Just Like February by Deborah Batterman
[/caption]The first novel I publish will not be the first novel I wrote. This is not the way I planned it but life, for all the stranger-than-fiction moments it encompasses, does not necessarily follow the narrative arc of a novel. There are things we don’t get to choose.
Many years ago I wrote a novel that had, at its heart, a girl’s love for her uncle and her coming of age in the wake of the emerging AIDS crisis. The novel was set in the early eighties, so little still known about AIDS except that it was running rampant in the gay population and so much of the world was running scared at just the thought of being in the same room with someone who had HIV or AIDS. What a ripe idea for a story (at least I thought so): there’s a kind of innocent crush that young girls have on doting uncles. What if, in this case, the uncle turned out to be gay, especially at a time when homophobia was escalating? The title of the novel, ‘Just Like February,’ became a metaphor for the uncle’s birthday (February 29th), with its suggestion that there is, indeed, a certain random, if not arbitrary, force at play in the way our lives pan out. Just read David Ewing’s Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year to know what I mean. As the shortest month of the year, February evokes a life cut short too soon.
The novel got me many good reads, more than a few words of encouragement to soften the blow of rejection. File the letters away. Roll up the sleeves. Get back to work. This is what writers do. There was no viable option to self-publish back then, and even if there were, I’m not sure I could do it.
Which brings me to the new novel, just finished, ready to be released. In the intervening years the publishing world changed dramatically and I took advantage of that change to produce a digital edition of my short story collection, originally published in print by a small, indie publisher. I learned (and continue to learn) a great deal about what it takes for a writer to put her own muscle behind her work. I discovered a community of writers that brings a stimulating, invaluable exchange of ideas to my day, writers like myself balancing on that see-saw between the visibility necessary to make oneself known and the invisibility necessary to do one’s work.
So what do I do now?
More than one writer I admire encourages me to do it myself. Why not? suggests the growing (un)conventional wisdom. Self-published e-books are catching on like wildfire. Take control of the means of production. Keep the profits for yourself. So what if it means a lifetime spent online, endless hours of self-promotion. More and more established writers are doing it. Why not me?
And there’s the rub. Writers are nothing if not gamblers. Hours and hours of hard work, draft after endless draft, characters who live inside our heads until, one day, we say, ‘Out!’ in the hope that someone, maybe lots of people, will take a chance on what we’re offering. And with that shift, all the inward gazing now directed outward, comes an awakening, maybe rude/maybe not. Writing, for publication, is never just about ‘me.’ In the publication scenario I have always imagined, there is an editor who will see something I simply can’t. Of course, I can always pay an editor to read but that misses the point. The heart of publishing is built on relationship. The same romance with words that keeps me doing what I do also makes me long for that best of all possible worlds, in which writers write, agents sell their work, editors nourish them along, publicists sing their praises. Not that I can’t, and won’t, consider doing it myself, 'consider' being the operative word.
In an essay of Joan Didion’s that I keep going back to, “Why I Write,” she calls writing “an aggressive, even a hostile act.” Say what you will about the solitude and quiet needed to write, with the implication that a writer hides behind words, it’s Didion’s contention that “setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.” Whether or not that ‘bully’ served me well with my earlier novel – was it ahead of its time? in that marketing netherworld between YA and adult fiction? poorly aligned stars? – is beside the point. This time I’m ahead of the game, in more ways than one, and my options are indeed greater, even acknowledging the element of sheer serendipity. One thing has not changed, and the same ‘letdown’ I experienced after finishing ‘Just Like February’ has kicked in as I let the dust settle on those freshly printed pages, ‘Dancing into the Sun.’ It’s tempting to make too much of the timing of a lingering head cold that keeps me from expending too much effort, creative and physical. The only thing to do is lie on the couch, pick up a book. Is it serendipity, again, that has me reaching for A Long Fatal Love Chase, a book by Louisa May Alcott that was written before Little Women but considered “too sensational” for publication when she wrote it?
