Category: revising

Omens

Nova Ren Suma

September 30, 2022

On dumpster fires, publishing pitfalls, & what authors can still control

When I first moved to Philadelphia, I saw an omen. It was my first weekend in the city in the spring of 2018. I awoke late Sunday morning in the apartment we’d just rented in Center City and headed out to go get coffee. But as I emerged from the lobby I discovered a LITERAL DUMPSTER FIRE directly across the street. I stood there, mouth gaping, but so did a number of others. Everyone was calm, as if this is a thing that happens here often, and so I took my cue from them, snapping this picture with my phone and then just witnessing the fire burn.

After some time I wondered if anyone was going to do something or if we were waiting for it to go out on its own. It wasn’t spreading. But it wasn’t stopping either. Was I supposed to do something? Were we all? No one seemed alarmed. No one even spoke. Then, after a time, two people wearing all black came calmly out the back door of a restaurant and each poured a bucket of water over the fire, dousing it in a last hot breath of smoke.

It was over. People started walking down the street once more. A car passed. The morning went on.

But I admit I was shaken over the symbolism. I’m the kind of person who sees signs in everything, from a random song playing to the words or numbers in a patch of graffiti, so of course I wondered if my walking out at just that moment to see this was an omen of some kind.

You see, I’d just made the decision to leave the only real home I’d ever known, the city where I’d lived my whole adulthood and had always thought I’d grow old in. I might have stayed there forever, like one of those old nonnas in the building next door who’d walk so very slowly together to the market with their hair up in colorful kerchiefs, stooped over their grocery carts, sometimes needing help with the front door. I used to see those nonnas all the time… and then I didn’t any longer. I don’t remember when, or if one was left without the other, but at some point they disappeared from Sullivan Street. Just as I had, to move to Philadelphia.

Was the dumpster fire a not so subtle sign that I’d made the wrong choice? If so, it was too late to change it. The move was done, the lease was signed, the keys to the rent-stabilized apartment let go, the money spent. The boxes were stacked in the new living room, and there I was.

Moving to Philly didn’t end up being what I expected: the pandemic came for us all soon after and I went full hermit, so I’m not sure what my life here might have been if that hadn’t happened. I do know we didn’t stay in the apartment where I saw the omen. I’m now renting a house in a quieter neighborhood away from any dumpsters, with a spacious writing office filled with books. We were meant to survive the pandemic in this house in Philadelphia instead of in our old tiny box on Sullivan Street in New York, and this is not one of my regrets.

Still, every so often, I find myself thinking of the dumpster fire that greeted me my first weekend here. I find myself transported back. Standing on the sidewalk passively watching it burn—doing nothing, saying nothing, a growing sense of doom creeping up my legs.

If you write books and try to publish them, I might ask: Does this feeling sound familiar?

Authors know that pitfalls in our writing careers can come on suddenly. You step out the door one morning and there’s a dumpster lit and roaring and you never even smelled the smoke. Or you can have a sense that something’s rumbling under the surface in the industry and you just can’t put your finger on it… and then some news of a consolidation or a downsizing or a natural sea change in staffing happens and your favorite marketing director or fantastic publicist or beloved editor leaves and it all clicks and you think, Aha, that’s what I was waiting for. There it is.

The smaller things too, the personal cuts. The nos. The lack of invites or the lack of support. It can be anything at all, that one disappointing surprise you didn’t see coming, that gut punch, that sting.

It might feel like it’s about you, but is it really? It’s more the fact that once we step into this industry, nothing is in our control.

Does this make me a pessimist or a realist or a passive ostrich with her head buried in sand? All I know is the fear about what can go wrong can be debilitating. Worrying so much about impending doom doesn’t help keep it away… or get a (good) book written… it only has me standing on a sidewalk panicking and looking around to see what might go up in flames next.

Lately, I’ve turned my attention inward. What I tell myself as I revise this long-awaited* book is that I can’t control what’s going on outside my door. I cannot control one single thing out there. I don’t know when another dumpster fire might reveal itself on this street or another, or when something amazing might fall into my lap. I can’t read the signs, because really everything could change at any moment. But there is something I can control. It’s myself. It’s the words I put on the page. It’s my story, this book I’m striving to write—as well as the other partly formed beginnings and halves and appendages of books I plan to write next, books I believe in, no matter who else does.

