Tomorrow I head back to the world of regular paychecks and (I assume) floods of email. I don’t think the significance of the occasion has quite sunk in, given the utter strangeness of pandemic lockdown, and the fact that after two days in the office, I will be going right back to the home office to work remotely.
Starting a new job doesn’t mean I’m giving up on writing—novel two is well underway, inspired by last year’s wild and devastating March floods. (Floods one year, a worldwide pandemic the next—I really think we ought to skip this month next year). I’ve also been continuing to send query letters to agents and have had a few nibbles, though no hard bites just yet. But for the sake of my sanity and financial realities, and after about six months and umpteen hundred job applications (and umpteen dozen interviews), I am going back to work. As awesome as writing full time has been, I’m pretty excited to start this new chapter. Hello external motivators, coworkers, and tasks with visible finish lines!
But what’s a new beginning without a proper resolution?
On my last day as a funemployed woman (and since I can’t go shopping to pre-spend my first paycheck on a new work wardrobe), I thought I’d take some time to reminisce over my former full time, unpaid but wholly, legitimately valid, real job.
One of the best things about taking time away from traditional work to write a novel is that it took failure off the table. Once I committed, that was that. I could no longer waffle and say ‘Oh, I hope I’ll get it finished someday.’ I officially made an investment—I went all in on me and not finishing was not an option.
What I struggled with most was validating that decision to myself and others, taking and treating and talking about it seriously. When you come from the ultra-practical Midwest, going after something with no guaranteed payoff tends to seem a bit…fluffy. A bit Eat, Pray, Love-esque privileged escapism.
At least that’s how I generally assumed other people would think of it. It proved a largely self-imposed judgment, as far as I know.
So when we first moved to Lincoln and new people would ask me what I’m doing, I’d say, Oh, I’m just taking some time to get settled into the new house and work on some of my own projects and enjoy some funemployment before I jump back into work.
Or I would defer: Yeah, my husband got a job at UNL, he’s working as a professor in the math department!
It took a long time, with much prodding from my husband and friends, for my narrative to change. To lead instead with, “I’m writing a novel” (now: “I wrote a novel”) and say it with any sort of pride.
(Figuring out how to talk about it in job interviews is another story—and perhaps another blog post, depending on how busy this new job keeps me).
Because I am proud.
I may have taken a novel writing class in grad school, but actually doing the thing, start to finish, that’s not something you can learn in school. I had to figure out how to hold myself accountable day after day, and I freaking did it.
And it was work. Writing a novel, and then rewriting it, and then cutting out about 30,000 words that I had labored over to get it to a sellable length—that’s work.
Writing is real, hard, lonely work. A mystical muse may sometimes be involved, but more often than not it is a grind, a solo race of unknown length with hurdles composed of questions like “What am I doing with my life?” and bear traps of certainty that every word I have ever written is total crap.
And triumphs, of course. There exists, after all, a mystical thing called runner’s high, which tricks people into torturing themselves in races of known, appalling lengths. So too with writing.
I take great joy in words, obviously, and when a sentence, paragraph, scene, or chapter comes together; when a fresh metaphor blooms suddenly into being or when my characters’ dialogue makes me laugh (an admittedly rare occurrence in my rather serious novel); when I break through a mental block and words start flowing again…I feel awesome.
I know it will probably be easy, as I transition into a different routine, to forget about that. To forgo writing when it feels like work because I’ve already worked all day.
I will miss getting to spend entire days in a thematically ordered world of my creation.
But novels are, ultimately and among other things, portraits of the human experience, and if I’m going to keep writing them, I must seek further experience.
So I bid a soft, semi-farewell to my fountain pen and clickity keyboard, to the coffee shops (which I cannot currently enjoy anyway) and to TV in the evenings. And a hearty cheers to new experiences, challenges, and growth opportunities.
And two glorious days out of the house.
Stay safe, my friends.
