This Isn't the Column I Wanted to Write

or, Job 1:21

I’ve started and stopped a missive or two in the past couple of months. I’ve wanted to tell you about my New Year’s Eve Day divorce from (nearly all) social media. It’s been a fabulously productive and revelatory time. Also breathtakingly busy, which is why I’ve been missing from this space. But more on that at a later date…

A few days ago I had an entirely different ‘stack in mind. One that would include a graphic of a Publishers Weekly Book Deal announcement. Because, Dear Reader, for 10 happy days, I had a Book Deal. One that popped and flattened and was whisked away like sea foam on the shore, subsumed by the cold waters of bewilderment.

The good news appeared in a voicemail transcript in the middle of a staff meeting, my phone on mute: “Julie, we’ve had an offer on Good for Vanishing. Call me when you can.” I had to sit still and breathe for another forty minutes before I could return my agent’s call. Then the forwarded email from the publisher: “We've completed our review and really loved the book. The setting and characters are terrific - it's beautifully written and I think it would make a great addition to our list. Can you please let me know if it's still available. If so, I can send you our boilerplate contract for review and we can go from there.”

That rush of hope and joy at the magical, elusive YES. The emotional exhalation, the heart’s fist pump, the “At last.” For an artist, there is little that can compare.

A great conversation with the publisher ensued: we talked distribution, marketing, time frames. The relief at hearing they felt the book needed little editing beyond a solid copyedit and proofreading. I would be involved in the cover discussions. Yes, they welcomed working with independent publicists.

My agent took those boilerplate contract terms, which were modest at best, and did what a good agent does: advocated for something more favorable for her author. Nothing outrageous — I’m hardly a household name, this is a small-ish, independent press — but something completely in line with standard terms, and of course in response to the stated, “I can send you our boilerplate contract for review and we can go from there.”

The morning after my agent sent her email suggesting different terms, she received a curt reply rescinding the offer. No explanation, just a huffy scrabbling for toys in the sandbox and a scurrying away. She replied with an attempt to mollify and continue the conversation, but her emails and phone calls went unanswered. We’d been ghosted. The deal was off.

I was sitting in the Y parking lot after an early morning lap swim when my agent relayed the news to me, expressing her shock and sorrow. In all her years as an agent, she’d never experienced anything like this. This was before she responded, when we assumed that further negotiation was still possible. Before the shock wore off and I recalled Maya Angelou’s advice, When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.

Despite feeling heartbroken and deflated with the news, I knew I’d been saved from further agony by getting into bed, so to speak, with a care-less publisher. I and my work deserve better. I try not to think into the disappointment too deeply, how long this novel took to write and revise, how long it’s pulled me away from working on new material, how my joy of a contract was at least as much about freeing myself to move on as it was an ego boost of having another novel in the world.

“I don’t think publishers realize how this affects an author,” my agent said. “How hard you work, how much you hope, what a blow this is.”

I appreciate her magnanimity, but not so fast… Publishers aren’t an amorphous set of AI bots (at least not yet). I work in publishing with an ethical, deeply feeling, wise team. Publishers and editors are human beings who make choices. And this particular human made a choice to behave without integrity. Whatever their reason for not continuing a negotiation they’d invited from the opening offer, they showed themselves to be lacking the most basic professionalism.

What continues to pull me down is more of an existential crisis. That people can be just so fucking awful.

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I trust — and forgive the cliché; you’d think as I writer, I’d come up with something original — that this closed door means I need to be on the lookout for an open window, even if I have to pry the damn thing up myself. But for the moment, I sit quietly and consider that beyond book deals and the need for external validation and doors slamming shut on hopes, there is an opportunity to reflect and learn.

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I wasn’t going to say anything to you all. I told a few close friends and my family about the impending deal, my colleagues because most of them are writers, as well, but I could have just let this go and pretended it never happened.

The weekend following the collapse of the deal, I read an article in the current (March/April 2024) issue of Poets & Writers, entitled Ghosted. The author, Jennifer Dickinson, had an experience far more harrowing than mine. She’d written a middle-grade novel featuring a young girl with a profound stutter, a condition Jennifer herself had as a child. She queried agents, and in August 2020 she received a warm response from one who indicated that with some revision of the novel, she would consider representing Jennifer. They worked together on edits for nearly a year, until Jennifer sent along a final draft. Silence. A year of silence, then an apology and promise to return feedback in a few weeks. More silence. Ghosted.

To Jennifer, the agent’s tacit rejection was not just of her novel, but of the stammering little girl she had been. The shame was profound, the despair intractable. Her public essay was a way of working through the hurt to arrive at a place of resolution and healing. She finds her solace in her writing community and so I too — despite my desire to lick my wounds in private — share with you my experience.

We are, as Jennifer writes, none of us safe, in publishing. But if we wanted to play it safe, we wouldn’t be writers.

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life