A letter to my young unpublished self

Dear Younger Sarina,

You’re in your twenties, and you can’t believe you haven’t written your novel already. You’ve squirreled away a box full of notecards, each one bearing a witty or truthful observation for your book. You have an interesting Wall Street job, and you’re going to write a thriller about it. But you’re too busy climbing the corporate ladder to sit down and write. Sometimes you take the cards out and rearrange them. Sometimes you add one. There are a couple chapters on a floppy disk somewhere, because it’s the nineties. But you don’t have anything close to a book, though, and you’re getting frustrated with yourself.

Look. Strap in. It’s going to be a long ride.

That banking is a beast, but it’s building your future. So hang in there. You’re going to quit when you’re pregnant with your second child. But very few people can write a novel with a newborn, and you are not one of them. So you’ll need to wait a little longer, until you enroll your firstborn in preschool. And now it’s time! You drop him off, walk around the Upper East Side for a half an hour until the New York Society Library opens for the morning. Then you go up to the fifth floor and write until pickup time at noon.

This is it! You finally finish the book. After querying more than fifty agents, you find one who wants to sell your Wall Street thriller. You’re 35 years old, but better late than never. This is it, right?

Nope.

That book fails to find a publisher. So you write a second one. Unbelievably, you summit that mountain again. You send this new book to your agent.

He fires you. By email. You are back to square one. It’s a very bad day.

But chin up, okay? Because you already know how this works. You write a great query letter and start e-mailing. This is what resilience looks like. Four months later you’ve done it. You have a new agent, and she loves the book. And she sells it to a Big 5 publisher. It takes a year, and your advance is not enough to live on. But yay! Big 5! 

This is it, right?

Well, no. You get good reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus. The cover is okay. But Target declines to pick it up. And Barnes & Noble only stocks it in their “A” stores, whatever that means. Orders are so bad that you’re already depressed by the time your friends throw you a book party ten days after launch.

Now you change gears again, because you want a career, damn it. You spend three years (three!) writing an important historical novel. Your agent loves it, but she fails to sell it, even after you change your name for this book, to avoid those terrible sales numbers in Bookscan. 

One winter day you get eight publisher rejections in a single morning. Your family goes skiing without you. The book you’re half-heartedly writing next needs a sex scene, and you don’t know how to write one. So you download a romance novel to your Nook and read that instead of working. It’s a lot of fun, actually, and you read it all in one sitting. 

Then your brain says, “Hey girl. We could do this. It would be fun. Writing might be joyful again.”

You write your first romance in six weeks. Harlequin offers for it immediately. And while they’re fitting you into the queue, you self-publish another romance novel. Because why not? We threw away the rule book when we threw away the important historical novel.

Why not indeed. This is where you finally figure out how to find your readers. It’s never going to be easy. It will always be work. But you will earn a living, and you will make all your own rules. People will plunk down money for your novels, and you’ll hit the USA Today bestseller’s list fifteen times and counting.

Listen, younger Sarina. You still won’t hit the New York Times, or get a movie deal, because this is not a fairy tale. And it’s going to take a while. But you’re going to figure this out.

Oh, and before I sign off, please don’t forget to use sunscreen, either. 

Love,

Older Sarina