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.