What I Learned from Publishing My Novel

In September, 43 years after writing my first short story (in second grade, about brother-and-sister detective team Tommy and Lisa Sue Vooleran, a surname that my mother criticized for being too unrealistic), a novel of mine finally made it into print.

When I was a kid dreaming of being a published author, I was sure that once my name was on the spine of a novel, my life would dramatically improve. I’d be the toast of the town! Hollywood would come rushing to make a film out of it! I’d be rich!

Of course, none of the above happened. I haven’t been invited to read in Brooklyn alongside John Wray or Gary Schteyngart. No producer has clamored to option Beyond Billicombe (though I can totally see James McAvoy as Richard, the male lead—James, call me sometime.) And I still haven’t even earned enough in royalties to cover the cost of having my friend Tim produce the fabulous cover for me.

But I have learned a few things:

1) Having people I know read the book is highly nerve-wracking. It’s akin to showing up for work in a low-cut, thigh-high, figure-hugging dress when you usually wear nothing but bulky sweaters and loose jeans. Although Beyond Billicombe is autobiographical only in its setting, any piece of fiction, I believe, exposes aspects of the writer. It’s in the choice of words, the choice of themes, the choice of details. Reading Wuthering Heights, for instance, makes it clear that Emily Brontë was probably pretty damn sarcastic when shooting the breeze with her sisters up in Haworth.

Then there’s the whole what-if-my-writing-sucks aspect. Being a writer is a huge part of my identity. Hell, I write for a living, albeit product copy and marketing articles. But by publishing a book, I’m allowing others to judge a massive aspect of how I define myself. What if they don’t see me in the same way? What if, after reading the book, they no longer have the same respect for me? I don’t care if people who read Beyond Billicombe now wonder just how much of my knowledge of junkies and 12-step meetings was first-hand, but I do care if they think I can’t put create a realistic character or set a vivid scene.

Fortunately all of the feedback has been positive so far. Then again, would someone tell me if he or she didn’t like the book?

And once people have seen you in a skin-tight dress cut up to there, when you show up for work the following day in your usual baggy clothes, they still have the image of your cleavage in their mind.

2) Negative feedback isn’t as tough to take as I’d feared. Granted, most of the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads have been positive so far. But two readers gave Beyond Billicombe only three stars. At first those reviews hit me in the chest like a baseball thrown by a Cy Young winner. But upon rereading (and rerereading), I understood the criticism, even agreed with some of it. And it spurred me to review 100 Days, the novel I'm working on now, with a keener eye.

Of course, if I receive a few scathing reviews down the line, the feedback may be harder to take in stride.

3) My instincts about my writing were correct. As I said, for the most part I agreed with the criticism I’ve received; it coincides with what I’d perceived as the book's shortcomings myself. But overall I was fairly certain that the writing itself was strong, the descriptions evocative, the emotions recognizable. From what I’ve been told, I’m correct. I’m a decent—dare I say, good—writer. And that’s encouraged me to finish whipping 100 Days into shape so that I can start submitting it to agents after New Year’s.

4) Writing about marketing is much easier than actually marketing one’s own product. I’ve covered various aspects of marketing, promotion, and sales for trade magazines for decades. I won awards for my coverage. I spoke at conferences and webinars. But I haven’t done a good job of marketing my book. I know what I should do, but I haven’t done much of it. 

Partly it’s been down to a lack of time—I have a living to earn, and a family that likes me to cook dinner for them and even spend the occasional evening or weekend with them. 

But a lot of it is also due to my shyness: I haven’t been able to bring myself to pop in at the local bookshops to see if they’d be interested in hosting a reading, for instance. I haven’t sought out blogs for the express purpose of touting my wares. Which brings me to…

5) I’d much rather write than sell. Beyond Billicombe is published, and I really do want people to read it, because I’m proud of it, and I think the characters are worth knowing. I want to introduce people to the protagonists, Suzanne and Richard, and to the North Devon town of Billicombe, just as some people like to introduce their single friends to one another in hopes of setting them up in a long-term relationship.

But right now I’m more engrossed with Steve and Cat, the narrators of 100 Days. Any free time I have, I’d rather spend with them. Steve and Cat still need me; Suzanne and Richard don’t.

This blog post is my way of writing and selling—or at least, trying to sell. So check out Beyond Billicombe. I don’t think you’ll regret it, and if you do, let me know. (Of course, you can also let me know if you love it.)

In the meantime, it’s a sunny day out here at the park bench where I write my fiction. The weather’s warm enough that my fingers aren’t stiff and mottled. So I’m going to return to 100 Days, all the while hoping you’re reading Beyond Billicombe and maybe even looking forward to what I’m preparing for you next.

