I worked on my novel for twelve years. Twelve years. That’s not me bragging, I’m embarrassed by that span. It was never my intention to take that long. I wanted to be more of a Jonathan Safran Foer type: bang it out in one summer, have your teacher get it published, have it top the bestseller list, win some big award, get it adapted into a movie, all the things. I definitely did not intend to spend years writing and rewriting this one story.
I was a teenager when I started this book, so a comparison to Christopher Paolini might be more apt than Foer, but I hope not. Christopher Paolini’s trilogy is widely acknowledged in the literary community as a bad splicing of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Now that I’m no longer a teenager and less defensive about that time not producing my best work, I think we should cut Paolini some slack. He was a teenager. He wrote glorified fan fiction. It’s not his fault those books became bestsellers.
Twelve years. I think if you work on any piece of art for that amount of time you go a little bit insane. Of course, there’s a chicken and the egg conundrum to the whole process. Maybe if you spend twelve years on one piece of writing, you were a little bit insane to begin with.
My novel is now called Blue Tendril. My first working title was Kaleidoscope Eyes, but I quickly googled that and found a biography of John Lennon by the same name. For the longest time it was titled Submerged Suns for no reason other than the fact that I liked the sound of it. I enjoy alliteration the way other people enjoy puns. Also, I thought it sounded epic and poetic. I made attempts to work that title into the story, but it always felt hamfisted. The year I finished the seventh and final draft of the novel, I googled Submerged Suns again. After years of nothing, I discovered a self-published fantasy series about mermaids. I was relieved, actually. Part of me knew that the title was too generic.
Did I mention that I worked on this goddamn thing for twelve years? Twelve years? That’s a little more embarrassing when you consider the age at which I started. Fifteen. Well, technically the summer before I turned fifteen, but I’m going to round up in this case. It began as a short story idea about a station on a distant planet where people are implanted with powers to fight a war. The scientist in charge keeps promising the subjects they will be freed once the fight is over, but when that happens, he reveals that they’ll be needed to terraform and rebuild the planet. So they stay imprisoned. How depressing.
For the longest time I thought that producing thoughtful and respected work meant it had to be depressing. Now I think that’s only half-true.
How did this short story grow into a novel, a novel that now has to be the first book in a series because the original first draft was the length of two novels and that had to be split up? How did it become a novel that I worked on from age fifteen to twenty-seven? I don’t know. This wasn’t my first attempt at a novel. That was in fifth grade. I started a book about the Aztecs called Montezuma’s Shield. I was obsessed with ancient civilizations at the time and Aztecs were my second favorite, right after the Egyptians. It was going to follow a group of Aztecs who lead a rebellion against the Spanish conquistadors. I didn’t get very far. I called it quits when I read The Aztec and its sequel by Gary Jennings. Even as a precocious fifth grader, I knew that I couldn’t rival his attention to detail. Also, the sequel is about an Aztec who leads a rebellion against the Spaniards, so my idea wasn’t even original anymore.
Okay, but that’s fifth grade. Nothing from fifth grade counts. Fine. Let me pull an example from middle school, shortly before I began the short story that turned into the novel that I worked on for twelve years. It was another science fiction piece called “Bands of Binding.” I really was infatuated with alliteration back then. Now I have more restraint, but like with soda, the craving still rears its gaudy head now and then.
Anyway, “Bands of Binding” was about a group of futuristic police who have their emotions suppressed by, you guessed it, a metal band around their foreheads. One of the officers experiences a glitch with his band and rediscovers emotion. I never finished that one either. My sister told me that it reminded her of A Clockwork Orange. I read that too and got discouraged.
But the seed that became Blue Tendril, that was different. Blue Tendril grew into a novel that grew into the length of two novels. Also, did I mention I ended up working on it for twelve fucking years?
And Blue Tendril was resilient. Instead of being done in like previous attempts, it adapted to whatever came at it. In the original conception, there was a strange force called the Ata that the protagonist and other subjects at the station could channel into powers like healing and telekinesis. It was meant to be the current of life itself.
“You mean like The Force?” A friend of mine asked. “Like Star Wars?”
