Sometimes the book just *isn't* gonna work right now

It’s a gorgeous & crisp fall morning in Brooklyn 🍂

I’ve got a window open and the AC off and it’s gloriously cool in my bedroom, bordering even on cold. I’ll take it! As an avowed summer-hater and anti-sun person, I’m loving the onset of fall in New York.

As of this past week, I’m officially halfway done with my packets for the semester — somehow I only have two packets left, and then this adventure of getting my MFA will be…nearly over?? That’s so wild, man. I have so many emotions that I’m repressing! I am putting my head down to read and write and prepare a lecture so I can finish strong! I’m loving work with my brilliant advisor! It’s good ☺️

In this issue of the newsletter, here’s what you’ll find:

1. From the heart: the long-term effects of suicidal ideation on my brain

2. From the camera roll: a new trial run! Just some pictures I’ve taken lately!

3. From the page: on setting aside a book that isn’t working — the good, the bad, and the empowering

As always, feel free to let me know what you think of any of this! Share with a friend and have them subscribe! Leave a comment! I love y’all!

From the heart 💗

TW: this section speaks about some of the effects of living with long-term suicidal ideation

It’s possibly foolish to write this now, considering the depressive episode I’m going to be detailing began about a week ago and maybe isn’t finished yet. But the truth is, it’s the only thing on my heart right now, and writing about anything else would’ve felt…disingenuous? Maybe not that, but definitely difficult.

I’m not going to detail the episode because like, who wants to just read a calendar of a breakdown? Not me, that’s for sure! What I think I want to talk about is survival.

Survival of this past week wasn’t a foregone conclusion for me on Monday — or Tuesday, or even Wednesday, to be honest. In the thick of the worst of it, I had the thought, maybe 30 really is where the line ends for me, and I accepted that as something that made sense.

Thinking about that moment now, with the benefit of a few days’ space, I want to cry. I want to reach back to the me of a week ago and wrap her in a big warm hug, and tell her she has to keep going — there is goodness on the other side of the pain.

The thing is, I’ve never been able to imagine a long life for myself. I think it started around age 17; I became convinced in late 2010 that I wasn’t going to make it past the end of that year. It was a delusion that caused me so much grief and angst, and I woke up on Jan. 1, 2011 feeling like I’d been given the gift of a longer life. Feeling astonished to still be breathing.

Aside from my fears of spontaneously dying young, I’ve lived with suicidal ideation since I was about 16, I think. There have been so many moments I thought were the end. And even though obviously none of them were the end, I do think that way of thinking about life has taken a toll on my ability to imagine a future for myself.

Cause the truth is I don’t really see deep into the future for myself. My brain shorts out at thinking approximately a year into the future; after that, it’s all murky and intangible, a time that maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll get to see. But probably not.

The astonishing thing is that I’m living my life as though a future is guaranteed. I’m still pursuing pursuits that won’t pay out in dividends for years! (Hi, publishing.) So there’s a dissonance in my mind, this dual reality wherein I’m planning for a future I kinda don’t think I’ll ever see.

God, putting it in writing like that feels incredibly vulnerable, like I’m showing you the inside of my brain and heart and asking you to be careful with it. But it also feels important to share because I always convince myself that my sorrow is unique, that my mental struggles are mine only, but maybe…maybe there’s someone out there who also has this mental trick of not thinking too deep into the future. And if so, I’d want that person to know they’re not alone. I’d want that person to know that I’m rooting for them as much as I’m rooting for myself. And I’d want them to know that it matters that they do have a future, that they make plans further out than a year, that they exist in this world as long as possible.

Maybe, if I believe it for someone else, I’ll eventually start to believe it for myself as well.

From the camera roll 📸

From the page ✍️

I’m pretty sure the vast majority of writers will relate to this experience of writing a book, or a couple thousands words of a book, and realizing — it’s just not working!

It’s kind of heartbreaking to reach that moment, to be honest. It’s the realization that all the time you poured into a story isn’t going to see fruition in that story1. It’s the frustration of nights and early mornings and afternoons spent pulling out your hair and at the end of it you don’t even have a book-shaped thing in front of you, you’ve just got some bald patches.

I had to do this recently. I’ve been working on a project since about April 2022. Originally, it was a middle-grade portal fantasy, but I wasn’t finding joy in that, so I bumped it to a YA portal fantasy, and then I bumped the portal portion into before the first page. Over the past year and a half, while I was also writing Nat & Cami and a verse novel and a few short stories and a critical thesis and querying, I wrote about 37,000 words across four different draft attempts for Kitty.

It was going to be my creative thesis, actually. I worked on it for the first three weeks of the semester, before realizing one Sunday night in August that it wasn’t going to work. The book just wasn’t coming. There were two big problems, you see: I didn’t understand my magic system, and I didn’t know what the plot was2.

So I set it aside. I picked up a different book, and my fingers have been flying across the keyboard working on this one. My joy is alive again. It was a good call to set Kitty aside.

But it still stings. I think it always does, setting aside a book, whether it’s in the drafting stage or after querying or, heaven forbid, after going on sub with it. It’s a kind of agony that starts low under your breastbone and spreads to the whole body. The realization that this book you’ve poured yourself into isn’t going to reach the masses (at least not yet).

I know it’s commong writing advice to say not to write with others in mind, but I’ve never been able to make that true for me. Every project I start, I do so with the hope of having others read it sooner or later. So to reach a point where that’s not gonna happen sucks. It really does!

But it happens. It can be good for us, too. Some books need to breathe before we go back to them. Some books maybe shouldn’t have been written, so it’s a good thing they died in the trenches (this is about my first book, to be clear.) Some books we’re not ready for, and some books the market isn’t ready for.

The good news, at least to me, is that we can always come back to those books. It’s not good-bye, it’s just see you later, etc etc.

I promised something empowering about this, so I guess I’ve gotta deliver on that, huh? Here it is: there’s a level of maturity to knowing a book isn’t gonna work out — creative maturity, craft maturity. And there’s something so beautiful about reaching that point where you can look at your work semi-objectively and say, “Yeah, we’re not ready for you yet.”

Shelving a book sucks, of course. But sometimes, it’s really the only way to move forward with a book that will work. Try not to get bogged down, and free yourself up to envision new worlds and writings you can explore. Let yourself mourn, of course, but also give yourself permission to fall in love with a new story. It’s always so magical when you do.

Alla prossima 👋

There’s one last thing I want to say before I sign off. There is a genocide happening in Gaza. This is unconscionable. The actions Hamas took against Israel last Saturday are horrific and tragic. The actions Israel has taken in the aftermath are horrific and tragic. There are people dying — children, women, men who are being bombarded and wiped from the Earth in a massive open-air prison from which escape is nearly impossible. There are ways to help: this is a link to Doctors Without Borders, which sseems to be a good place to donate. In the US, we can also put pressure on our elected officials to call for an end to the atrocities. That’s what I’ll be doing today and this week.

I’m sending love you everyone who is hurting this week — whether because of this war, because of the war in Ukraine, because of the earthquake in Afghanistan, because of other world events, because of personal, familial, professional, or other events in your lives. I love you.