(Thanks to my friend Tina for the photo. See, Beyond Billicombe makes a great beach read!)

Quitting and Winning

“Quitters never win,” we’re told from the time we’re tots. By the same token, we’re also told that we should avoid “throwing good money after bad.” This seems to be the same sort of contradictory wisdom as “turn the other cheek” vs. “an eye for an eye” and “out of sight, out of mind” vs. “absence makes the heart grow fonder”—not very helpful.

So when it comes to writing, should one plod through a project to completion no matter how miserably it’s going, or should you sometimes accept that you’re better off abandoning a work?

The question came up recently in a Goodreads forum, and while I think it was directed to readers—do you force yourself to finish reading a book even if you’re not enjoying it?—it’s certainly pertinent for writers as well.

I would never have started, let alone completed, my novel Beyond Billicombe if I hadn’t abandoned another book I was writing. At the time my husband and daughter were out of the country for five weeks, giving me entire evenings and weekends to do nothing but write (and walk the dog, heat up frozen fish-and-chips dinners from Tesco, and watch James McAvoy movies on cable). For three weeks I beavered away on a novel, and while some of the writing was pretty good (if I do say so myself), the story as a whole wasn’t gelling. I reached the point where I almost dreaded sitting down to the keyboard (which is where my viewings of James McAvoy movies came in). By now I had only two solid weeks of solitude left, and here I was wasting them on a story that was giving me no satisfaction.

As it happens, during this time I was also reading Lowboy by John Wray during my bus rides to and from work. The story of a schizophrenic teen who escaped from a New York hospital and the frantic search for him, it combines brilliant, lyrical, impressionistic imagery with a very tight plot. At its heart it's the story of a quest, and that basic storyline is what makes the book, despite its sometimes difficult-to-follow marriage of perceptions and reality, such an accessible and gripping read.

And that led me to an epiphany about what was wrong with the story I’d been working on: There was no quest, no goal that the characters were striving for, no clear linearity. Granted, many books succeed without that element, but I knew I wasn’t capable of writing one.

I tried to work a quest into the story, but I couldn’t. And so, realizing what the work was lacking, and admitting that I couldn’t at that time provide it, I relegated the chapters I’d written to a folder on my hard drive.

But while brainstorming for a tidy plotline for that story, my mind had come up with another fictional quest—or rather, it had returned to a vague plot I’d conceived years earlier. That plot had involved a different set of characters and took place in Philadelphia in the early 1980s. But a day after calling it quits on the other novel, I'd transposed the storyline to Devon in the early 2000s, with a new cast of characters, and began work on what became Beyond Billicombe. I wrote most of the first draft in the two weeks before my family returned home.

In this case, I was right to stop throwing good writing after bad. Though that’s not to say I tossed the story and its characters completely. I’m now thinking of revisiting them.

And this spring I revisited another story that I’d abandoned a few years ago. Again my reason for quitting was an inability to create a tight-enough plot for the characters. The protagonist of the story, Steve, is one of the favorite characters I’ve ever developed; he’s one of the two narrators of a book I’d written prior to Beyond Billicombe, and I missed spending time with him. But one morning in April I woke up at 6 a.m. with Steve’s “quest” precisely detailed in my mind. I raced to the park (aka my office for writing fiction) to review the chapters I had previously completed. I salvaged some elements and began integrating them with the new, focused storyline. I’m hoping to have the manuscript ready to submit to agents by the beginning of the year.

Maybe this doesn’t count as an example of quitting, but rather of postponing. Or you could argue that it’s impossible to truly quit a piece of writing; it already exists, even if not in the form you envisioned. And whether it remains on your hard drive or in your imagination, it’s still with you. You may quit the story, but the story hasn’t quit you.

As for whether I ever quit reading books before finishing them, I do, even though I feel as if I failed the author almost every time. But there are so many other books out there worthy of being read, not to mention so many things we’re obliged to do that give us little if any satisfaction, that forging ahead with a book that’s more work than pleasure seems pointless. Life’s too short, and the fact that I can’t think of a contradictory maxim for that piece of wisdom suggests it’s an axiom worth following.

Another Interview with Moi

Thanks to Teresa Morrow, aka The Author's Cheerleader, for posting an interview with me about my novel Beyond Billicombe: http://teresamorrow.com/author-interview-with-sherry-chiger-author-of-beyond-billicombe/.

