Warning: This post may be a bit self indulgent.
I grew up in Idaho. I spent most of my childhood until age ten in the high desert. Don’t let the word “desert” fool you. It’s a frozen wasteland from October through May, if you’re lucky. Some years it stayed cold with freak snow storms through June. Then just as things thaw out for good, the temperature would spike to over 100 and fry all of our lily white skin to a crisp while we were furiously farming sugar beats, alfalfa and of course, potatoes. The rest of my childhood was spent deep in the rocky mountains off the north fork of the east branch of the west whatever of the Salmon River – basically the middle of no where and cold year round. Even though I resemble my mother’s side of the family – fair skinned, blonde hair, hardy Nordic emigrant stock – I think my insides belong solely to my father’s side of the family from somewhere in the south of France. I hate to be cold.
Don’t get me wrong. I love some things about winter. I love that you get a break from most yard work and Thanksgiving and Christmas are my favorite holidays. But when all that fun stuff is over, you’re left with the month of January, and frankly, January sucks.
As a kid, January was the coldest month with NOTHING to do but go to school. (You might think this sounds like one of your grandparent’s sob stories, but it’s TRUE. I swear.) We hauled ourselves out of bed and put on more layers than Ralphy’s little brother then trudged a half a mile down our dirt road, packed hard with snow drifts, to the bus stop where we would wait for what seemed like an eternity until the bus came. We were one of the first stops so the bus was usually freezing cold and if the neighbor kids got on before us we didn’t get the coveted seat by the heater.
At school we had three recesses. My kids would kill for this opportunity. It was a golden age of unreason when they thought children learned best when allowed to scamper half the day and give their teachers a break. Normally we enjoyed this luxury, but in January, unlike my kid’s school who keeps them in the classroom during “bad weather” (read: a hint of rain or temps below 50), our school kicked us outside and there was nothing to do but attempt blowing “smoke” rings with our hot breath while we stood bouncing in line for our turn to whack a frozen tether ball, hoping it didn’t break our wrists.
After school it was our job to haul wood into the house to keep the homemade furnace roaring for the next day. We also had to feed the horses, break the ice on their water trough with a frozen crowbar, and clean up the dinner dishes, then to bed. We didn’t believe in homework in the high desert. There were too many farm chores to attend to for teachers to do something as foolish as assign school to be done at home.
When I think about it now, it seems so bleak and cold and just – not fun. And that’s exactly what it was. At least in February we had Valentine’s day to think about; what boy liked what girl, who would give who an extra special valentine, etc. But in January there was just… nothing.
That experience has stayed with me my whole life. It didn’t matter if I was living in New York City with endless diversions, Salt Lake City with the worlds best ski slopes, North Carolina with it’s year round gorgeous beaches or Indiana with.. uh… with… really great friends! (*wink*) I still hate January.
So this December I prepared myself. I knew it was coming. I can’t ever avoid the month. It follows me everywhere I go. I’m too much of an optimist to give into the depression and cold hopelessness. I can’t afford the Bahamas. So, like so many of you, I started a deep self evaluation and set a bunch of really dumb unhelpful goals. One of which was rearranging all the bedrooms in the house. We won’t talk about that disaster now, however.
Another of my goals was to read more of my to-read pile. If I’m going to be a viable YA author I need to keep up with what’s hot in YA. Traditionally I’m not into romance books or paperback sort of titles. I like adventure books, Newberry award winners and fiction that bridges that gap between commercial and literary. I have a big pile of books like that from all sub-genres of YA to read. I started with Divergent by Veronica Roth.
Here is where a new level of epic January depression kicks in.
Gorgeous cover.. sigh
In 2010 I wrote a book called Divulgent. About a girl in a dystopian society who has to take a test in order to secure her choice of future. Her mother has secret information and passes enough of it on to her to set events in motion that lead to a pretty action packed novel. Sound familiar? If you’ve read Divergent then it should. The first five chapters of Veronica Roth’s book are almost identical to mine in plot. Our main characters are so much a like it’s pretty gut wrenching, for me at least. Both books even have a know-it-all disapproving big bother. (Insert guttural yelps here) As the books progress they leave each other for different paths, but after finally sitting down to read this book everyone was ranting about, I realized why every single agent and editor I had sent my book to passed on it. It sounded like a Divergent knock off. Almost a direct copy, only not nearly as well written. Because that’s one thing I’ll confess right here and now. Divergent is MUCH better than my book. Yes, Ms. Roth had a professional editor and agent to help her polish it up, but the basic bones are good – really good – and you can’t blame that on an editor. The author is still the heart and soul of the book.
