I Wish That I Knew What I Know Now, When I Was Younger
hold on to your heart and your vision
As always, this newsletter will come with story time, but first, some book business! Hopelessly Teavoted is a book in four months, 22 days, 11 hours, and 22 minutes, as of when I checked right before hitting post.
And I’m on pass pages, which means basically that I’m reading the typeset version and both falling in love with it all over again AND agonizing over every sentence; very normal nothing to see here. Also, you can preorder my book during the Barnes & Noble Preorder sale that goes through tomorrow (Friday, April 25), or you can wait until Indie Bookstore day Saturday and preorder from your local indie!!!
Preorders are important because they tell publishers that people are interested in a book, which helps them buy more books from authors. And let me tell you, I have STORIES in me, and they’re weird but also maybe wonderful. So please preorder and help me keep telling those stories.
Speaking of stories, it’s story time!
This one is going to be about learning competence, confidence, and some hard lessons about writing. One thing that is true for me is that there is a difference between being technically able to write and being confident enough to share that writing. We all know people who have one but not the other, or who are stronger in one than the other.
The trick is to eventually grow into both.
Which of course, only works if the person is willing to learn and grow. One thing is certain: neither you nor I nor anyone else on this planet can force another person to be willing to learn and grow.
Anyway, it took me a long time to learn those things when I was working as a teacher. I was an adequate teacher for the first five years or so, and I do think by the end I was really quite good at facilitating learning. And I sort of thought that moving from teaching to writing would naturally transfer skills of competence and confidence. But it turns out that for me, it would take more time to build confidence as a writer.
Plainly put, when I started writing in composition books as a middle schooler, I was too scared to show it to anyone. And as a teenager, I continued writing anonymously on livejournal AND deadjournal (I had both; people contain multitudes) and then when I got to college, I gave writing nonfiction news and fiction in writing workshop classes a try. It was then that I learned the extent to which other people have Opinions, with a capital O, about my writing. And I’m not going to lie, that crushed me a little. I leaned safely toward copy editing and training new reporters on my college paper and in my journalism classes, and then, when I switched to majoring in literature, I spent the majority of my time analyzing great authors rather than showing my own creative work in public.
It was in these years that a handful of professors encouraged my writing, praising voice and word wielding even within critical analysis. These were small seeds of confidence planted, seeds that could be nourished later.
When I first started teaching, I had this dream that I would have plenty of time. I started a novel I have never finished. I worked so hard to try to make time for writing, but I was living in a cramped studio apartment, working retail nights and weekends in addition to teaching full time to make my rent and student loan payments. I got to a point where something had to give.
People always use that metaphor of juggling balls and how it’s ok to drop as long as you’re not dropping the glass ones. Anyone who has known what it is to work to survive knows that the glass balls, the ones that break, if you are poor, are the ones that make money.
So I stopped writing for a few years. In fact, sadly, I also stopped reading for pleasure. I was lucky because I taught high school English, so I was still reading during these fallow years, and because teaching is a creative art, if you’re doing it right, I was still flourishing in designing lesson plans that were engaging and required my creativity and that of my students.
But I was sad, hollow in a way, because my personal creative wells were in stasis.
In the wake of a rough patch of early twenties romantic catastrophes, I picked up poetry and short stories. They were bleak, but they eventually grew happier as I did, and I took up journaling. And truly, once I got my depression under control as an adult, I was happy, and I was reading again, voraciously, back to hundreds of books a year, and writing in my journal. I felt alive and powerful in a way I hadn’t in a long time.
My creative process receded for a while again, like a tide rolling out, while I looked to other goals. I decided that it was important to me to be head of a high school English Department before age 30. And so I did it, and at age 29, I had my first child, and took over a department. While I found parenthood and my career rewarding, I have to stress how difficult it is to balance, and how little forgiveness there is in the general structure of the American workplace for family in addition to careers.
Then before I knew it, I had two very young kids, a job as a teacher and a department chair, and a pandemic hit. I left the school I loved to work closer to home, and in the summer in between schools, for the first time in a long while, I had nothing to prepare. I’d wrapped the old job and I didn’t start the new one until August.
So for the first time in years, I sat down and I wrote with the intention of completing a novel. And I did. It was a time-looping, six-POV witchy new adult book. In every way it was more book than I could take on, in a space and age category hard to sell, but I didn't know that, and I didn’t care. I just cared that I wrote a whole book. And so I set out querying it, knowing nothing about query letters, and really probably not doing it “right” until after I wrote my second book. This is the first thing I learned the hard way:
Make sure you know what a query letter should do. You’re selling the characters, a taste of the plot, just enough for the agent to want more.
I was querying too widely at this point, but I didn’t know yet how to narrow the search. The third book was a campy vampire book. And it was then that I learned an important lesson in querying:
If you’re writing something that is in a saturated market, or a space that isn’t actively being purchased, make sure it stands out. Narrow your querying list to agents with interest in and experience selling books like yours.
The fourth book I wrote felt special. It was an upper YA portal pirate fantasy. And when I was asked to make significant changes to the book in age range, content, and genre, I did it, even though my instincts revolted. I told myself I didn’t know enough to trust my instincts. The book sank to the bottom of the metaphorical publishing ocean. I learned a hard lesson:
People sometimes have different editorial visions. It is OK to push back. If a change doesn’t resonate, don’t make it. Confidence means knowing when to reject suggestions.
Back before I was agented, I wrote my first ever adult romcom. I think it was book 5 (fun fact; Hopelessly Teavoted was the seventh full length book I ever wrote). I describe it as a grumpy Henry Cavill in a bathtub type gets snowed in with a sarcastic, jaded reporter who is fleeing career and relationship failure. Friends who have read it still send me memes or videos of Henry Cavill and of female journalists in romcoms (Andie Anderson! Sally Albright! The list goes on). One of my sisters even sent me a Henry Cavill pillow, which I lovingly call Henry Cavill-ow (see picture). But sadly, Breaking News and Snowfall (I know, CLEVER) never went anywhere! My first agent didn’t have time to read it, and then we sold Hopelessly, and it just kind of fell to the wayside. I learned a lesson here:
Sometimes, books just die, for no good reason. It’s sad. But, if you want to write, you just keep writing anyway.
And so I did! I kept writing anyway. And in the spirit of total honesty, I have yet to sell another book! But I also have many more ideas, and many more drafts, and I intend to keep writing until I do. And in the meantime, I at least have my Henry Cavill pillow. You should know that all Goldbergs have some amount of a weird sense of humor, because rather than sign her name to this, my sister sent Henry Cavillow with just the following:
Did I have a brief moment where I was like omg, has Henry Cavill sent me a present? Maybe. Also my birthday is in JUNE, lol. I sort of raised my sisters and you love to see your kids turn out with your same weird sense of humor, so this cracks me up.
This is the pillow, which can be rubbed so the sequins turn black and hide his majestic face. The cat was not included and he is skeptical about my antics here.
Anyway, the point is, do your research, make sure it stands out, trust your instincts, and keep writing!
Thanks for reading, and good luck to you now that you know you can pretty much get a pillow with any face on it off of Etsy.
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