(I wrote this a while ago, but it felt too raw to send at the time. Today I wrote a different Tinyletter that's still too raw to send, so now I'm sending you this one instead.) 

I've been holding off on writing this particular story until I knew how it ended, but it occurred to me the other day that that's exactly the wrong instinct. We pretty much only ever hear about failure when it's been redeemed by success. And maybe that'll happen eventually, but it doesn't seem likely right now, and anyway, the point isn't what's coming. The point is how it's felt to sit here for the last two years, trying to make something happen that just does not seem to want to go.

When I sold Look, my agent and I also negotiated a contract for a second book. I hadn't written that second book yet; I had maybe half a draft and it was completely raw, so I sent my new editor a link to an article I'd written instead and said, basically, it's like this, but fiction. I was aware that contract books are a gamble, but I felt very certain this one would work out.

It didn't. I sent my editor draft after draft after draft, and her note was the same every time: I just don't understand what this book is about. Which is like... pretty basic stuff. 

To be clear, this is a story about professional relationships not working out. I don't blame her or anyone else who comes later for this. It happens! My favorite authors have books I like more and less, and those are finished products; to edit something together requires that you both want to push the project in the same direction, and I could neither go where J wanted me to nor communicate effectively where I thought we should be headed instead. I tried really hard though. I re-wrote the book five or six times, wiping out scenes and plotlines and characters, trying desperately to make the thing I saw and felt when I was working on this book seem real enough to her.

I have a whole bag of metaphors I use when I'm teaching writing: writing a novel is like trying to build a house and furnish it at the same time. Writing a novel is like driving on a dark road at night. Writing a novel is like interpreting a dream.

But in this case, writing a novel felt like announcing I was a magician, and that I would be pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It felt like standing on stage and pointing to what I thought was a rabbit, I mean not like, a gorgeous one but recognizably a rabbit, twitching nose, cotton tail, etc. and having the response be, very sweetly, very gently, "I don't know what you're talking about. That's just a pile of loose fur." It felt like describing something that I thought was a dream but everyone thought was a hallucination. It was particularly difficult because it rang some of the same bells as being very mentally unwell at the end of 2016, and trying to communicate across a fundamental gap of experience. I could feel the thing I wanted this book to be, but I couldn't make the words in it say that to anyone else. 

Anyway, as you might guess, we never got there. In January 2021, I called my editor and said I couldn't work with her anymore. I felt completely unmoored by the process of doubting myself so much, of swimming against a relentless tide. It had been two years and we were not an inch closer to line edits than we had been at the start.

I had lost sight of what I thought the book was. I still can't open the document without cringing; it just feels so overworked and hopeless. 

Normally I would have just sold her another book to take that one's place, but I had written something else in the mean time, and it wasn't YA. Well, no problem, I thought: I'll sell the new book to an adult publisher, and use that advance to pay off the old advance (yes, they make you give the money back if you don't finish the book) and everything will come out in the wash. Except I showed the new book to my agent, and do you know what she said?

I just don't understand what this book is about. 

That wasn't the end of it between us, but it was the beginning of the end. Since then I have revised and revised. And the book has been rejected by every agent who's read it. No one has said quite that they don't understand it, but their notes tell me that they don't-- that the thing I am trying to say is, once again, getting garbled somehow, reaching them as sort of vaguely poetic static. It makes me feel crazy and also humiliated. Trying is so embarrassing. Only my fear that quitting is worse has kept me from doing it. 

I am not a stranger to rejection. So if you are considering emailing me an uplifting story or some advice about facing it, please don't. Fifty agents said no to my first book, and then ten editors, and then the third one racked up a bunch more no's, including from the editor who'd published the first two, by the way. It only takes one yes. Many successful authors have been rejected many times. This is just part of the process. I promise you, I am aware of all of this. My skin is as thick as it's ever going to get. 

And anyway, those are redemption stories. And I don't want to tell or be told redemption stories right now. This is the messy middle, and it deserves more than we often give it. I've asked this question once before but I'll ask it again because right now it feels like the only question: "How can I tell myself, let alone anyone else, a story that doesn't end the way we think it should, with a big ol' happily ever after, with a success to redeem each of the failures and frustrations that preceded it?" What if I never publish another book again? I mean, really: what if? No one dies, not even me. How do you know when giving up is necessary surrender? How do we tell a story that's just: sometimes, shit sucks, man?