I woke up the other morning thinking about the amount of time I’ve spent on this journey to traditionally publish my novel. And there’s a part of me that thinks I’m getting a little long in the tooth for all this waiting! It can be grueling, yet, here I am. Still writing. Still fighting.
And I’m one of the lucky ones.
I have a wonderful literary agent who is fighting with me. An advocate who came along and plucked me out of a slush pile and helped keep me on this mountain. And, let’s be clear, it is a mountain. Although it seems some can scale it quickly and without oxygen, I am an example of the typical climber — painstaking slow and sucking on wine oxygen every step I take. That’s why I’m writing this. Because sometimes hearing another writer’s story helps you understand you’re not on the mountain alone.
I’m at what I consider Base Camp 3, landing an agent.
Base Camp 1 is writing the book and editing it one million times. Many a writer turns back here. They look at the path in front of them them, realize the costs and the pitfalls, and say no thank you.
Base Camp 2 (or Dante’s tenth circle of hell) is querying agents. Many a writer stops here as well. I almost did. Twice. It’s full of crevasses and false hope and, unless you have the skin of a rhino, some pretty serious frostbite.
This is where I started understanding the appeal of self-publishing. I did more than my share of research on it and decided I might not be able to pull that off the way I’d want to. See, I can be a tiny bit competitive (my tennis team may or may not be laughing right now) and a tiny bit tenacious. So I took the “get an agent” route. I also refused to believe my past would predict my future.
But the past is exactly where I need to start.
I want to go back, way back, back in time to a decade where querying meant paper letters and full requests meant printing 300+ pages of your manuscript and securing them with a rubber band only!, oh, and don’t forget the SASE (if you have to Google that acronym you probably don’t buy neck firming cream). That’s where all this crazy started. That first time I walked into Base Camp 1 and thought: I can write a book and sell it. How hard can it be? I had no idea. No. Idea. Yet off I went armed with shiny, new ballpoint pens, floppy discs, and a backpack filled with over-confidence and naïveté.
A dangerous combination indeed.
Next week, that’s where my story will pick up: my first Base Camp 1 (yes I’ve been back to Base Camp 1 multiple times). Hope you’ll grab a cup of coffee and join me every Monday as we set off on this journey together.
Sometimes the past is worth revisiting, even if just for a laugh.
Cheers until next time!
