10.26.22

My publisher said: You need to blog. I sighed heavily at the request. I knew it would come to this.

Believe it or not, I was a bit anxious about this task. I can be a bit shy. I don’t like too much spotlight on me. I thought to myself… Why on earth would anyone want to hear what I have to say?  And why would they keep showing up week after week for a new batch of ramblings from me?

And so here it is. Blog post #1.

There is a cement of emotional baggage that comes with writing a new story. A reflection of your experiences and the highs and lows accompanying each one. It's a very personal journey and a rocky relationship. Every paragraph and chapter is hanging on emotion with a batch of words screaming at you. 

And when you’re done, you marvel. You say to yourself, Did I just do that? Did I actually write a book? Or in my case another book? But what’s worse is the aftermath and the self-loathing that comes with it. After all, you wonder…is it any good?

I don’t know any writer that doesn’t push themselves to unveil a new story that’s better than the previous. Even with this little blog post, I’ll obsess over it and make 20 revisions before I click publish.

I write because I have to. It’s my therapy. It allows me to breathe. I take my experiences and wrap them in a little fireball and throw them to the wind.

I would have never guessed in a million years that I would sign with Quill & Crow Publishing House. But somehow the universe put them in my direction and we just fit. Like my Stan Smith Adidas on my feet. Like hot chocolate on a winter day. Like Drake blaring out of my car speakers. Like Providence College (my alma mater) and Ed Cooley, head coach of the men’s basketball program. They had a runaway season last year that led them all the way to be Big East regular season champs. He and his team just fit.

Sometimes you just gotta ride it out. You have to find your fit. I don’t know why. Previously before I wrote There Ought To Be Shadows, I had written another manuscript but was having a terrible time getting it picked up. I was sad about it. I curled up like a baby and had a good cry. Several good cries. Several good cries and lots of slices of chocolate cake. I’m a Cancer so I’m very sensitive. I had been published three times before, so why was this one different? Why was I struggling? It was a great story. I was sad for the characters. I felt like no one wanted to give them life. Being a Black author is hard. Really hard. Stupid hard. Especially in an industry that is over 70% Caucasian. And they may lie and tell you they want BIPOC stories and alternative points of view, and post it all over their websites, but they really don’t. They want to appear like they are WOKE, when in reality they still uphold the same systemic racism that locks us out. Let’s face it. There are very few of us (BIPOC) calling the shots, making the deals, and accepting the manuscripts in publishing.

I had heard that every author has a trunk novel. A trunk novel is a story that was written but shoved to the side. Maybe they’ll work on it in the future and polish the script. Maybe they won’t. And that’s just what I have done with that one.

A few months later, I started working on There Ought To Be Shadows. Although that wasn’t the working title. I’ll talk about that in the future. I wrote, I deleted. I wrote. I deleted. I wrote. I deleted. You get the idea. It was that way for a couple of years. I wrote off and on haphazardly. I only had a shell of a plot. When I write it’s pretty organic. I rarely take down any notes or outlines. Everything just flows. But it wasn’t until last Fall that I began to shape the story. I was on medical leave from my job as a result of a major surgery. I had time on my hands. I couldn’t do anything but recover. So, I wrote.

By the Spring, I was almost done. I actually finished 2 days before a trip to my happy place, New Orleans. I only told 5 people that I was done, and two of them were my parents.

Then the submission process started, which is always brutal. My manuscript wasn’t getting much attention, and many presses were closed to submissions or had shuttered because of the pandemic. I got an occasional no thanks email. I didn’t have much faith in it. I had promised myself that if this one doesn’t work out, I would take a couple of years off and write the next one.

I stumbled upon Quill & Crow Publishing House one day while perusing a directory of publishers. I went to their website to investigate and promptly talked myself out of submitting to them. Then one day, I was bored. I decided to give it a shot. I sent them the first twenty pages.

A few weeks later. I got a rejection notice from them. No biggie. I didn’t think we would click anyway.

And then the universe stepped in.

About a month and a half after that in late summer I received an email from the Founder and Editor in Chief of the press. She profusely apologized to me about the miscommunication from her acquisitions team. She actually did want to read my story in its entirety. Oh. I said to myself. As we say in the hood, Well, that hit different.

Fast forward, I signed a contract with them the week of Labor Day.

What I do know is that if my trunk novel was published, I might never have written There Ought To Be Shadows. I would have written more stories. There are always more stories. I have two or three occupying my head as we speak. But it needed to be written at that exact time for me to be in sync with my new publisher.

Quill & Crow Publishing House is a quirky press with lovely people who dance to a different beat. They are a little family that has been nothing but supportive and welcoming to me. They love horror, in particular Gothic Horror. That is their specialty and they only publish in that genre. I think that’s why I feel safe with them. The noisy characters in my head finally have a way to escape onto pages where they will be accepted. They are just really cool people that want to get out great stories about things that make people go bump in the night.

After I signed, the Founder and Editor in Chief sent me an email and wrote to me in the last sentence:

Thank you for trusting us with your story.

It was then that I knew I made the right decision.

Like I said, sometimes you just gotta ride it out.

Till next week, stay dreadful my friends.