More Peace Than Party

Tenacity Tale: On the Calm I Felt When I Finished My Novel

I finished my revision for my novel in progress¹ on Sunday 5/5 at 6:06 p.m.

I’ve finished novels before, of course.

There are at three other books on my computer, one of which I revised eight² times, queried in several rounds, and had a couple near misses with agents, so I know firsthand the heartbreak that comes from going all in with a book only to have the market shrug.³

That shrug, man.

It’s brutal.

So brutal that it can flatten you if you’re not careful to safeguard your writerly heart, and I wasn’t careful.

That shrug made me doubt my work so deeply, I couldn’t remember why I’d ever even liked the book enough to send it out into the world in the first place. Intellectually I remembered—I have a piece of art on my wall I put up to celebrate finishing the novel, after all⁴—but I couldn’t remember how it felt.

I promised myself I wouldn’t make the same mistake with this novel.

So, I finished the book at 6:06 p.m., and by 6:07 I was scribbling the start of the time capsule you’re about to read.

Honestly, I dithered about whether to post it at all.

Something about sharing a moment of peace makes me feel utterly exposed in a way that sharing a disappointment rarely does, which is probably a sign that we all need to get better at sharing these lighter, brighter moments.⁵

So, here’s my time capsule of the weird and wonderful peace that descended on me as I finished this novel on Sunday:

You'd expect I would feel giddy or joyous or exuberant, but I don't.  

What I feel is peace and a deep sense of accomplishment. 

Yesterday, I took a break to go to a friend’s reading and a different friend’s open studio. To keep my head in my book while driving hither and yon, I listened to a playlist I made for the book a couple of years ago. I was in the car far longer than the running time of the playlist, so my music service cued up songs based on the selections on that playlist. Because my playlist was filled with ballads of deep longing, I got songs of deep longing.

And then my digital DJ served up “She Used to be Mine” by Sara Bareilles.

Apparently, this song was a Broadway phenomenon a while back—I vaguely remember seeing it posted on Facebook a few years ago—but something about hearing this rich alto sing about how her life had veered off course the day before I finished my book really tripped my feels.

My writerly life kaleidoscoped on me, folding time so that this moment of deep peace about finishing a revision was juxtaposed with the handful of crossroad moments when I’d considered giving up, and I felt deeply grateful I’d pushed through every one of those moments.

So, when I actually did push the novel over the finish line tonight, I didn't feel like doing cartwheels and backflips—and not just because I just turned 49 and know my body is unlikely to survive such shenanigans.

I didn't feel like doing cartwheels and backflips because I was at peace. 

This novel may never be published—I hope it will, but it might not. And if this book is shrugged off like the last one, my heart will break, and I’ll likely ask myself what’s the ever-loving point? The trouble is by the time I'm asking myself what the point of writing is, my heart has already decided that there isn’t one.

Which is not true, of course, but doubt makes idiots of us all, doesn’t it?

So, I'm answering the question today in case future Cathy gets beaten down by the market enough to start asking what the point is again.  

And the point is simply this:

I love this book.

I love my protagonist and her grumpy AF voice.

I love her longing.  

I love that this book flowered out of a market experience so demoralizing I considered giving up.

I love that when I got some feedback that sent me into a tailspin a few years back,⁶ I listened to my instinct to close the door to write the book I needed to write. And because I kept the door closed for so long, a profound thing happened—I poured more of myself into the book than I might have if I was burping up chapters to be critiqued every month or so.

The protagonist of this novel is not me, but in the course of the book she learns lessons⁷ I badly needed to learn myself. I've grown as a person because I wrote this.

My words are kind of failing me—verbosity is a tell-tale sign I'm reaching for something bigger than I know how to say—but I needed to bottle some of this peace, and the only bottle I had handy was a keyboard.

It’s my dearest hope that this earnest-AF essay is all the insurance policy I need to make sure that no one—not even a shrugging marketplace—will ever strip me of that peace.  

Just in case it isn’t, while I was at my friend’s open studio, I bought her stunning gouache painting of a road bending not breaking under a wondrous sky to hang on my wall to remind me.

Laura Roper’s stunning gouache painting that choked me up is the epitome of bending without breaking.

1. Not so in progress anymore, though!

2. Or 48 depending on how you count a draft.

3. It was a little more complicated than a shrug, but this is a post about the new book.

4. Two actually: one when I finished the draft I queried; one after a revise and resubmit for two agents.

5. Plus, I’m the same writer who encouraged folks to celebrate their writing wins almost exactly a year ago in the joyfully-titled “One, Two, Cha-Cha-Cha!” Re-rereading that Cha-Cha-Cha post today, it tickles me that it’s a time capsule for the moment I figured out how the book needed to be revised—a revision I finished on Sunday.

6. The feedback was right, but the timing was wrong.

7. I hope!