My heart sank, but the story didn’t wilt under the glare of unoriginality like the others had. In high school, I became obsessed with the subconscious mind and ways to access it. So, naturally, the Ata became the subconscious mind of existence. What did that mean exactly? I didn’t know, and that was the fun of it. The Ata was mysterious because it was subconscious. Maybe it was a literary lawyer trick, but I didn’t care. It felt right. To further chop away at clichés, I took away the physical powers of the main character. Now they were more ethereal, like the ability to travel into dreams. What’s more, the book was no longer set in space. Now it took place in a confederacy of interconnected dimensions.
And the story just kept growing. I thought about it all the time, playing out scenes in my head, many of which didn’t even get written. I planned a sequel when I got to the end of my idea for the first book. I didn’t realize then that when the first draft was actually written down, it would be double the length of a typical novel by publishing standards.
I worked on the first draft for all of high school and all of college. I finished it about halfway into age twenty-three. Isn’t that crazy? I wish I could do MRI scans for myself and an alternate Boz, one who didn’t spend his adolescence and early twenties obsessing over this book. Did it help or hinder my development? Was it an extended, self-directed apprenticeship in the ways of writing, or would I have been better served using all that imagination for something else?
I couldn’t tell you. I live in this reality, and in this reality, I tried to stop writing it, but I couldn’t. I liked it too much. Writing it was torturous, but dreaming it up gave me such a buzz. So, I tried every brain hack to write faster. While in school, I was convinced each summer break that a burst of inspiration and discipline would possess me, and I’d finish the thing in time to be some sort of prodigy by the fall.
Becoming a prodigy was an obsession of mine growing up. But that’s a different essay.
After being consumed with this thing for all of high school and college, I took a good hard look at my first draft with newly minted postgraduate eyes. I went back and read the parts that I had written as a teenager. There were moments of precociousness, but mostly, it read like a teenager wrote it. Also, it was too long and rambling.
So, I had to make a decision. And I decided to continue. I split the first draft in half and started rewriting line by line. I tried to siphon out the melodrama and inject more dark humor. Surprisingly, the main plot didn’t change much. It was mostly the tone.
My hope was that rewriting would go much faster than first draft construction. And it did, but only in comparison to twelve years. I thought the second draft would take a few months. Instead, it lasted about a year and a half.
I took another good hard look at it, debating whether to shelve it or go on. You know what happened, I pressed forward.
I often say that the best $400 dollars I ever spent was in hiring a developmental editor. I’ll feel that way even if the thing never gets published. Why? Well, the main component of feeling insane when working on a project like this is the secrecy. I’m not one of those writers who send out every paragraph for review. For the longest time, I wouldn’t show anybody anything. I was too sensitive. The first time I let my sister read some of it was back in either late middle school or early high school. So, I was probably somewhere around 15 or 16.
“Do you like it?” I asked.
She grimaced a little.
“We’ll work on it,” she said.
And I didn’t show her any of it until I was in college. That’s how afraid I was. I needed to believe that it was going to be the next big thing. Any hint of disapproval or even apathy could destroy my dream and me.
My sister, to her credit, ended up reading quite a bit of the first draft. Of course, by that time, I was embarrassed by it. She read a decent bit of the second draft and said some nice things about the change in direction. More recently, she read the most current draft and gave me lots of balanced feedback. So, she’s the reigning champion of the most devoted reader competition.
But at twenty-six, no one had read the most current draft. And I was feeling crazy again. I had done four drafts by that point, and I knew it needed more work, but I was too close to the story. I could no longer see the forest for the trees. I needed a more objective pair of eyes. And so, I hired someone to read it.
The man I hired was named Stu. I found him on Fiverr. I initially hired him for a beta read, which is essentially where someone prepares a brief book report on your manuscript. And this time, I made a deal with myself. If the feedback even so much as hinted that this thing was no good, I had to put it away. I had to stop.
The problem was, Stu didn’t say that. He said the opposite, actually. Stu gave me the exact validation I was searching for. He said it was highly professional, one of the most original manuscripts he had been commissioned for, and that with a few changes it stood a high chance of being traditionally published.
Holy shit. Maybe I wasn’t crazy.
