Thirty-Seven

One thing that I have not talked about much on this blog is my third career -- after parenting and the M-F day job.  My career as a writer.

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer.  It's amazing to me how Toad, who is in second grade, is like me at that age.  He's copying books into a notebook -- right now it's Diary of a Wimpy Kid - The Ugly Truth.  I did something very similar when I was his age, only it was writing "books" very similar to whatever I was reading at the time.  B is for Betsy by Carolyn Haywood.  Betsy-Tacy by Maud Hart Lovelace.

In third grade, our first Writer-in-Residence visited my elementary school.  I will never forgot those writers -- Patricia Weaver Francisco, Michael Dennis Browne, Richard Solly.  I was published for the first time when I was twelve.  I wrote a narrative poem called "Tigers Were My Friends" and it was published in the annual COMPAS Writers-in-the-School anthology.

I was on my way to being a writer.

I went to camps and workshops and wrote constantly all through junior high and high school.  I was co-editor of my high school newspaper.  I wrote -- rather briefly -- an editorial column for the UMD Statesman.  I worked as a writing tutor for three years.  There was no question what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I never even considered any other career.

Other careers considered me, however.  No one came beating down my door after graduation to offer me a job writing novels.  That's not how it works.  My first job out of college was writing travel proposals for an incentive marketing firm.  Then I fell in love with my part-time job at Best Buy and made it my full-time job, which became a total time-suck and left little time for writing (although I did find the time to meet the love of my life, Hammer Guy, at Best Buy 281).  In 1999, four years after I graduated from college, I decided to go back to school for my Masters of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing.  Four years later, I had a thesis of short stories and a brand new baby, and if I thought it was hard to find time to write with a full-time job, I was in for a very rude awakening as a parent.

It's been 11 years since I decided to go back to school and become the writer I always wanted to be.  I was published in 1999 and 2000.  I didn't submit my work again until 2006, when I was published in a small literary magazine out of Massachusetts.  That was the same year I tried writing for young adults and found it to be a natural fit.  I haven't been actively submitting any short stories since then, thanks in part to the addition of another baby in 2007.

Last year in November I decided to do something crazy.  I had a broken foot and wasn't getting around much.  I heard about this thing called National Novel Writing Month.  Every November, people around the world start a novel on November 1st and are challenged to finish it -- with a beginning, middle, and end -- with at least 50,000 words by November 30th.  Thirty days of wild literary abandon.  It doesn't have to be fantastic.  It just has to be finished.  I thought, why not.

It was one of the best experiences of my writing career.  It forced me to write.  It forced me to be disciplined and meet a daily word count goal.  The prose was sloppy and wordy and all-around crappy, but I pushed myself and I finished in 25 days -- a young adult novel titled, at the time, Look How They Shine.  The months following were dedicated to revising that beast.  A handful of trusted readers offered critiques.  In June the novel, then titled Shine, was polished and possibly ready for an agent.  I began to query agents, who, by the way, take a lot of time off in the summer.

The rejections started coming.  Rejections are good, you know, because it means that you can move forward, that you are one step closer to finding the right agent to represent you and your work.  I kept two queries out at a time, and when one rejection came in, I would send it to another.

As of last week, I'd been rejected six times for what is now titled Cloud 9.  I was still waiting to hear from the seventh agent, and if I got a no from that one, I was planning to submit the manuscript to a contest from a publishing house.

Back to high school for a minute.  The summer before my senior year I spent a week at my last COMPAS summer writing workshop.  There I met a Minnesota author named Sandra Benitez.  She is an amazing writer, an amazing woman, an incredible storyteller.  She told us that she had not started writing until she was thirty-seven years old.  Thirty-seven!  I was seventeen and I thought to myself, I would die if I couldn't write.  How could she wait until she was thirty-seven to become a writer?  I was young and certain that I had a brilliant career as a writer ahead of me -- and I wasn't going to wait until I was thirty-seven to make it happen.

This past March, I turned thirty-seven.

I am still certain that I have a brilliant career as a writer ahead of me.

Friday I received an email from my seventh queried agent:  "Hi Sara, I enjoyed your query.  Can you send me the full manuscript?"

An agent requested a full.  An agent request MY full.

It is a tiny step toward publication.  I have worked hard on my novel.  I care about my characters and what happens to them and I want the world to know them, too.  Maybe this agent won't be able to put the manuscript down and call next week offering representation.  Maybe she won't.  Maybe I'll get a politely worded rejection.  That's okay -- I'll just start the process again.

I know that it will happen someday.  If I'm thirty-seven, thirty-eight, forty-eight, it doesn't matter. 

What matters is that I keep writing.