An Interview on Books and Tales

Annette Gisby of the blog Books and Tales has posted an interview with me: http://booksandtales.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/author-interview-sherry-chiga.html?zx=97c40ce5b294ab04

And if you'd like a sneak peek at the prologue and part of the first chapter of Beyond Billicombe, here you go: https://www.createspace.com/pub/community/give.review.do?id=1109917&ref=1147694&utm_id=6026

What Now? So What? And the Empty Nest

My novel Beyond Billicombe is in print and also available as an ebook (go ahead, buy it now; I’ll wait).  Three years after I wrote most of the first draft during a three-week blitz at my home in Devon while my husband and daughter were visiting the States, then finished the draft and began revising it during weekly sessions in a friend’s supposedly haunted attic, finally polishing it upon my move back to Connecticut, it’s for sale and waiting to be read.

I should be elated, right? And part of me is. But that excitement is battling it out with a gnawing anxiety that has teamed up with a shadow of sadness, and so far the excitement is coming out the loser.

Bear in mind that I’m an obsessive-compulsive dysthymic. Rather than relishing any accomplishment or stroke of good fortune, I automatically think, What now? followed by So what? 

What now? Now I have to convince people to read the book: flog it to bloggers, tout it via social media, beg folks to leave a review on Amazon. All things that I don’t really enjoy doing. I enjoy writing, not promoting.

And so what? Thousands of books are published every week. All the energy and time I devoted to Beyond Billicombe—beyond the immense pleasure it gave me, does it really matter?

Especially if no one else gets the same pleasure from it?

Aside from a few agents, who praised the writing but felt the manuscript wasn’t something they could sell, nobody has read all of Beyond Billicombe but me. My husband has been stalled at chapter eight for months. (“It’s good, I like it, I’m just not a fiction reader.” Then again, he hasn’t even bothered to look at the images of the book cover that I posted here and on Facebook weeks ago, so it’s safe to assume his lack of interest is no reflection on the quality of my work.)

I obviously think Beyond Billicombe a well-written, absorbing, moving story, better than at least a few other books I’ve read this year, but what if nobody else does? What if I’m deluded, in the same way that a doting mother is convinced her child is precocious and adorable, when in reality the sprog is an unattractive, unexceptional bundle of drool and dribble? (Two other novels I’ve written in the past few years have a schizophrenic as one of the protagonists, so delusions are something I spend a great deal of time obsessing about.)

And back to what now? I feel a bit like Jax, the missing brother of Suzanne, one of the protagonists of Beyond Billicombe. The last time she saw him, he’d been in rehab and sober for several months. But he doesn’t see getting straight as a crowning achievement:

“Hear me out, okay? I’m not saying this to get a rise from you, I’m not saying this because I’m feeling sorry for myself. I’m saying it because it’s true, for me.” [Jax] turned toward [Suzanne]. His face was all sharp, piercing angles, and his skin sheer enough to be bruised by a gust of wind. “I don’t want you feeling, I don’t know, guilty. Or angry. But the thing is, I could get out of here tomorrow, stay sober the rest of my life, and I could never catch up with you. Or undo the shit I’ve done.”

“It’s not a competition.”  

He took a last drag, then pinched the lit end of the cigarette between his fingers before putting the stub in his front jeans pocket. “I know that, here.” He rapped the side of his head with his fist. “But not in here.” Now he thumped his chest.


“Jax, if you stayed sober, that would be better than anything I could do.”

He lifted one corner of his mouth. “For me, yeah. But let’s face it, most of the world manages not to become junkies or drunks, and they don’t walk around expecting praise for it.” He mustered a grin. “Obviously this is something I still need to work on.”

And at another point, when Suzanne found Jax using after months of being straight:

“Zee,” [said Jax, calling Suzanne by a childhood nickname,] “remember when I told you to start caring a little less? This is why.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to. Because I can’t stop.”

“Come on, you did. You were clean for months. What happened?”

He shook his head. His hair hung lank, hiding his face from her. “Nothing happened. That’s just it.”

She crouched beside him, softened her voice. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, nothing happened. One day became another. I didn’t drink. I didn’t use. And I didn’t do much of anything else.” He paused. She waited.

I wrote my book, it’s published, and now, aside from getting the word out, I can’t do anything else with Beyond Billicombe. I love the finished product, I loved getting to know the characters, I loved lavishing hours piecing together the right words to best get their story across. But now it’s over.

Maybe what I’m really feeling right now is mournful. The writer’s equivalent of empty-nest syndrome.

Which means filling the nest again—in this case, answering what now? by plunging into the next book, and ignoring so what? altogether.

Cover Time

Mockups of the covers of Beyond Billicombe, by my favorite English designer, TimTim Design. It's a bit darker in the images than it will be in real life.

