Elaborate tableaus of make-believe
The unpublished book, or the first novel I ever thought was worth something
Well, the results are in and people have voted on the unpublished novel to be released on a weekly basis!
Chapters will be sent to readers’ inboxes on Fridays at 5PM EST, starting this week on June 10, 2022 with an Introduction and the first chapter. If you don’t want to read the novel, then you can unsubscribe specifically from that section of my newsletter here.
And now, before we begin, a little backstory.
A question circling my mind a lot in recent days is Why do I publish?, as I’m sure you can glean from the multiple times I’ve attempted to parse it through essays on this newsletter. Truthfully, I’m not sure I get any closer to the answer each time I try, but it feels like something I should resolve before continuing with my career.
Publishing is a weird ego-trip.
There’s something so hilariously arrogant in having the audacity to declare that something you’ve written deserves to be published. I don’t think we ever really talk about that in our writing journeys; we only ever discuss our desire to be published, the drive it took to get us there, the trials and tribulations and many, many, many rejections received before finally triumphing in the end. So many How I Got Agented or How I Got My Book Deal stories tell us the what and the how but never the why. Why do we want to get published? What pushes us to put our work out there to be consumed by a greater audience?
Lately Lemon and I have been trying to distill our thoughts about Author Brands and messaging into a cohesive framework, but even that comes down to a creative ethos—the reason why you put your work out into the world and what you’re trying to accomplish with it. I can’t answer either of these questions, or rather, I can’t seem to articulate them very well, even as I have the inkling of an idea as to why I’m doing this at all.
You’d think that as a theater kid, I’d have a better answer, but the truth is, all creativity is play to me. I think so much of my inability to face this answer head-on is because I was an only child for the first ten years of my life. The vast majority of my play time was spent alone, amusing myself and myself only. I really only started writing because I needed some way to remember and keep track of the increasingly Baroque storylines I told myself in my elaborate tableaus of make-believe.
All my books are elaborate tableaus of make-believe.
The first books I ever write as a child were fantasy. And Anne of Green Gables fanfic before I even knew what fanfic was. To be fair, everything I ever wrote (and still write, to some extent) was fanfic—from Jane Austen to Lord of the Rings, Sailor Moon to The X-Files—until I got to college.
I suppose every English major goes through a period in which they attempt to write The Next Great American Novel, but thankfully mine was fairly short-lived. I wrote a shitty piece of utter narcissistic dreck that I knew was self-centered and terrible even as I struggled to write it, before abandoning it three-quarters of the way through the “story” (lol). I can’t write without joy, and that unfinished novel was entirely joyless.
So I turned to that which had always brought me joy: children’s fiction.
This would have been in the early mid-2000s, when YA wasn’t quite the established category it is today. When I thought of children’s fiction then, I thought of Lloyd Alexander and Brian Jacques and Philip Pullman and Madeleine L’Engle and Diana Wynne Jones. I suppose this kids’ book I was trying to write at the time would now be considered middle grade, and it was a sort of alt-historical novel about an orphan girl and her street urchin best friend. Really I had no idea what I was doing about…anything, but I knew one thing: the villain was a woman, and that woman was my protagonist’s mother.
As my friend Kelly could tell you, I struggled and struggled and struggled with this book. I might have finished several drafts, but it just wasn’t working. In hindsight, I think I struggled because this book did not yet have a Point; it did not have an idea that I was trying to explore. Just a collection of tropes I loved as a child—flirty best friends, early 19th century British boarding school settings, an absent father, and a distant yet terrifying mother. I was only 22 when I wrote this book; I did not know better, but I did know that it wasn’t right.
I workshopped bits of this not-quite middle grade with my writers’ group in NYC, where two of the members worked at literary agencies, and a whole new world was opened up to me. Publication was still something nebulous as this point, mostly because I was still reeling from the notion that publishing was a legit industry where people worked and helped produce books. At the time I was working in a boutique private wealth management firm, and I was far more interested in trying to work in publishing than to get published myself.
And I did manage to work in publishing. When my finance job became a casualty of the 2008 crash, I took an internship at a literary agency and then became an editorial assistant at one of the Big 5 (then Big 6). I loved working in publishing, or rather, I loved editing. It was one of my favorite things to do in the writers’ workshop—talking through the writer’s intentions, what they wanted to achieve, what they wanted to say, and offering suggestions on how to better execute their vision. I loved shaping a story, I loved seeing it become stronger over time, I loved discovering the Point.
For the first few years I was working in publishing, I let my own writing take a backseat. I didn’t know it then, but the process of editing other people’s work for public consumption had made me a better writer, even without the endless practice of writing draft after draft after draft. It gave me a much better sense of why I read and therefore a much better of sense of what I was looking for. When I dusted off my not-quite middle grade, I knew when rereading that my story was mushy and shapeless, even if the characters were compelling.
And the most compelling character was the most opaque to me.
The villain.
I knew, vaguely, who the villain was. Her name was Lady Min, and she was beautiful, cold, ruthless, and Asian. Because I was 22 and still writing myself into stories, my not-quite middle grade had a half-Asian little girl living in London. I knew the villain was her mother, and I knew her mother wanted to bring down the British Imperium. What I didn’t know was why.
So I wrote an entire novel to understand why.
In 2022 it seems quaint to need justification—even in fiction—as to why White Colonialism is Bad, but it was a different cultural landscape in 2010. I was also 25 when I attempted to write Lady Min’s story, and still inoculated by my own privileged upbringing to really, truly understand the simmering, seething rage that drove her to such icy determination.
Plus, I wanted to write a doomed romance.
You see, this 120K novel actually began as a short story. (Lolsob) Because I knew the end before the beginning, I knew that the relationship between Eva (my protagonist)’s ideas did not end happily. Lady Min’s story began, as all my books do, with a mood. A feeling. A vibe, if you will. I wanted to write something that made me feel the same as I did in my favorite tragic Korean dramas—something that was both so delicious and so very right in the pain.
I wrote myself into radicalization instead.
Rereading this unpublished novel again over a decade later was incredibly illuminating. In some aspects, it is incredibly cringe, the way all your younger work is cringe to an older self. In others, it may be the best thing I have ever written. It was also unlike anything I had written until then…because it had a Point.
And that was the moment I thought it might be worthy of publication.
I did, in fact, query this adult novel. I queried five agents, and received two offers of representation.
I declined them both, then withdrew the manuscript from consideration.
At the time, I’m not sure I could have articulated why I did so, aside from the vague notion that if I became published, I really did not want to known as a literary author. But I had also been in publishing long enough to know that, while my novel had a Point, there wasn’t anything about it that was appealing to a reader, or at least in its current form. How on earth would you pitch this? An alternate historical story of one woman’s rise to power? Why is it alternate history? Of course, all of this could have been edited into a standalone, but to do so would have broken the link between this book and the middle grade, and I wasn’t ready to do that. Not yet.
So I shelved it. In some ways, I don’t think I ever intended on returning to it. I have intended on returning to the middle grade (now with 100% more magic!), but this adult novel remains singular in my oeuvre. It’s the only novel of mine not written from joy; it’s a novel written from rage, even if I didn’t know it at the time. It is, in many ways, a perfect snapshot of the girl I was at 25.
I’m really proud of the book.
And her.
I’m proud of her too.
The first installment is coming this Friday! I will posting the first third of the book for free, and the others will be behind a paywall. As my birthday is coming up in July, I’ve decided to make a promotion of it and offer 20% off a yearly subscription. Sign up below!