Here’s another problem. After I wrote my book, I put it away. I just didn’t have the time or energy to edit it. It was depressing and I was trying to get through an already rough pregnancy. Looking back now, I realize that had I sucked it up and stuck with my book, pushing myself to edit, rewrite, polish and perfect, I would have had a pretty good shot of getting it into someone’s hands who was looking for something to follow up Roth and may have helped me work it into something worth reading that could stand on it’s own merits. But because I waited for a year to pull it back out again, no one wanted it. They thought I was a hack and not even a very good one. I’m almost positive no one believed me when I said I hadn’t read Divergent.
It took me a few days to process all of this. There is just so much information out there that we don’t have access to. How was I supposed to know that putting away that novel was pretty much assigning it to literary death? How was I to know that the same time I was working on it a woman in Chicago already finished hers and had an agent shopping it around? How was I to know that dystopian, my favorite sub-genre of YA, would spring to life while I was making a baby and burn out in the eyes of agents and editors so quickly that I’d never get a chance to throw my own warped stories on the pile?
Conclusion: there is no possible way I could have known any of this.
And so life goes on. In the midst of major home renovation mess, major novel envy and admiration, major January depression and back to school blues, I remembered something my favorite professor told me long, long ago: Photography was invented at almost exactly the same moment in Europe and America by two unrelated men.
Why did this thought brighten and warm my soul? Because I can’t control it. It’s not my fault. There is an entire world full of good, amazing, creative people out there. It’s foolish of me to think that I would ever have an original idea, ever. Does that mean that we as artists and writers give up the quest for originality? No! Absolutely not. It just means we let go of the disappointment when we realize we don’t own originality. We can’t. No one can. Even if you do stumble on something all your own, chances are you just don’t know about the girl five thousand miles away treasuring the same thing. And that’s ok.
It’s ok to constantly have a carrot in front of you that you can’t reach. It’s what keeps us going. And it’s ok to catch that carrot once in a while and realize that someone else has a hold of the other end, or several people do. The writing community, more than any other creative community I’ve been a part of over the years, is the most warm and inviting place to be. It seems to me the writers and poets I’ve been privileged to meet and work with over the past few years are the most accepting and willing to share that carrot.
So go ahead and work your butt off. Write or draw till your fingers bleed, then celebrate the success of finding those who are like minded. Don’t let the doldrums of January or unoriginality get you down. Keep going. Because as Molly O’Neil once said, (get ready, I’m about to butcher a quote because I can’t find my notes from the conference!!) “No one is you. You, by just being alive, are original. No one is going to write a book exactly the way you do. They may come close, but it will not be yours, and that makes it worthwhile.” (You get the point, right?) We are all creating worth while pieces of art. The world deserves everything we put our energy and time into and each step we take brings us closer and closer to our goals. We just can’t stop walking.
My book is filled with my love for my son. I wrote it for him, with him in mind. Veronica Roth has never had the privilege of meeting my son and probably never will. I feel sorry for her in that respect, even though she probably had her own great inspiration. Her book will never mean as much to my son as my book will and that is worth all the contracts in the world to me.
Even though I sit at my desk looking out over my usually pink and green yard that is now covered in a sheet of grey January, thinking about these things makes me feel better about life and writing and parenting and pretty much everything. I am committed to never stop walking the road. Even when it’s a half mile long and covered in deep snow with a frigid yellow bus waiting at the end to take me to a frozen tether ball and a mediocre education – I never stopped walking and I won’t now. I’m still that little girl looking for a warm spot, a bright light, waiting for spring to shine through. 2013 is going to be good. I can feel it. I have people like Veronica Roth in my boat. Along with a whole gaggle of good friends, loving family, and supportive strangers (thank you Twitter!). Life can be good, even when it’s January.
