Some truths about being a professional author

Dear friend,

It’s Monday morning, late. The clock already reads 10:17 and I’ve yet to move from puttering to working. I’m trying to clear my mental palette, to create space, because I’m about to settle in with a novel I’m very excited to be editing.

Sounds sublime, right?

Being a professional author is alternately seen as tragically romantic, glamorous, or—perhaps more realistically— as just plain pie-in-the-sky. People imagine I’m living some version of the life they see in a series like Younger or Julia: an agent who is like a best friend, a publisher eagerly awaiting my next bit of writing, a long line of adoring fans hovering at the bookstore, and perhaps— for good measure— a beach scene break-down with too many bottles of wine.

And that, my friend, would be the fantasy.

What is real— and what I’m continuously grateful for— is the ability to have a leisurely morning, to plan in time to think and dream and refresh my tea, and then— oh, deliciousness!— to be able to fully immerse myself in a creative space. It doesn’t matter whether I’m working on someone else’s words or my own; both hold endless pathways for stretching my neurons into a fresh experience of the world, for remembering the breadth and depth of human perception and emotion, for finding pockets of transformation that a reader can later inhabit, and for exercising the parts of my noggin that recognize pattern, symbol, and sequence. That’s the joy of being an author. The rest— the bits the movies focus on— is usually the headache.

Another rarely lauded feature of the writer’s life is navigating the business side of being an author. Most authors (the exception being the household names) make only a small portion of our incomes from books, the rest comes from… well, being an author, and the opportunities a savvy person can craft around the skill sets acquired whilst writing, editing, and chatting up random people in bookstore checkout lines. Having a business mindset allows writing to be a vocation instead of an avocation. (I’m actually a fan of having writing as avocation. Counting on it for your income adds a not-necessarily-useful degree of complexity.)

It’s this business side I’ve let moulder these past six months as I’ve navigated the move to Edinburgh. I (literally) have emails in my inbox that have gone unanswered since July.😬

As I restart the business of writing, I’m opening up spaces for new editing and mentoring clients (email me and I’ll try to answer before 2028); considering how I might want to do writing retreats (I’m thinking on a version of a salon here in Edinburgh); and noodling on some sort of small group writing support pod (which sounds drab when I type it but I’m imagining a tight posse of vivacious writers meeting twice monthly in an online round table). I did consider a witchy bookstore, which— while it lights up my romantic receptors— would likely interfere with leisurely mornings and countless cups of tea. I’m also considering a read-in, complete with live calls, for Letting Magic In because we really do need to remember how to find magic and mystery in our own lives as a counterweight to the crazy.

If you have interest or thoughts on any of the above, please be in touch or leave a comment below. Nothing is concrete at the moment which means many things are possible!

OH! One more thing: Letting Magic In will not be coming out in paperback.

(Why? Because I’m a buffoon who got scared, didn’t listen to my own [ridiculously strong] intuition, and took a deal with a press that doesn’t typically do much memoir… or paperback. Taking said deal resulted in a year of publishing drama truly worthy of a few episodes of Younger… maybe an entire season.)

End result?

I broke up with my agent of seven years (cue publishing drama) and Letting Magic In will not be coming out in paperback.

So if you’ve been waiting for it (I would be— who wants to spend $30 on a memoir?), then you’ll want the audio, the ebook, or to buy from Amazon where the hardcover is actually selling for less than paperback prices. (And, wow! The reviews are excellent! I hadn’t been in Amazon for a while. Huge thanks to everyone who added their thoughts.)

I’m also looking at all the herbal and witchy material I’ve created over the years and thinking about where that fits into my current tapestry of interests. Every once in a while someone pops into an old version of Witch Camp and yells into the void “Hello?? Is anyone else still hanging around here?” Which brings up all sorts of emotions for me and also reminds me that we all still need safe spaces to be our most real, hopeful, bountiful, fierce, loving, angry, and symbolically-motivated selves. We need doorways into the collective unconscious at access points that make our hearts pitter-pat so that we can be reminded that there’s more to life than the shit show we see on the news. We need to be with people who hold space for this kind of multi-layered aliveness.

As I’ve been sorting through the bits and pieces of my past work, I’ve been thinking about how my various interests play, or don’t play, together at any given moment in my own life. How sometimes I see the tapestry and, other times, just a tangle of threads. My writing and my witchy merge and then separate again. Right now they seem disparate but I know how quickly this dance can turn from solo trancing into a cha cha.

A few weeks back I was discussing this with me niece, the ways in which something that feels like a dropped stitch will suddenly be integrated years later, how the experiences that make up a life have an internal logic we don’t always understand in the moment. We were talking about her life at the time, an opportunity she was ready to walk away from because she no longer felt like it fit. Then, in the funny way life has of showing us the same concept from multiple angles, a forgotten thread reappeared in my own life:

I’m volunteering at the Royal Botanic Gardens here in Edinburgh. (That’s right kids, if you show up for the daily tour, I might just be your guide.) They recently planted a tree, one I discovered years back when I was working on my thesis for my herbal studies. I was studying eighteenth and nineteenth century texts, trying to understand how herbal remedies were or weren’t used in colonial Philadelphia. Which basically meant I was traipsing through the attic archives of various Philly institutions, pulling down diaries and receipt books that no one had touched in decades. I was constantly dust smudged and dirty and probably about the happiest I’ve been in my adult life.

