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Back in December, I had decided to shelve my first novel. I had worked on it, on and off, for the better part of a decade and spent about two years trying to find an agent to represent it. It was strange, experimental, and ambitious. Over the years, I'd gotten all kinds of contradictory advice from all kinds of people from all walks of life on how to improve it. All I gained from that experience was confusion and frustration. I had other projects to focus on that weren't quite as polarizing. I knew I needed to let this one go. And so I did. I surrendered it fully.
Then, a few days after I returned from India in mid January, something peculiar happened--a serendipitous anomaly that has made all my efforts, risks, and patience worth it.
∞
Mid-March. Our pants rolled to our knees, bags over our heads, we hopped off the small, longtail boat and took in the surroundings--where savanna meets sea, a desolate landscape of wind whipped sunbeds and swings. A nothingness, full of silence and secrets, took us in and taught how to witness the world in a new way. When you give up looking for it, paradise reveals itself.
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She had read our Aeon essay and followed the link to my blog where she learned that I was a fiction writer with a completed novel. She was an agent at a major agency, and she wanted to read more of my work. After vetting her far more than necessary, I sent her my query and sample pages from the novel I had shelved a month prior. Less than two weeks later, she asked for the whole manuscript. And once again, I let it go.
∞
From deserted beaches to busy mountain villages, we hiked into the forest and took the least traveled path up hundreds to stairs and along a ridge, high up in the jungle canopy. We stepped with attentiveness, careful of faulty steps and slippery ground. In every direction, a misty atmosphere landscape made of dreams and fairy tales enveloped us. Rainy season in the mountains. Ephemeral and wild, ungraspable.
To counteract my brushes with the impermanent, I began to write 500 words a day toward my second novel with uninhibited furor, my fleeting imagination grounded into the permanent.
Late March. While on another nearly deserted island of slow life sounds and perpetual sunsets, she called me to talk about the potential she saw in what I was doing. She wanted to work with me. And in an instant, everything changed. A new adventure, a new trajectory, new decisions to be made.
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I thought about not telling anyone. Keeping it a secret because I'd always believed that holding the sacred close kept it potent, kept it magical. And maybe this is true in some circumstances like finding unknown, pristine islands and beaches. But in other cases, there is magic in sharing the journey.
Going the traditional publishing route is a long process and nothing is guaranteed--the book still needs to be sold, then published, then released. But unlike other paths, there is more potential for me to find success, for more doors to open that otherwise would remain closed. I will continue to be patient as I move forward on this path. And I'm choosing to bring you along on this journey--however far it goes.
I hope this spring has been treating you well. And I hope this summer brings you many kinds of journeys--those you choose to share and those you keep close to your heart. Tell me about a journey you are currently on--creative or otherwise. How has it changed you or guided the direction of your life?
