The Quiet

Where we are when you hear nothing from us.

Lol, I have no Substack to speak of — an account opened, lots to say… but, quite honestly, all that wind is going into either writing, reading the submission queue, teaching, or (as anyone on my insta has witnessed) training my dog (Get a collie, they said, it’ll be fun they said…).

But I’m over here reading posts from some writing friends (my god I’ve got a lot of amazing writing friends, this many years in — chances are if you’re reading this you’re one of them, so just know I think you rock), and the real thought I am having... Is the silence. The quiet.

Not the writers I’m hearing from.

But all those I don’t.

I’m thinking about why I don’t have a substack. And, let’s be honest, why my dating life is quiet and why I have so many friends I’ve fallen out of touch with.

What I’m thinking about, more than anything, is what my past week has been.

I’ve written (counting on fingers) between 8 and 11 novels. I’ve had half a dozen great agents ask, in conversation, “Send it to me when you’re done.” I had a junior agent at Janklow Nesbit and then her supervising senior agent contact me based on a submission I’d sent to attend an Aspen workshop. Wanted to see it when it was done.

I could be fair to myself — list all the family crises, the deaths, the hospitalizations, the housing loss, the desperate need to earn a living — that intervened.

But what I think about, all the time, is the quiet of my writing friends.

Because when so many of us get to the end of a teaching semester, when people ask what we’re doing with a few weeks off, this is the answer: for fucksake, I can finally sit down and finish the book.

I say this, in particular, thinking of a handful of my friends from workshops who periodically disappear. So often, it was to concentrate on finishing a book.

The book I’ve been working on this winter break is like climbing the Himalayas. Nearly ten years ago, in a weeklong writing retreat with Ben Percy, he looked up from my sample pages and said, “You’re a hell of a writer.” (The kind of thing you write down for some day when you’re trying to think of ideas for a tattoo, lol.) He then proceeded to suggest I’d tried putting too much into one book. Let it be two books. A series.

A: made me angry. No one wants that kind of hassle, to have to go pull apart a perfectly good book and make something else out of it. But at the time, one of the best things I credit Percy for, is he got me to let go of my insistence on writing the book I thought I was supposed to write (cough, literary), and to embrace what I would be able to write if I wrote the kind of book I love reading.

That writing retreat happened to occur in the midst of a life-changing divorce, a move, a masters degree, a need to be the breadwinner… But I found myself somewhere in the pandemic doing roughly what he said. Tear apart the backstory of the novel that J-N agents had been interested in and… hmm, write a series.

And I’ve done that, the last four years. I started writing flash, got a ton of stories published, became a submissions editor, so that much of my writing life has been occupied there. But all this time, I’ve been in my head, living through the full arc of a series that answers the question Percy challenged me with. Write the book you want to read.

I’ve written the characters I crave reading. I’ve written the eerie, hopeful dark that I crave feeling, that feeling of your brain being engaged in trying to figure a story out, your heart craving certain relationship outcomes. I love it. It was best use of my time, best use of my knowledge and life’s experiences — the haunted houses my family lived in, the moves, the places I’ve lived, the morgue, the law. That original novel (and another) is still in existence, able to query, but entirely separate, this arc of seven stories that fuel my exact hunger in reading.

And so there is a quiet, when I get to the end of the teaching semester. My kids lay down plates of food like I’m some stray cat so I can keep working. I take breaks to walk the crazy collie (whose snuffle mat is more distracting for all that snuffling, but still buys me time to work). I am in that hike up the peak, of combing and culling through all the chapters of the first book of the series — the intense work of accurately placing all the breadcrumbs, the locations, the turns, the unexpected. That moment of being 90% done, the end feels so far away. But, in this last week, I’ve closed that gap.

And it’s time that I get one of these novels out on query.

So anyway, I’m taking time to post a little message here mostly because I went, “Oh yeah, that’s right I have a Substack,” and it got me thinking — I’m not alone. So many of my other writing friends are in this exact same quiet. I wish you all well, in whatever step busies you on the road to your stories being read.

xoxo