So, I hired Stu for a developmental edit where he went through and made notes throughout the entire manuscript. It was such a thrill to have someone read it with that level of focus. And Stu did not hold back in his feedback on the parts that he didn’t like. In fact, he told me throw out an entire chapter. But instead of destroying me, I found his criticism to be a good thing. It suggested that the positive feedback was genuine. Also, I was paying for it, and although I love compliments, I also love getting my money’s worth.
And so, I addressed his notes one by one. Then I added in scenes to flesh out the story’s arc in the way he suggested. Then I printed the whole thing out and marked it up again.
And then, I was out of excuses to hide my little baby away. It had been twelve years and seven drafts. If it wasn’t ready at that stage, it never would be.
Even so, I procrastinated madly on querying. I edited my cover letter and synopsis endlessly. I researched my dream agents obsessively. I focused on finishing up a draft of my feature.
And then, April of 2020, about one month into the pandemic, I submitted to my first agent. He got back to me within a day and demanded a meeting.
“This is The Dark Tower but even better,” he said. “It’s like Dune through the eyes of Vonnegut. Get ready for your life to change.”
No, I’m hiding my disappointment behind a very obvious fake out. What actually happened is that his assistant emailed me a few weeks later to say they weren’t taking any new projects.
And that’s how it has been. I’ve debated whether to write a separate essay on the querying process, maybe on the agony of submissions in general, but as of now, let’s just say the results have been anti-climactic. So far, it’s been only silence or form rejections.
It’s now been almost two years total of querying and then not querying. The printed version sits under my bed. Sometimes, I pull it out and read passages at random. The funny thing is, I still like it. The funnier thing is, I missed writing it. Maybe that’s the craziest part. Because I made another deal with myself when I started querying. I could not start the second book until an agent expressed interest. Otherwise, I had to move on.
About half a year later, I broke those terms. I kept hearing the first scene and so I wrote the first page of the second book. When I did, I felt that buzz again. I realized how much I missed the world of my novel, how much I missed the characters, and how much I wanted to know how it would all turn out.
With the second book, I’m trying to keep the process fun. I’m writing out of order and when the mood strikes me. I’m writing the scenes I hear without knowing if I’ll keep them. And I’m trying to write without the sky-high expectations of a younger, less jaded Boz.
But I also need encouragement to keep querying, and so I remind myself of all the things we tell struggling writers. So and so queried this many times before they succeeded. So and so got this horrible response before their book became a bestseller. So and so worked this awful job for years before they got discovered. I look up lists of authors and their rejections. I’ve indulged in the rags to riches story of J.K. Rowling and Stephen King more times than I care to admit.
But, it’s hard not to lose faith after what has now been two years of anti-climax. So far, only two people have read the most current draft in its entirety: my sister and my good friend Krishi. Both said encouraging things, but they’re also my sister/friend respectively, and therefore they are biased. So, I’m back to feeling delusional again. Not full on insane, just a little out of it, like some old man in a nursing home blathering on to a bunch of bored caregivers about a book he wrote back in his youth.
“Wow, a whole novel, huh, Boz? That’s nice. Now, let’s get you into that sponge bath.”
The disappointment in my own lack of success is one thing, but what hurts even more is the way in which I feel that I failed my characters, particularly the book’s protagonist. I used to roll my eyes a little at authors who talked about their characters as if they were alive, but now that I have literary children of my own, I understand it better. The protagonist of my novel spends the first third of it trapped and dreaming of escape. When he does escape from his circumstances, he finds the outside world(s) overwhelming and confusing. The whole book, like many books, is about the search for home when you don’t have a place where you already feel safe. It’s a coming of age novel for emerging adults.
Say what you will about my teenage self, I didn’t make the classic first novel mistake of writing a glorified memoir. However, I did write a character who resembles me to a suspicious extent. But I’ve done that with several projects now. What’s different about the protagonist in question is that I grew up with him. I spent years trying to find him a home, to write him into a better life. The first book only sets up that journey, it doesn’t complete it. But now it’s been almost two years since I started querying, and in terms of publishing, I still haven’t found him a home. I still haven’t found a way to make other people care about his journey.
But lately, I feel hope again. After a querying hiatus stretching back to last summer, I finally submitted to an agent the other week. It seems I’m braving the slush pile again. I hired a different editor to go over my submission materials, and in the process, I rediscovered something about my little phantom book.
Even after all this time, I still like it. And for me, that’s reason enough to continue.