The blurb on the back cover reads:

Suzanne has come to Billicombe, a faded English resort town on the Bristol Channel, for one simple reason: to find her adored older brother. A recovering addict, Jax had moved to Billicombe after completing rehab, but it’s been six months since Suzanne last heard from him.

Her search, however, turns out to be anything but simple. For one thing, Suzanne is a former child actress, well known for her role on a long-running TV series, and she needs to avoid being recognized while exploring Billicombe’s seamy underside. For another, Richard, a local man Suzanne turns to for help, has problems of his own stemming from a car accident that cost him much of his memory. Suzanne’s quest for Jax and Richard’s attempt to put his life back together collide in ways neither could have expected.  

Thoughts?

You Can Go Home Again

For better and for worse, I have a damn good memory. The better: When my husband asks “Where are my keys?” (a near-daily occurrence), I can always remember where I last saw them. In fact years ago, about six weeks after I moved to England but when the rest of the family were still in the States, he called me to ask where one of my daughter’s swimsuits might be, and I was able to tell him the exact spot in the closet where he’d find it. Also, I’m a whiz when it comes to trivia games.

The worse: Try as I might, I can’t forget being called Gorilla Arms in second grade, the humiliating incident in 10^th grade when I had a meltdown while giving an oral report on “Diary of a Madman,” and every slight from every employer since my first job at McDonald’s as a teenager.

So though it’s been more than two years since I had to leave north Devon, England, and return to the States, images of the seaside town where I worked and of the market town where I lived remain vivid: how slippery with rain and seagull droppings the alleys off the High Street were in spring, so that you’d have to walk with mincing steps to avoid slipping and rolling into a mound of dog crap; the smell of methane while waiting at the bus shelter alongside one of the farms that dotted the main road between the two towns; the way the setting of the sun over the channel picked up speed the closer it sank to the horizon.

Nonetheless, editing Beyond Billicombe, the novel I’m publishing this autumn, has jogged details of the area that I’d forgotten.

Beyond Billicombe takes place primarily in a town on the Bristol Channel whose glory days were during Victoria’s reign, when it was a flourishing resort area; several key scenes are set in the nearby market town. Both locales are based on the towns where I worked and lived while writing the first draft. Although I changed the names so that I wasn’t beholden to journalistic accuracy (once a journalist, always a journalist), I’m certain people who know the towns will recognize certain aspects.

No matter how precise your memory, though, a recollection is not as acute as the reality. (Which is fortunate, because really, if women could recall in living detail every moment of giving birth, would anyone ever have more than one child?) Reviewing Beyond Billicombe brought back to me so many of the scents and sights and sounds of Devon so accurately, at times when I was finished with revising for the morning and drove back from the park where I work to my house, I’d have to pause while getting onto the road to confirm that I was meant to drive on the right side rather than the left, or once back in my home office and writing an email for work, I had to remind myself not to spell color with a u.

The revision process has almost been like a physical return to those two towns I love so much—though a bittersweet one, as ultimately, of course, I find myself not back in Devon but in the nondescript Connecticut town where I now live, in a house I don’t really like, unable to just walk a few doors down to buy a chicken pie from the butchers for lunch or to one of the numerous greens to hunker down beneath a tree and write while being serenaded by the wood pigeons I’d originally thought were some sort of daytime owls. (Unable to walk pretty much anywhere at all, really, as exurban living in the States is all about hopping in the car.)

My first book, which I wrote years ago, took place in a particular neighborhood in Philadelphia, not the one where I grew up but one where I did spend a fair amount of time. A friend of mine from a writer’s group visited Philly for a weekend, and when she came back she said that at one point she knew exactly what neighborhood she was in (Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods; a native won’t say she’s from Philadelphia so much as from Parkwood, or Mayfair, or Frankford), thanks to the descriptions in my novel. That was one of my proudest moments as a writer.

Hopefully Beyond Billicombe will make me just as proud, even if my readers haven’t been lucky enough to experience north Devon for themselves.  And at least they’ll be spared the scrim of homesickness and nostalgia that falls over me when I read those some of the scenes again.

How important is a book’s setting when you’re choosing your next read? I’ve read books simply because they took place in north Devon (granted, I haven’t been able to find that many) or Reykjavik, another of my favorite places on earth. And what books have you read that have been especially masterful in transporting you to a location? I’d love to hear in the comments.

The photo above is of the Ilfracombe High Street, as seen just steps away from the office where I worked while in England. The photo doesn’t do it justice. God, I love that town, in all its gritty, gray-tinged, seen-better-days patina.