My sister sent me a DM on twitter this week. It was a tweet that she’d seen from a literary agent who was accepting submissions on novels and she thought I might be interested. My initial thought was that this was excellent, an agent actually wanting people to submit their work, rather than the usual line on websites that it can take blah blah time and it needs to fit the guidelines exactly or won’t even be looked at, and then I thought: I can’t.
I sent my book off to 43 agents last year. Forty three. That probably isn’t nearly enough but it seemed a lot as the rejections came in. I had one tentative yes, which I think became a no as I never heard from them again. But it seemed never ending. A constant flow of emails that ranged from an automatic response to some kind words about my writing but ultimately saying that my story was not strong enough.
I don’t think I have it in me to do it again.
I think that I need to rewrite the first three chapters, the ones that agents read, I think that the book is too long, I think that I need to put it on forums but that seems big and daunting. I think that I’ve picked the worst possible potential job for someone with no self esteem, no confidence in their ability but it’s the thing that I love the most. It’s the only thing that I imagine myself doing at 40, at 50, forever really.
I have vague ideas about a second book, ideas that come to me in the middle of the night and I’m excited about them and I wake up and get the girls to nursery and I sit down in front of my computer, write two or three paragraphs and dismiss the whole thing. It reads like something I’ve read before, it’s in the style of some author I like or it’s just boring. So I leave it and then we go again. Sometimes twice a week. Lately I’ve not even bothered to start the writing process at all. Why waste my time when I can watch documentaries on Netflix about Queen Victoria.
Maybe it’s the baby, maybe now that it seems so close, there simply isn’t room in my head for anything else. I find, though, that I am struggling to prepare for the baby, she doesn’t have a name, doesn’t have a car seat, I haven’t packed a hospital bag. I still can’t imagine her actually being here, being in our lives, and I’m not being deliberately fatalistic, I just can’t. I look at the girls and I freak out that their lives are about to change and we should be doing more to prepare them, talking to them more about when and how, rather than an abstract thing that they don’t really understand.
I think further ahead and think that I should dust off my CV, update it and prepare for finding a job in October when she is six months old. But the idea of leaving this little one when I was with her sisters for their whole lives seems abhorrent to me. But we can’t continue living with money worries hanging over us, we can’t stay living in this flat, there’s so much we want to do with our children that we simply cannot do.
Anyway, there are no stories at the moment. Just worry and fear and sleepless nights. And a lot of feeling not good, but that’s a pregnancy thing. I need to slow down, I need to breathe in the scent of my little girls’ hair and I need to relax. Everything happens as it should. Even if the path to get there is bumpy.
Fairy Lights and Fear 