In a barely remembered rare books room of Pennsylvania Hospital, I discovered an original copy of a book by a man named Bartram (my Philadelphia friends will be wondering “Of Bartram’s Gardens?” And the answer is yes.) Within this book was a tree, one I had never heard of before. Here’s what I wrote of it back when I was still living in Philadelphia:

The Lost Camellia

Every once in a while, I stumble across something that sparks my love of myth and mystery, something that roots in my soul and makes me behave like an O.C.D. gerbil, going round and round on my little rodent wheel.

Five years back, that something was Franklinia alatamaha, the Franklin Tree, the Lost Camellia.

Philadelphia is not a particularly mysterious city. It lacks those gated, stone walled-courtyards that tease the outsider with hints of jasmine and gardenia or twisting alleyways that smell of roasting coffee and croissants in the hours just after dawn.

What Philadelphia does have is the Franklinia, The Lost Camellia.

Extinct in the wild since the late 1700s, the Franklinia is a member of the Tea family (Theaceae), the same family as the camillia, which is a native of Asia. The last confirmed siting of the Franklinia in the wild was in 1790.

This elusive tree is the unicorn of the plant world and I now have one growing in my backyard.

Philadelphia botanist John Bartram collected the seeds of the Franklinia on a trip to Georgia back in the eighteenth century. He brought them back to Philadelphia were he successfully propagated the Franklinia tree from which all modern trees are descended.

And there aren’t that many; a loosely conducted census of the trees on the East Coast put the number around 1,000.

When I first learned of the Franklinia, my love of the curious, the mysterious, and the elusive kicked into high gear. I searched nurseries and online sources. At a native plant sale, I arrived after the only one had been sold. For a few years, the Franklinia became my personal Holy Grail.

Then we moved and my garden changed. I forgot about the Franklinia and focused on painting the living room.

Last week, touring the New York Botanical Gardens with my mother-in-law, we came across a strange little tree. It looked like a cross between an azalea and a camellia. Beautiful, glossy leaves framed five petaled white flowers, even though it was autumn and late for blooming.

We debated what it was, never suspecting it could be the ever elusive Lost Camellia.

Five days later, I was in my local nursery and came across an unusual looking tree. I circled it a few times, trying to identify the oddity before checking the tag. Franklinia.

I often think about the ways in which our culture revers the obscure and the hidden, as if somehow we ourselves become rare and precious by proximity or ownership.

And yet we so often overlook the beauty that surrounds us everyday in search of this thing that we are sure must be better for being touched by mystery.

I’m not gonna lie: having a reminder of the fleeting and elusive nature of life, having a living bit of our botanical history, growing in my garden is a gift that I will be charmed by as long as I live here.

But in the time when my Franklinia obsession had faded, I remembered the joy of peonies and cone flowers. I smiled at the thyme creeping in a dense blanket and was soothed by the gentle rustle of the birch trees.

Often times clients have read about an herb from India or Korea, something so obscure that we don’t even have an English name for it, and they wonder if maybe I could find it for them, if maybe it would be better then the easily accessible dandelion or nettle, or more potent than oregano, or a better winter heal all than elderberry.

There is a thrill to finding the rare, to knowing very few others have tasted it or felt its effects. And yet, the true art, the deeper wisdom, is finding the mystery in the everyday and the healing in our own back yards.

Appreciation sometimes seems to be the rarest elixir of all.

When I remember to notice the world around me, there is so much mystery to savor.

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Last week I introduced the other garden guides to the new Franklinia at the “Botanics” (the local moniker for the gardens here). It’s just a wee twig, maybe a meter high. Next to the flowering magnolias, the cherry blossoms, and the alleys of rhododendrons, it seemed rather pathetic. The rain was bucketing down, cold rivulets running down my neck. Essentially, I was cold and damp and extolling the gorgeous rarity of a plant that looked like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree.

But I’ve seen this beauty, sprawling in grandeur with camilla-like flowers the size of a latte cup. I know what she becomes.

In the midst of these meanderings I got an email from my ex-agent. The one I broke up with. Her son had found copies of my older books in her office and had pulled the cards from the pocket in the back. Apparently he’s obsessed with them and put them in a pile by his bed before he went to sleep.

Sometimes the patterns, in publishing and in life, are too big to make out. We see the repeat, we know the texture of a moment, but not how it ties into the greater whole.

And maybe that’s okay. After all, a tree which in all fairness should have been extinct two hundred years ago, sprang back to life first in Philadelphia, and then—by seed and cutting— in gardens around the globe. This tree and me are sharing space here, in a little corner of Scotland where neither of us had previously thought to be planted.

And meanwhile, seeds and cuttings of my words and thoughts are finding their own way out in the world, weaving new patterns I will rarely get to see or understand.

Last time Franklinia appeared, she reminded me to remember the beauty of the everyday. This time, she is murmuring of the mysteries, of remembering who we have been and who we can become.