Most of you probably know that for the past year I’ve been working on a book proposal of a memoir about my mother and her experience with breast cancer. Some of you have asked how the process is going. Some of you have asked when you can expect to grab your copy off the shelf of your local bookstore, bless your souls. I bask in your optimism.

This project has been a long time coming; I lost count of how many times mom and I elbowed each other whenever things got hard and said “more fodder for the memoir, eh?” This was said with wry sarcasm, but then one day, it wasn’t. “Let’s write a book together.” And it turns out that she was dead serious. (Forgive the pun. If you’re not laughing, well, she is.)

It was a project we began to dream about together. It was a project that she had the courage to conceive of, even if she wasn’t sure she would ever see it come to fruition in her lifetime. She sat down and in six months wrote 15 chapters all by herself. My mother (if you’re trying to picture her, imagine part Julie Andrews, part Lorelai Gilmore) was a woman who knew what she wanted and made it happen, whether it was defying doctors’ prognoses or writing a book about it.

Me, on the other hand? I know what I want, but I tend be a little less self-assured, a little more cynical, a little tip-toey around the things I want and how to get them. So when my friend sat down on my couch a year ago and said “now’s the time and I’m here to be your agent,” I was excited, but also scared. I waded in the shallow waters for awhile before feeling ready to dive in with this book business.

It was – as it always seems to be where I’m concerned – a problem of knowing just enough to stand in my own way.

Writing a book, in case you’re not aware, is a long, arduous path. It’s an epic journey. It’s Frodo taking The Ring to Mordor ambitious, complete with Orcs and the occasional giant, flesh-eating arachnid. Some call her Shelob, but her real name is Your Emotional Baggage, and she tends to emerge from your bedroom closet just when you’re about to write the most vulnerable parts of your story.*

But I digress.

The point is, I knew this going in. I knew that it would be hard and risky and frustrating and slow and terrifying and that there are no shortcuts and there are definitely no guarantees.

And knowing this perhaps slowed me down a bit. It took a few months to let the “OMG A PUBLISHER IS GOING TO READ THIS” performance anxiety to wear off, another month or two to crank out enough material to form a first draft of a proposal, another month to write a draft of a sample chapter, another month to edit a draft of mom’s sample chapter. And then another month after that to edit all of it into one cohesive proposal and send it to my agent. (In my defense, I was working a full time job and trying to maintain a blog… Oh little blog, poor neglected thing. File this under things they don’t tell you about writing a book : having an online platform is essential to acquiring a book deal these days, but growing said platform while working on a book is next to impossible. The system is rigged, you guys.)

A couple months after that, a publisher finally nibbled at the bait on my hook. A few friendly email exchanges later, we set up a time to chat over the phone.

“So what can we expect from this phone call?” I asked my agent. “Will we talk timeline? Numbers?”

“Friend,” he said very gently, “Writing a book has five steps. You are still on Step One.”

So you see, even in my attempts to prepare myself, I still was not prepared for this process. We never will be, so we have to be faithful and diligent to the process anyway.

The phone call with the nibbling publisher went pretty well. They complimented me on my writing and said they’d been following me for awhile (!!!!!), we talked about the proposal, I tried not to get too numbers-specific with my tiny little platform, we schemed about a possible opportunity, I got a little excited and over-promised on delivery, and in the end, no matter how hopeful I wanted to be about the whole thing, it just wasn’t the right fit. They were asking me to work on something separate from the mom memoir, and as much as I feel that this other project is a book I will write someday, that time is not now. It was a square peg in a round hole and lemme tell you: this method of forcing words does. not. work.

You know those writers that are all seven steps to the book deal of your dreams and three habits that helped me write a thousand words in an hour and start waking up at five a.m. and you’ll become a NYT bestselling author in 10 days? You guys. They’re lying. OR, maybe it did actually work for them, but it doesn’t work for everyone, and I am one of the everyone else whose best work happens in the hard, slow, quiet moments. And you know what else? That’s okay. There’s a lot of really magnificent people in this camp that have created beautiful things when they allowed the words to flow naturally from life to the page.

So over winter break I came to terms with the facts :

Fact A : forcing words is not my modus operandi

Fact B : rejection from a publisher can be a lot less painful and a lot more freeing if I let it.

It seems they were confused about why I had structured the manuscript the way that I had. At first their confusion raised my hackles and provoked a few fangs and growls, but after I thought about it for awhile and ate a few dozen bowls of ice cream, it hit me. I had picked the most straightforward (read: utterly boring) way to structure my manuscript possible. Why had I done that?

I did that because I was afraid to take risks with it. I was afraid they wouldn’t see my vision. So I chose not to have a vision and just to give the straight-facts version of this story, which actually isn’t the same as telling it true.

And when I finally understood this and sat down to give it another go, a whole new proposal came tumbling out – new premise, new chapter structure, new title, new sample chapter. One that feels a lot less Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and much more memoir-ish, the way a book about a person’s real life ought to be.

And as it goes, now that I have a second draft that I love, the project is in limbo. (Remember the part where I compared writing a book to LOTR? Just when you think it’s almost over, it goes on for another 45 minutes and you really have to pee. And we’re only on Year One, Part One, Step One, Lord help us.)

It’s in limbo because my dear friend and agent has taken on some new opportunities, and we both feel it would be more efficient for both of us if we found me a female agent that has the expertise to help me market this book. (I’m writing about breast cancer and womanhood, you guys. It is what it is.) And I feel really good about this decision, despite having to gear myself up for the journey that is finding a compatible agent.

So that’s my #realtalk about year one of my journey to publishing my first book.

And it taught me so much about myself as a writer. Believe it or not, I don’t say this begrudgingly. This first year in My Epic Journey to Writing a Book revealed a couple of other facts about myself to me:

Fact C : despite our recent decision to find a new agent, were it not for my friend sitting on my couch a year ago and offering to help me, this journey may never have gotten started. And for that reason, I have nothing but gratitude for him.

Fact D : all of this epic journeying so far has done nothing to dissuade me of the truth that I am, in fact, a writer. (Please point me to this sentence in this blog post later when I’m sobbing to you about how it’s never going to happen for me.)

If you’ve read to the end of this diatribe (with or without skimming), bless you. I’ll be back with updates as I have them, but until then, I’m hoping to appear a lot more regularly on this here blog with other thoughts about life and faith and all manner of bloggy things. Perhaps by the time the book deal actually happens, my platform might be a smidge bigger to please those pesky, numbers-savvy publishers. Either way I’m glad you’re here. I love you all. I wouldn’t be doing any of this if it weren’t for you.

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*It helps to have a Samwise Gamgee for moments such as this. Thanks to my dear hubs, Matthew Jason, for casting light at every vital moment and never letting me go it alone no matter how delusional stubborn I am. And thanks to my friend and agent-now-helping-me-find-a-better-agent, Darrell Vesterfelt. You saw something I didn’t yet see in myself. I’m so thankful for you. And to the rest of you, dear friends and readers, thanks for your endless support and faith. We’re getting there, one step at a time.