From Women Writers,Women’s Books:
Who remembers 2012? Major news that year: the shooting death of a Black teenager named Trayvon Martin, a hurricane named Sandy that flooded the East Coast, and a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary that took the lives of 18 schoolchildren and 9 adults. It was the literary year of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and This is How you Lose Her by Junot Diaz.
Do you remember your writing life all those years ago? I do. My relationship with my former literary agent had ended after she didn’t sell my novel. I’d written a subsequent novel she didn’t like. But, despite the heartache, I was inspired by a brand-new idea: a book about a cleaning lady who likes to mess with her customer’s stuff.
Keep writing, I told myself. Never quit. Every no is one no closer to a yes.
The cleaning lady idea was hilarious to 2012 me, a wife and mom in suburban Detroit who drank too much and was pleased to read a study that swearing was good for stress relief. F*#k yeah, it was!
Had I known it would take my cleaning lady novel 12 years to have a cover and ISBN, I’d have sworn my younger, fool head off.
Timeframes aside, I’m elated my debut novel, Coming Clean, was released by Regal House Publishing in January 2024. I didn’t give up, kept writing and submitting, and now officially have a book to hold. The thing is, I’m not the same person who wrote the novel. My kids are grown, for one thing, and I stopped drinking too much and turned to yoga instead of cursing. I wrote my novel so long ago I had to revise it to upgrade the technology used by its characters.
I don’t even live in suburban Detroit anymore; I moved to Chicago last winter.
I’m not the same writer who wrote the novel either.
Publishing a debut novel so long after writing it feels like going back and re-reading old diaries: you’re partially proud of your younger self, partially embarrassed by the earnest ambition, partially relieved how much you’ve grown. When you look in the mirror, you see gray hair, crow’s feet, and the softest sag around your jawline. The forehead lines remain even when you stop making faces.
The writing itself feels a bit shaky, in the manner of a toddler who has mostly mastered walking, but whose overconfidence leads to an occasional wipeout on a snowy sidewalk or sliding halfway down the stairs due to rushing. Controlling oneself takes time and the same goes for controlling your words on the page.
For all of us writers who keep at it, there are only two choices: give up or keep trying. Maybe it will take two years to accomplish your initial goal. Maybe 12. Maybe 20. Don’t be mad—get on board and hold on.
I’m here to tell you the advantages of a long and winding road to publication. All those stinging rejections? Another year on vacation explaining to the in-laws that yes, you’re still plugging away? Multiple novel projects at various stages and confused about which one to focus on? Another writer friend publishes a book while you watch and grapple with envy? Totally worth it!
Here’s why it’s worth the work and the wait:
The opportunity to revisit earlier work and make it better. Every time you pull that novel out of the drawer and give it another round of revision, your work improves. Coming Clean is the story of a disgruntled cleaning lady, Dawn, who agrees to pose for her friend’s provocative photography project in the houses she cleans. In early drafts, crucial parts of the story were nonexistent because I was so focused on developing the lives and homes of Dawn’s customers. In building these mini-worlds, Dawn’s story became as diluted as her magical homegrown cleaning concoction.
Time and distance from the manuscript illuminated what was missing. Dawn’s backstory is that her fiancé was killed in a motorcycle crash. The novel is about starting over. A richer narrative led to the realization how hurt Dawn was that her dead fiancé’s family didn’t want her without him. This forced her to address the strained relationship with her own mother.
Countless chances to pull back on risks taken. Early in the process of writing Coming Clean, my classmates and professor at the Tinker Mountain Writers’ Workshop pointed out a sentence buried on page 2 they found first-line worthy:
One of the best parts about cleaning other people’s houses was she got to f***k with them.
It was fun and funny to talk about such a first line in the safe space of a writing workshop when the book wasn’t yet fully drafted. It’s another thing to sign off on final proofs knowing your grandmother would roll over in her grave to read this f-bomb.
Link to the rest at Women Writers,Women’s Books
Or, you could go the indie route and publish 24 or more books in twelve years, earn way more than the advance you would get from a traditional publisher after twelve years, and have a far more secure writing income with monthly payments.
The OP is Exhibit A demonstrating that traditional publishers are the leading causes of author poverty, insecurity, insomnia and poor mental health.
This one sums up my writing journey! My first draft (what I thought was a killer debut novel) was 27 YEARS AGO! I dusted it off, literally, six years ago. Like you, I had to change a lot of technology. Payphone anyone? Retyping it all into a Word doc had me shaking my head a lot, but I found good bones. I learned a lot and self-published last year. Now, I’m getting ready for the launch of the sequel this weekend!