As of today, it’s been exactly four weeks since my last real blog entry. Even with the postcards, that’s the longest I’ve taken off, and let me tell you it was a good break. While organizing my computer files a couple of weeks ago, I came across an old journal entry and knew this would be the subject of my first post after hiatus. From January, 2005:
I don’t know what to do with my life and my writing. I have this book out there, The Story of a Girl, and yes I want to sell that. I have [ ], which I now know is going to take a lot of work in revision. … I have this list of potential projects a mile long. I don’t know how to do all this in five or six hours a week, let alone the market research and submissions stuff. I’m not home enough. My spiritual life is pathetic. Housecleaning is just barely acceptable. I never read.
I very much like my job at [ ] and love the people I work with. I don’t dread going to work and I feel like I belong there. I don’t feel that strong sense of direction with my writing. I feel like I’m never going to be good enough, that it’s is so much work for me to just get my work to a level I’m not embarrassed about. Getting it good enough to publish seems impossible right now. I feel that if I could have a year with no other job than to read and write, I could produce work that will sell.
If I don’t get this agent, I don’t know if I should even keep trying to sell The Story of a Girl. I can’t be afraid of letting all the writing go and seeing what God tells me about that. … maybe I’ll just stop. I’ll just work … and retreat from pursuing writing as a career.
Within a week of that entry, Michael signed me as a client and shortly thereafter, well, you know the story. I’m not going to say there’s a lesson here, like “never give up,” or draw any questionable theological conclusions like ”you have to be willing to let something go before God will let you keep it” (which is really just a religiously gussied-up version of everyone’s second favorite cross-stitch “if you love something, let it go…”). But I wanted to post it to remind myself—and everyone who reads this blog who is a published writer or wants to be—how thin the space is between that side and this side of a dream. And I’m that same person who is often afraid and unsure and feeling like I’m not quite doing it right, whatever ‘it’ happens to be that day.
I’m glad to be making my blog return during this special week, the week of the Glen Workshop. It’s my seventh year. Every year is different, and every year there are more and more memories here of conversations and books and self-discovery and people who have profoundly affected my life. This year I’m thinking about: how I love to make people laugh. I used to give myself a hard time for always having be “the funny one” and diffusing everything in life with a joke. And that if I keep that up, no one will take me seriously. But maybe that’s why my books are so serious. My writing is where the “take me seriously” side comes out. In day-to-day life one of my great pleasures is seeing faces change from whatever they were to what they are when they can’t help but laugh.
What else… My mom is here, doing the songwriting workshop with Over the Rhine. And when Karin or Linford come up to me in the cafeteria and tell me how much they love my mom, and I hear her in the dorm room across the way writing a new song, and I know how much my first Glen meant to me and what it means to her now…well, that makes me kind of cry a little.
I’m also thinking about books, and looking at the stack of nine that Warren at Eighth Day Books has helped me pick out, and I want to read them all and make him proud and have smart things to say about them next year. And thinking a lot about connections, which I talked about a little at the Image donor reception last night, how when you support it you’re not in a magazine publishing enterprise, you’re supporting connections that you can’t ever measure but you have to have faith that they’re there. After seven years you really start to see those seeds bloom into something that grows and spreads and feeds people you’ll never even meet.
Also, I’m thinking about change, and the folly of thinking I’ll ever “figure it out,” because, again, “it” is never static. Thinking, too, about joy and enjoyment, and how that’s the thing I want instead of the figuring it out.
It’s good to be back here in NM, where it kind of all started for me, when those seven people around the workshop table had the first chapter of the first draft of Story of a Girl and I knew that whatever happened with it, I wasn’t alone.
