something more? Something interesting?

It took a week or so but he wrote back. I was just about squealing and had to call a friend and tell her, “I heard back from Steve Almond!” It’s so funny when that happens – when the impulsive move gets a response. All those long letters to other authors that I’d agonized over! Anyway, I think it might have been my mention of that chapter that got him to agree to my request because he wrote back that he had to fight to keep it in the book.

This is the terrifying thing about “regular” publishers – they might cut your best chapter. And it’s the terrifying thing about non-traditional publishers – that they might not cut your worst.

I’ve read the book review section of my Sunday paper with great devotion for about twenty years. I love reviews. I even started a file on stuff I’d write after reading them. I’d get so inspired by the insight of reviewers…the way they’d see into a book and gather up the meaning like apples picked off a tree. I’d feel this sweet relief when there’d be a little about the author, especially those who worried and struggled and fretted in that particular soulful way of the artist, and those who talked of process and where they wrote and when. I swear I started writing my first mystery novel (back when I thought that’s what I’d be writing forever) because of a review of a book written by a single mom who got up at five in the morning and wrote before work. She was a big success and I imagined myself doing the same and being able to buy my kids cars.

A book review is how I found Steve Almond. I don’t have a huge book budget so I could probably count on one hand the number of hard cover books I’ve bought after reading a good review, and I likely wouldn’t have bought Almond’s either except that I found an interview he did on-line where he talked about obsession. I’d never heard anybody say what he said, which was basically that a good writer is obsessed and that he wouldn’t want to read a book by anybody who wasn’t obsessed.

I am obsessed and I know obsession when I see it.

By now he’s got the book. Maybe he’s reading it. Maybe if he sees how obsessed I am he’ll write me back. If he doesn’t hate it, maybe I’ll read it again. I’ll let you know.

BOOK (in screaming capital letters)

I’m laying in bed this morning thinking, BOOK. Last night I reviewed the timeline for this whole thing and so, of course, this morning, there they are, the various tasks, and that whole half truth/half lie you tell yourself that it matters or alternately doesn’t matter. The timeline is like a guide for a pregnant woman, it really is. Four months ahead. Three months. Two weeks. Like that. I’m three months ahead and looking at the four month suggestion: arrange your launch and/or book signings now.

I’m remembering my last launch and feeling the changes of the last ten years. The first launch was for The Grace Trilogy which I’d written collaboratively with two friends. The publisher was Hazelden. I had two of the three books to edit and an editor for each. Both lived less than five miles away. One came and sat at my dining room table and told me he probably couldn’t get through the editing without crying. He’s still a friend. We had a beer not long ago when I was feeling desperate to see pencil scratches on my manuscript and to have a fellow human being I could look at tell me my BOOK was okay.

I’m not without friends, only feeling bereft when I think of a book launch. With my first I was still working and had more of a social network. I had my two co-authors and all their friends and family. We had the largest launch at the largest Barnes and Noble in town. My husband threw us a party at the Loring Café, about the coolest place to eat in Minneapolis (that it’s been gone a number of years will give you a hint, if you’re from the area and know the place, of how long ago this was – 1997). I was still a regular church goer and my priest was there and a bunch of church lady friends that we arranged a bus for. I’m wondering, this time, if I can get 15 people there. I read that bookstores are pretty content to host you if you’re going to sell 30 or more books. I start counting family members and friends on my fingers. The list has shrunk considerably. My Dad won’t be there for one thing.

We had a publicist.

Don’t have one of those this time. Don’t have collaborators. Don’t have editors. Don’t have a single face or even a voice to put with a long-distance name. Don’t have a phone number. Don’t even have many e-mail addresses. What I have is a database.

My publisher is O Books. It’s different. Possibly the new wave of publishing. The one that might emerge, at least, if the big name publishers keep telling new authors (and the formerly published who didn’t reach successful sales figures) that they’re only taking the big names right now – what with the state of the industry and the economy.

Minnesota has one of the most vibrant publishing communities around and you always get the feeling that if you say anything about publishing as you experience it, you’ll get a bunch of flack that says, “Hey, if you write a good enough book you’ll get published.” You figure that any mention of difficulty will be taken as sour grapes. So I’ll just admit that if you’re really literary and you write a certain kind of really literary book, you can probably still find a small traditional publisher that will take a chance on you.

For the rest of us, there are likely going to be more places like O Books.

The basic philosophy of O Books (byline Change Your Thinking Change Your Life) is that if you have a competently written book that you’re willing to stand by, they’re willing to give you that opportunity of seeing it in print and taking your shot. O Books is located in the UK. I’m in the US. This isn’t a problem since all the communication (presumably even if you lived next door) would still be done via e-mail and database. They don’t even keep phones on their desks. (Who knows if they have desks?) There are still supporters and “experts” that help you through the process, but “You” are expected to be the primary expert and tons of information (the database) is provided to assist you in being your own authority.

Which is why you wake up in the morning with the BOOK in your head and butterflies in your stomach.