These Five Years: Part Four

There's always something we don't see coming.

For weeks I’ve been raking away at the part of this story that comes next: where at last we are settled-ish, the world is perhaps slightly less charred, and after all this time, my novel of hope and despair hasn’t left me. Nothing comes out quite right, though, and I can’t catch the words. I keep starting over. I hesitate.

This morning, I feel the scrape in my bones. The black metal fingers of the rake in my hands scratch at our driveway where I’ve piled crimson and gold leaves. I’d paused to admire, even sit under, the very same leaves just last week. Now they are gone.

I gather them from their resting place, build them into heaps, and stuff them inside biodegradable bags so large that, to open them completely, I have to pull each one over my head, the hems reaching past my knees. All that beauty, swallowed whole.

The boys try to help, but end up jumping: rites of childhood and seasons that pass too quickly. The wind carries drifts of autumn confetti everywhere. Away and then back, again. No matter how much I pull and tug, there are leaves left behind. I let them lie and consider what remains.

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I should want to tell you the next part.

The part where people whose opinions I deeply value read The Other Side of Hope and then tell me the book is good, tell me it’s beautiful, tell me it’s made them cry and hold their breath and feel somehow seen.

The part where friends press in and help me think critically about what needs more work, what needs to go, and what needs to expand to tell a better story.

The part where things are finally, mostly good.

Late that winter but early in the year, just as I begin revisions on the third draft with my readers’ feedback in hand, an idea for a new novel comes to me in a dream. Night after night, the same man and woman in an old public house in a tiny Highlands village return to me. For the first time on this fiction foray, I believe I may write another book.

Early in spring, my uveitis specialist tells me she hopes she never has to see me again. We both smile with tears in our eyes and hug tightly. Down the hall, I fall back against the door of the bathroom and cry hard with relief and gratitude; after three years and three weeks, I am discharged.

I should be excited to tell you that everything keeps moving in the right direction.

I finish decorating my office. Cliff builds me raised beds, and I plant a garden where everything green feels miraculous. I visit the Immersive Van Gogh Experience not once but four times, each one more moving than the last. One of my best friends drives me to Kentucky where I stand in a wheat field, the stalks green and pliant at first and then crisp and golden when we return just a few weeks later.

This whole time the revision picks up speed, the structure becomes more balanced, and the pipe dream of “querying in the fall,” at last, appears possible. The hope of this self-imposed deadline propels me forward. We return to Manhattan, and when we get home, Cliff sends me away for the next two weekends, one of which I spend thrown back in time in the middle of nowhere (not unlike my novel) for a mini-residency at Rockvale Writers’ Colony.

In September, the draft is finished.

I think it’s ready. Or at least, I really want it to be, and in this case, really wanting it spurs me on. I do all the next right things: create a spreadsheet, subscribe to Publishers Marketplace, purchase a year of QueryTracker, and research agents so intensely it borders on stalking.

In October, I begin querying.

I get a rejection that first night, and the wave of emotion that hits surprises me, though it shouldn’t. The kids make certificates to celebrate that every “no” means I’m on my path to yes. My first full request comes from an agent I consider untouchable, and I blubber into an iced mocha in my favorite coffeeshop at the beach. But the rejections follow, even still. Adding to the excitement and terror of that season, we bring home our puppy, and I have no idea what I’m doing.

In November, I start writing the new book,

born from the Pub Scene. That’s what I title its secret Pinterest board and Note on my phone. I let the momentum of NaNoWriMo push me to create in the purgatory that is waiting to hear back — or never hear at all — from agents. With You Everywhere becomes a whole half a book that month: a beautiful escape every time I open Scrivener.

Since publishing quiets down around the holidays, I take a break from querying until after the new year. In my pristine planner, I write RESUME QUERYING on January 16, 2023, pleased with my decisiveness and foresight.

I couldn’t have known.

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In early December 2022, Cliff’s father fell ill. Wendell had been valiantly battling two forms of cancer in varying degrees for the previous twenty-five years. But what should have been a day trip from East Tennessee to Nashville for a procedure, turned into a cascade of events no one was prepared for. Every day that passed only led to more decline and uncertainty.

Maintaining presence while facing the possibility of loss was a grief I’d never encountered. There was both a pallor and a poignancy to those December and January days, when everything festive and new felt wrong and out of place. And yet somehow, necessary for moving forward, for guiding the kids, for living.

The morning of January 16, I sent out my 40th query, as planned.

That night, Wendell took his final breath.

He’d not returned home after leaving for the hospital that December day. But in truth, he was home, and those of us remaining, left to make sense of a world without him in it.

Almost a year later, I’m bracing myself for the holiday season, memories like leaves I can’t yet relinquish. Some still cling, with impossible traces of green, to their branches. Grief is like that, I’ve learned. And I’m certain it is why this part came slow and unyielding.

I hadn’t known how our loss could shape my work and writing, this year, and I’ll share more on what I’ve learned in the final part of this series, next week.

Thank you for reading, as always.

Until then,

Read more from These Five Years series:

These Five Years: Introduction

These Five Years: Part One

These Five Years: Part Two

These Five Years: Part Three