Am Writing

So, here is a thing. I am writing a book. I apologise to any of my Twitter followers because they already know this, seeing as though I have become somewhat obsessed with tweeting about it.

I have been writing it for some time now, in the region of a year, maybe more depending on what you think constitutes writing a book. To start with, the book was a carefully chosen selection of my blog posts. Then it became part book, part diary, part blog posts. It has had various different iterations.

Up until recently I was writing it on the side, when I had time, after all the other things I was doing. I was also writing it kind of secretly. It wasn’t a secret, secret, but I wasn’t exactly telling everyone I was doing it either. Everyone is writing a book aren’t they? My book probably wasn’t going to get published anyway, seeing as though it is ridiculously difficult to get published, so why tell people about it? It would just be embarrassing when it didn’t come off.

However, the book is not really just a hobby, it is something I’m actually serious about and the more I’ve got into blogging, the more I’ve come to realise that writing is a big part of who I am. I need writing to be in my life and when I sit at the computer it just sort of flows out of me. I want to be an author. There, I’ve said it. I don’t want to stop being a speech and language therapist but I do also want to be an author.

Being an author is a much trickier career choice than I originally thought. The writing might well flow out but someone, somewhere, needs to think it’s good and worthy of printing. The whole success of this career choice relies on someone else’s judgement, which, it turns out, is pretty hard to get used to. I also really felt that I couldn’t call myself an author until I had finally got published and until that point I would just be a wannabe, which feels kind of uncool.

I made submissions to literary agents. I got rejection letters and quickly began to lose whatever belief I once had. Trying to become an author requires A LOT of self-belief. An agency sent me a nice letter saying that one author submitted her work over 80 times before she became published so although my book wasn’t for them, I shouldn’t give up. Bloody Nora I thought, who has enough unwavering belief to keep submitting when they have already been rejected 70 times? Or 75 times? I had been rejected 4 or 5 times and was already getting fed up.

A few weeks ago it came to a bit of a head. Grizzly sat me down and made me talk to him. I just wasn’t feeling successful in any area of my life, that was the problem. “Which bit needs to change?” he asked me. The speech therapy bit? The parenting bit? The blogging bit? You’re working hard in all of them he reassured (and some other things about promising to appreciate me more). It’s the book, I mumbled. “Make the book happen then,” he told me. “But I’m trying and no one likes it and I keep getting rejected and waahhhh!” I had a proper moan then quickly became fed up with the sound of my own voice. “It might need re-writing and that’ll be a really big job….” I trailed off. “You’ll never have as much time as this”, he said, “Just do it. If you don’t believe in it, no one will”.

I guess I needed some tough love. I wasn’t sure I felt much better at the time but I did seem to feel differently about everything when I woke up in the morning. If I was really serious about this, I needed to do it, as in seriously do it, not just a bit of secret tinkering. I decided to come out as a wannabe author. Maybe talking to people and asking their advice would make it all feel more official and proper? Maybe publically talking about it would take me one step closer to actually fulfilling it? I started to wonder whether it is the publishing that allows you to call yourself an author or if it could possibly be the act of writing itself.

Grizzly also asked me his usual questions: ‘what is the worst that could happen?’ and ‘what do you have to lose?’ “Nothing, apart from my dignity,” I replied petulantly. “Dignity is a subjective concept anyway”, he said, “You’ve got nothing to lose”. I don’t normally like to give him the satisfaction of thinking he’s right but I’m inclined to agree with him on this one occasion.

At the end of the day, even if I never, ever, get published, I will still have written a book. I need to consider that an achievement in itself and the act of having sat there, hour after hour, week after week, pouring my thoughts onto the page, will not be negated by a lack of publishing. I will still have put my feelings into carefully chosen words and crafted those words into carefully constructed sentences. That will still have happened even if the book never makes its way to the shelves of Waterstones.

I have been lucky enough to get some constructive feedback on the most recent draft. It has helped me to realise that blog posts are easy to hide behind and a lazy way to tell a whole story. I am no longer messing about or taking short cuts. The book will not write itself. This time I am truly writing the book; not the abridged version or the easy-reader but the actual story of how we got our son. I don’t mean ‘first we did stage one, then stage two then we met him’. I mean the honest, no holds barred truth of how the placement was 24 hours from disruption in the first week.

In order to really tell that story, I need to make my mind go back to memories it has purposefully forgotten. I didn’t start blogging until 5 months after we met Little Bear so I have never written properly about the first days and weeks. I am genuinely struggling to recall some of it in detail, as is Grizzly, as I think we’ve blocked it out. Snippets of situations keep coming back to me, now that I have gone looking for them. It has been surprisingly emotional to make myself stop and reflect like this especially as us Bears usually tend to live life constantly on fast forward.

All adoptions have their challenges and rocky times but I think people usually have a bit of a honeymoon period first, with issues gradually appearing or worsening over time. I’m not quite sure how we managed to have our very worst time immediately as we met Little Bear, but we did, and it makes the progress and change we have experienced since that point all the more stark in comparison.

Another bit of feedback was that the Bear pseudonyms don’t work in book form so I’ve had to come up with human ones. I now feel like some sort of triple agent, as I try to remember who I’m talking to and whether I should refer to us by our actual names or whether it’s a blog/social media situation so should use Bear names or whether I’m in book mode and should use our human pseudonyms. It’s pretty blooming confusing and I’m bound to trip myself up somewhere.

I wanted to share what I am up to on here because I don’t know whether I will manage to give the blog the same level of attention as usual, while I focus on the book. If I don’t manage to post as often I’m sorry, but I will be back and you never know, one day you might even be able to read my book (but don’t get too excited because I’m still writing it and the chances of it getting published are teeny tiny but thankfully God loves a trier).

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