After My Book Deal: Life Changing or Same Old Struggle?

Along with the rest of the world, 2020 was pretty crappy in our household. [I originally wrote a long paragraph here about all the things we failed to do and how miserable we were, but what’s the point in that? Seriously! We’re still here and we’re vaccinated AF, and there’s really nothing else to say than: “Let’s go!”]

So, while a good portion of life certainly sucked here at the dead-end of our little street this past year, I managed to publish a number of short stories and flash fiction pieces with a broad spectrum of literary publications — large, small, well-known, obscure, etc. In addition to which, I signed a book deal in early January 2021 to write three novels over the course of the next several years.

Some of my short pieces are published under my pseudonym, Dog Cavanaugh. Some are published under the name my parents gave me. My best personal contribution to global pandemic expressionism was my story, “Animals with Nowhere to Go,” published by the wonderful jazz culture website Jerry Jazz Musician (go subscribe if you know what you’re doing in life).

I write today partly because my story “Millie Floating” just came out in the newly published print collection The Best Short Stories of Philadelphia 2021.

Also, at around the February mid-winter mark, I turned in the draft manuscript of, Old Music for New People. Snow fell outside my window right at dusk that evening as I hit SEND to transfer my 323-page coming-of-age novel about gender identity, baseball, young love, family problems, and the magic of music to Lou Aronica, publisher at The Story Plant.

Certain people keep congratulating me on “being persistent” and “finally achieving my dream.” Sometimes I hear that as an unintentionally comical statement. Sometimes it actually feels like a dig. I’m not sure I was being persistent so much as simply doing something that truly challenged me in the right way. I’d been trying to write a great American novel since my second semester of college in the spring of 1977. Somewhere along the way I moved from considering that I hadn’t yet gotten “there” to understanding that I had been there all along.

But, yes, it’s hard to understand why people who write keep pushing the boulder of fiction up a bunch of hills. Over the years, I’ve sent so many stories off to literary publications and magazines and collected such a prodigiously massive number of rejection notes. Each one of those rejections essentially means I was run over by a backsliding boulder and made to feel quite ridiculous and pointless for believing in something I’d written. I would wake up the next morning at the bottom of the hill feeling sad, or sick to my stomach, or meaningless, or stupid, or some combination thereof.

After a while, you figure out that you have a choice: either stop putting yourself through the torture of it all, or see each rejection as a new challenge to revise your work. I don’t know when I chose that second option, but at some point years back I realized that there’s always going to be something wrong with what I write and that not getting that thing published is a great opportunity to make each story better. And so it goes … What I have learned is that there is no final draft until you hear that slightly plump (or svelte) editor singing.

Today I’m finishing up my review of typeset pages for Old Music for New People. I get one more look at the manuscript in ARC (advanced review copy) form in a few months. The book gets released in December, just in time for the holidays. Stay tuned for more as the summer continues. I’ll be revealing the cover for the book soon.

Go to the Toho Publishing page for The Best Philadelphia Short Stories 2021 and order a few to many copies for yourself. I know it feels like time to go out and kick up our heels, but maybe it’s also time to buy small publisher’s books and give them away to friends, families, and strangers.