All right, and so I’m back to discuss the rather prolonged period of my apprenticeship in learning to write books. Of course, if you’re trying new things, trying to grow, I’m not sure your apprenticeship ever really ends, especially if you’re not interested in writing the same book over and over. So thus far I covered how I wrote Personal Time, a book about my marriage and becoming a new father that covered where I was in life in my early 20s. I wrote Both Cruel and Kind: An American Boyhood about my childhood and teen years into my early 20s that covered the dissolution of the most deep and meaningful friendship of my adolescence. And I realized something in doing that.

Anything that might have haunted me about that time, anything that might have occasionally popped up in my mind to bother me about that dissolution…once I had completed Both Cruel and Kind and had a draft I was happy with, all the negative feelings were gone. I didn’t set out to write it as therapy, that’s not the reason I write, but it turned out that the process of constructing the story exorcised any demons I might have had about that point in my life. Now, I had a few ideas for entirely fictive novels that I could have turned to, but I was compelled after finishing Both Cruel and Kind to tackle my early 20s, which was period in my life where I was adrift, a period that embarrassed me, a period I missed because of all the new experiences I’d had but one that also, when I thought of it, caused me shame.

Of course, your early 20s, if you’re college educated and relatively well off in America are a period that feels dramatic, but they’re difficult to render that way because they aren’t actually dramatic. Usually, if you keep trying, you’re going to turn out all right. I graduated from college right after the September 11th attacks and had trouble finding a job. I moved out when I was working part-time and making $750 a month. I went on interview after interview and no one would hire me. Amidst all this, I had the first serious love affair of my life. Job insecurity coupled with romance isn’t a good mix. Add to that post-9/11 dread of terror attacks and wars being ramped up in foreign countries and I realized I had a framework for my next book, Your Ex-Lover is Dead. This may sound odd, but I took a lot of inspiration for even beginning the book from the HBO series Girls in that Girls showed me both what I could do and what I didn’t think I could get away with.

Mostly what it showed me was that, though your early 20s as a college educated and relatively secure person seem like they’re dramatic, they’re actually quite funny in retrospect, so one should lean on the humor and avoid any over-the-top attempts at pathos for your character. And this is what I did. I started with a framing device where I make it clear to the audience that I’m reflecting on that time in my life from many years later, which helps because it allowed me to critique my behavior, to show it as questionable when it was questionable but to provide context as to why I was acting that way while also showing that it was a learning experience and no longer condone such behavior. While Personal Time was set up to be a day-in-the-life autofiction and Both Cruel and Kind covered ten years, Your Ex-Lover is Dead covers a one and a half year period, the first half being the lead up to me falling in love, the second half covering how I ruined that relationship. And it was a fun and harrowing book to write all at once.

The book took me about a year to write with me abandoning it midway for a month or so and then starting over. I rewrote it several times until I had something I was happy with, but with the same result when it came time to try publishing it: like Personal Time, it felt too personal. I now had three books complete, but I didn’t want to put any one of them into the world yet. Well, maybe not quite: I had, in the meantime, overhauled Both Cruel and Kind (remember I’m never not working on something so in breaks of composition with new stuff, I’ll sometimes return to old stuff to try and fix whatever might not have been working or simply try to trim some fat off my prose) and I decided that maybe I was going to send out query letters to agents.

But how does one do that? I hadn’t the first clue, however, there is a LinkedIn Learning course that I found that is several hours long that takes one through the steps called, obviously, Sell Your Novel to a Major Publisher. (You’d need a LinkedIn Learning license to get into that link). So yes, I sat and watched this. I watched certain parts several times, and I created query materials for Both Cruel and Kind. Then, I queried 10 agents and got no response from some of them (it’s apparently normal to be ghosted) and a few who were nice enough to respond. And then, I lost my nerve. By then, it was 2020 and simply put, I didn’t think a memoir by an unknown white cis writer about the trappings of masculinity was going to find a home. I’m not saying that to complain or cry about it. It was simply not where the industry was at that time with COVID running rampant, BLM in full swing, and an election between a reviled Republican and a milquetoast Democrat that most of us in the liberal camp didn’t really want but voted for anyway out of expediency to ensure the other guy didn’t get back in. If you’re going to publish, I figured, you have to acknowledge the reality of the climate you’re wading into, and it was a politically charged climate and I’m not a particularly political writer on the surface.

So where to next? I needed to come up with something I thought would appear to a wider audience. Something maybe not auto- or semi-autobiographical. So what did I do? Well, funny you should ask. I write letters to my children every weekend about what’s going on in my life. We had finally gotten a COVID vaccine so the year of fear was over and I decided to adapt those letters into a book, written for them, called Plague Year. I took the letters and streamlined them, added a narrative through-line and instead of writing a book to publish, I wrote a book for the two people who matter most about what it was like to live through that year. Naturally, with them still being adolescents, they haven’t read it. Nor have I read it to them. Rather, when I read to them, it’s middle grade and YA novels I mostly turn to. And around the time I was finishing up Plague Year, I was also finishing reading them a book by Sara Pennypacker called Pax. And oh, Pax is a wonderful book. And so is it’s followed up Pax Comes Home. And it was as I was reading Pax that I started to remember this playfully little story I had written in 2012, a story of about 30 pages concerning a boy who was worried his parents were going to get divorced who sets out on a journey to find a truffle with his St. Bernard to try to save his parents marriage. The story was called “The Elusive Black Truffle.”

I wonder, I thought when it came to mind, if I could expand that into a book…