This Indie Author

“Heated Rivalry” is the latest book-to-TV happily-ever-after author story to hit social media. When this happens, I’m awash with grief and elation—another author got their precious “made it” wings, but that author was not me.

I know what it takes to write and write and publish and publish and not be able to pay for more than a few expensive Starbucks drinks with your royalty checks. I know what it’s like to dream big, to imagine myself on Oprah’s couch (the old dream) or sitting in a meeting with Netflix executives (the new dream). So, Rachel Reid (a fellow GenX-er to boot!), mazel tov! I am happy for you.

And, I’m sad. I’m five years older than Rachel Reid and light years more away from the possibility of that big book deal, let alone a meeting with Netflix executives.

I’ve witnessed this phenomenon so many times—Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight, Big Little Lies, The Summer I Turned Pretty, just to name a few.

Fuck me.

I’ve been at this so long that my original goal/dream to be the next Judy Blume is almost as distant as my early memories of writing stories (or attempting to) in the half-basement of the first house I lived in as a child. I would sit on a red plastic chair that accompanied a white and blue plastic kids’ table. It was a half-basement in that you couldn’t stand all the way up in it if you were an adult. I still don’t know how my father changed the litter box that they kept in there for our cats.

I would compose about two sentences of a story in terrible penmanship (I got a “D” in handwriting), get bored, and resort to drawing equally terrible pictures for the rest. Girls with triangles for dresses and squiggly long lines for hair. The stories were all dramatic and character-driven. All of my stories were inspired by the one thing I excelled at in elementary school: reading. I devoured everything from The Life Cycle Library to Ramona Quimby books to my beloved Judy Blume novels.

I abandoned my dream around 2014 when I had a nervous breakdown that included breaking up with my then-agent. The breakdown was a mid-life crisis (I was turning 39 that year) prompted by what I now understand was my realization that my life’s ambition that my 4th grade teacher so adequately summed up with an award that simply said “Ambition is to be an author” —frankly I didn’t do much in her class other than talk a lot and try to write stories in my notebook during “dictionary time” (anyone else remember that?) was not turning out as I thought it would. In 2014, I was in year three of my second agent (sometimes I call her my third agent because technically I had one back in 1998 for about a year, but I paid her about 300 bucks for what she referred to as “postage and copying expenses”. I was over a decade into being an author and still no book deal. That agent and I would go on and stay together another year, only dissolving after she got upset with me for asking her if I could submit to a small press that I’d found in my tireless internet searches for presses that accepted (edgey) YA manuscripts. I guess my doubts about her finally became evident. She even said something like that when we broke up. When we parted ways, I was relieved to finally stop kidding myself that a contract with one of the big 5 was going to happen. To this day, I don’t know what that agent was thinking, having me as her client when she didn’t really try very hard to sell my work. She admitted this to me at the end when she confessed to falling asleep in a meeting while pitching my work to a team of editors at one of the big publishing houses.

I went on to secure three book contracts with small publishers (without an agent) and sell a few mental health essays. These have been awesome experiences, at least when I let them be.

The dream of being a successful, full-time Judy Blume-level author has been a distant memory until I am reminded of it while scrolling through Instagram, watching reel after reel and post after post about “Heated Rivalry” and Rachel Reid.

And when I’m reminded of this futile dream, an old anxiety that no longer serves me returns.

In the old days—the days of Harry Potter, Twilight, and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants—the anxiety would manifest in the thoughts: You’re getting older, running out of time to make that “the next Judy Blume/ambition is to be an author” dream come true, and this anxiety would motivate me to engage in activities that I would think would bring me closer to my dream: write a book or two or five, create a writing coaching and editing business, get an MFA, start a literary anthology featuring edgy, YA short stories, go to countless writing conferences, self publish some of those said 2-5 books, run writing workshops, do talks at libraries on publishing, and sign with agents. I did things I wanted to do, but all in the service of this anxiety: You are running out of time to ‘make it’.

Good anxiety motivates.

It can jump-start you with energy, but other times it makes you ruminate, which can make you just behave with such anxious intensity that it leads to burnout, which leads to depression and immobility.

Bad anxiety debilitates. Thus, after decades of chasing a dream that I was nowhere near achieving, I crashed. After years of serving the false logic that if you work hard enough, you can achieve anything, I simply stopped: I couldn’t do it anymore.

After all the scrolling of Rachel Reid’s success (and my gosh, those young men are talented and hot!), I found a familiar, that old anxiety crept in: hurry up, you’re running out of time.

Ha, girl, I’ve already RUN OUT OF TIME! Part of me replied. But the other part, the younger, scared part whose self-worth rests on a fragile, narrow idea of “success,” that part said, “Fuck me! Hurry! Catch up! Bust your ass trying to figure out how to ‘make it’!”

While scrolling through Instagram, admiring and envying Rachel Reid’s success, I saw a post from a local bookstore about upcoming events.

This tremor of anxiety came into my brain, and it said, ‘You should reach out.’ Followed by, ‘Ugh! It will be a lot of effort, and it could be a bust.” A paralysis followed. I did nothing. I couldn’t post anything that day or work on marketing my books.

But I did write this.