Day 19 When Your First Book Comes Out

Photo by Mathias Konrath on Unsplash

This post is a bit of a break from our normal ones in that it isn’t advice about writing itself. It’s advice about living the writing life. Sort of. I hope you’re cool with it. It’s something I come back to a lot because I think it was so pivotal in my own writing journey.

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When I wrote my first book, my parents were both still alive. I’ve always been the weird one in the family, the one who didn’t make sense, who wore Snoopy shoes and had a weird Muppet voice, and was born 14 years after my closest sibling. I never felt like part of a family, but I always felt like my parents liked me okay, which is pretty wonderful.

While I grew up, my parents were divorced. My little hobbit dad was a mechanic and a truck driver. My mom was a real estate agent for a hot second, a town clerk, and then an dental supply company office manager. I saw my dad on Sundays when he remembered. He was an adorable hobbit man, but pretty forgetful, honestly.

After years of being weird and trying to be a poet and things, my first book came out. One of the first blog interviewers asked me:

Now that you’re under contract, does your family better appreciate your writing?

This was a hard question to answer honestly. I expected nobody to laugh, to tease me. I expected this big, validating moment.

This is what my dad said when it happened, “Someone bought your book? That’s great. What’s it called?”

Me: “Tips on Having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend.”

We were on the phone.

My dad began laughing. “Ho boy. Ho … boy. Wait till I tell your Aunt Athalie that one. Tell me that again.... Gay what?”

“Tips on Having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend, Dad.”

My father then laughed some more. “Let me write that down. That’s really the title? Ho … boy. Hahahaha … Ho . . . boy.”

It was not the moment I had envisioned. There were no trumpets. There wasn’t a red carpet roll-out. It was just—silly.

Then about six months later, I was talking to my dad on the phone while simultaneously trying to make vegan cottage pie and he said, “How many books have you sold?”

I told him.

“Three? Three! In less than a year?”

“Yep,” I said, dicing onions, which always makes me cry.

He was really quiet and then he said, “Your grandfather was a really literate man. He was a great reader, you know. And my mother … she loved poems.”

“I know that, Dad,” I said, wiping my eyes with a paper towel that smelled like onions and only made things worse. I started snuffing. Dad didn’t notice.

But then he swallowed so loudly that I could actually hear it over the phone and he said, “I’m dyslexic you know. I don’t read very well.”

“I know, Dad. You’re super smart though,” I said this because sometimes my dad forgot that he was super smart because he only went through to second grade. He felt like everyone else in the family, in the world, was smarter than he was. He felt wrong.

The silence settled in and he finally said, “I’m just really proud of you. You know that, right? I’m really, really proud of you.”

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When I sold my first book, my mother said, the way my mother always said, “Oh, sweetie. That’s so wonderful. I knew you could do it. I am so proud of you. My daughter, the writer.”

To be fair to my sweet mother and to be honest, this was what my mother said about everything I did.

Like the first time I made an angel food cake she said, “Oh, sweetie. That’s so wonderful. I knew you could do it. I am so proud of you. My daughter, the angel food cake maker.”

Notice that the name of my second published book wasn’t much better. My dad kept laughing. Even in my ‘glory’ moment, I amused the hell out of my family due to my complete lack of glamour, and my complete lack of normal. And that? That’s okay.

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The rest of my family, I think, were appreciative of the fact that I sold a couple of books. It made me more legit to them somehow. Which is strange, but typical I guess.

In our culture it often seems that the process of learning and creating is often only considered worthy if a tangible product comes from it and if that tangible product has market value.

But to me… the big value was that I made my dad think about his parents and think about books and think about me and that I made him proud.

So where’s the wisdom in all this? Um... I think that in our rush to produce, we often forget the joy in discovering. Our culture doesn’t make that easier on any of us, but there’s this great, beautiful joy in discovering, in being quirky, in playing, in creating just for the sake of creating, in being in the moment just to be in the moment.

So, when you create something, what I really hope for you is that you get to enjoy that moment, that you get to enjoy the process of creating and also the moments of goofiness, too. If you make something marketable? Cool! That means you can pay for food and shelter and property taxes and dog food. But it’s okay to just create for joy, too.

Below the paywall is a writing exercise and a place to submit if you’re into it. All the daily posts for the WE ARE WRITING experiment in February are here at the main site.