The Story of The Book

It feels like such an old, tired piece of news, that I am writing a book.

 It’s called Grief: A Love Story, and yada, yada, yada, it’s about how we sign up for grief when we sign up for love and that it’s a thing we might just collect, rather than run from.

Spouting off about writing a book is kinda sexy. Who doesn’t want to be A Writer? Perhaps in a tweed blazer with patches. It’s damn glamorous.

But when you write one and then flaccidly do nothing with it, it’s a little like when you tell someone you’re going to do something big and life-changing, like buy a house, or change careers, and then not ever doing that thing. I feel as though people were intrigued and excited by the idea of a book written by me, about grief, and how I see it and made it through a lot of it, and there is disappointment about it as I have failed to come through.

I remember when I finished the first draft. It was March of 2017. I got all the words—90,000 or so of them—barfed out into a manuscript. I celebrated the milestone, as one should, but was reminded, by one of those friend-trolls on the internet (the sort we have long un-friended) that it was the first draft of many and that there was nothing really to celebrate, yet.

I pushed back on that. I celebrate everything. I do. I love excuses to open special bottles of wine, or eat dinner out, or treat myself.

But the damn troll was partly right.

Here we are, nearly six years later, and the book is still nested cozily in my laptop. It only takes me a few moments to locate the file and open it back up, though I have gone­­­­­­ months between visits.

It’s changed and morphed in the six years it’s been living in my drafts. It’s been called

The Last Draft <insert year>

FINAL_Draft_For_Real 

And I particularly like this: August_2022_Last_F#cking_Draft 

The Me that wrote that draft was…well, I was sweet. I had found my way through the year that followed one that chopped me at my knees. I had let go of not only four beloved people from various corners of my 40 years, but also let go of my trusty car, and then kill off my loving companion, the Basset Hound (I joke, but that’s what I did; I hired a hit on my cancerous dog and ended his life). I had fallen head over heels (head over heals?) into a relationship with a man that would become my second husband (and it’s still funny when I introduce him that way) and we were planning a move to a whole new city to be near family and opportunity and space.  

Indeed we moved. And it was great.

Then we decided to get married amid attempts to start a family that ended in the long and rewarding adoption of our son. We made it through the calm hurricane of new-parenting in a pandemic, career upsets and changes, schooling and up-leveling.

Still, the book remains unpublished. 

Some days I feel like a big, fat fraud.

Most days I have compassion for the life that has unfolded and delivered me to this graced, open space with my book, ready to push on and deliver it to the world. And some days I don’t.

I have, however, made some active steps on this. As I prepared to return to school in the Fall of 2023 (cross your fingers I get into Dalhousie’s social work program!), it came down to this: scrap the book or complete it. 

I explored self-publishing, which had honestly never appealed and the expense of it made me weak, and then went, again, to the traditional publishing route. I am now working with Patti Hall, who is, with a generous heart and her heaps of skill, guiding me through editing, agent-proposing and all the rest of it. It’s finally, actually, coming.

So, yeah, I wrote a book, and here’s the new message: I have an in-the-can manuscript that I am proposing out to agents. That’s a thing. Now get me my tweed blazer, please.