A Book at Last
The ultramarathon of dream to publication
How long does it take to publish a book? If you’re me, more than a decade.
I started considering writing a memoir about Sean’s illness and our family’s world tour that followed after he died in 2010.
Shortly after we arrived in New Zealand in 2011, I began scratching out what Anne Lamott refers to (unironically) as the “shitty first draft.” It was an apt descriptor. “What is this?” asked my Aunt Leslie, when she read one of the very first versions. I’m not sure. It was mostly Facebook posts with a soupçon of narrative. It was, to use a literary phrase, “a hot mess.”
I stripped out much of the social media and added more exposition and dialogue, but I overreached, trying to write the way I thought writers wrote. Again, hot mess express. My friend, Dan, a fellow journalist, wasn’t sure what to make of it. “This doesn’t really sound like you,” he said.
Back to the keyboard. One-squillion iterations later, I have something more closely matching the way I talk and the way I write things like blog posts. Even if you think the book sucks, at least I can own my suckiness. It is not me trying to be someone else.
But I hope you don’t think it sucks (if you think it does, for god’s sake, don’t write a review on Amazon or Goodreads). I titled it Love, Loss and Lifelines: My year of grief on the run.
I chipped away at the manuscript, shelving it for years at a time when life intervened: new love, marriage, the two small fries that were always primarily my responsibility, two jobs, multiple moves, divorce, a wretched five-month house sale, followed by the purchase of a fixer and heaps of renovations.
I attended a writer’s conference in San Francisco in 2018, where I speed-dated agents but got no bites. I queried hundreds of agents in the US, and three of them requested a full manuscript. An email from an agent who represented a NY Times bestselling author got my heart thumping, but ultimately he rejected me, leaving me like a wallflower at the dance. If you need a colossal portion of humility, I recommend trying to pimp yourself out to agents and publishers. I once asked a Kiwi celebrity and author, just before a charity quiz night she emceed, if she would read my manuscript. “Hell no,” she said. “I won’t even read my uncle’s book. Why would you want to publish a book? There’s no money in it.”
How right she was. Self-publishing is expensive. If you want to make $5,000 on your book, invest $10,000. Also, you learn heaps of things you probably never wanted to know: how to buy an international book number, get a bar code, list your book on sites that never cooperate the first time, choose fonts and formats and… it doesn’t end.
Why bother? I often wish I had been able to let this project go. But the memoir has been dogging me and it would not relent. I wanted something not only for my kids (okay, Fiona, because Finley is not a reader), but for other people who have endured loss. We are a sad, growing club no one wants to join. My grief path is different from yours and it’s no shining exemplar, but it’s the one I chose.
My friends and other writers have been a tremendous help in this process. I would not have reached this point without them.
Here is part of the promotional blurb, in case you’re interested.
Deeply felt and often funny, Love, Loss and Lifelines is for people who have lost a loved one and picked themselves back up—or not. It’s for people supporting those who have lost a loved one. This medical tragedy/traveler’s tale is smeared with tiny greasy handprints while showing a young widow’s voyage through the messiness of grief, the baggage of loneliness, and the joy of rediscovered love.
Love, Loss and Lifelines will be available for purchase during a launch party at the downtown Tauranga library Thursday, November 3 at 6pm.
It will also be available via Amazon.com, through select local retailers and from my website.
A portion of New Zealand sales will be donated to Grief Support Services, which provides subsidised counselling to anyone suffering grief and loss in the Western Bay of Plenty.
Read the first chapter of Love, Loss and Lifelines at www.dawnpicken.com