I can control only my work and how much of myself I put into it, not what happens to it and not what any of you think. All I can do is make this book the best I can, for myself. And if someone sets it on fire or spits on it afterward, at least I can look back on the effort I put into it—the choices that are in my control—without regret.

Last year, I was on the bus headed home from teaching a class in University City when a series of sirens started going off on everyone’s phones. The bus was crowded with strap-hangers and people piled into every available seat, and a bunch of us were getting emergency alerts from the city about a tornado warning. We were to seek immediate shelter.

Rain came down. The sky turned an ominous color. And yet the bus driver kept going along South Street without an announcement and without a reaction, and after a few murmurs that there was maybe a tornado about to hit, one woman jumped off at the next stop and ran in a frenzy down the block, but everyone else simply stayed on. Everyone around me was calm, collected, unfazed. That’s the thing about the people of Philly that I’ve come to recognize: They really have seen it all. I kept to my seat, the bus kept moving block to block, stop to stop, wind and rain whipping at the windows. And though I’d never experienced tornado warnings in any capacity like this before, my overactive imagination was visualizing a SEPTA bus lifting up in the sky and the ceiling ripping open and our bodies flying out the gaping hole into the Schuylkill, which is a river not at all pronounced the way it’s spelled. I was rattled with doomsday images, thinking of the person I loved who I wouldn’t see again, and the book I was writing that I wouldn’t get to finish and maybe that was okay, maybe I didn’t need to finish it after all, and any of the bad things in my head could have happened because they happen all over the world every day, but what came next was this:

The bus reached my stop as usual and I got off.

I was soaking wet by the time I made it to my front door, my heart beating wildly, but if this was another omen it didn’t harm a hair on me. The tornado passed us by. And beneath it, I was left alive to write another day.

* I don’t know if you would consider my next book long-awaited—but I really want it finished, so I certainly do!
Fear of Falling

Nova Ren Suma

September 2, 2022

On fears, unhappy accidents, & writers following their own timelines

Photo by Ginevra Austine on Unsplash

I have always been afraid of stairs.

In darker moments—literally when the sun goes down—a staircase becomes taller somehow, bending off into unknowable, impenetrable shadow. The fall down is longer, more dangerous. The prickling sensation along the spine comes. I start hurrying up. I can’t look behind me. I have to keep climbing. I can breathe only at the top.

This has been a fear ever since I was young, often rooted in specific detail to the different staircases of my childhood: the hard corner before the banister in Saugerties, the creaky sweep past the leaky window in Pennington, the ladderlike steps to the loft in Kerhonkson, the red hallway and then the lower-level steps of Woodstock, the long steep passage with the painted face at the bottom in West Hurley. When I think about it, it’s not the stairwells and creaking steps themselves, but more the act of turning my back and climbing. Perhaps it’s a fear of being followed. A fear of being eyed from the shadows. A fear of being pulled down into— what, I don’t know. A fear of falling in all the imaginable ways you can fall.

Photo by Riccardo Pelati on Unsplash

This spring, I hurt myself on the basement stairs in the Philadelphia rowhome we’re renting.

These stairs are a short pass of creaky wooden steps, gray-painted and open to the dark below. This basement is unfinished, concrete floors with open areas of dirt and exposed beams, and it’s where we do the laundry. After living for twenty years in New York City and needing to use a costly laundry service because there was no close laundromat, this feels like the height of privilege. (This plus a dishwasher! Modern conveniences I appreciate with every usage!) But I always feel a little out of sorts when I enter the basement.

In a strange loophole in our lease that I didn’t understand but was told by the landlord’s real estate agent that it is fine and perfectly standard, we are renting the whole house except for the basement. We are allowed to store things in the basement and use the washer and dryer, and no one but us will have access to it while we’re here, but technically it’s a no-man’s-land. It doesn’t belong to us, even temporarily. In this way, the basement seems to belong to the house itself.

Beside the stairs is a separated area through a doorway that we call the brick room. In it is a light bulb on a string, the water meter, and… a random pile of bricks. It’s a small, dark cavern, and I am aware of it—very aware—whenever I climb the stairs into or out of the basement. I am always aware of the brick room. Sometimes I think of it while falling asleep in bed three narrow floors above.

Photo by J. Balla Photography on Unsplash

It was an ordinary morning. The laundry was finished and folded and I was heading back upstairs.

At first the climb back up was innocuous. I was aware of the brick room, but I didn’t look at it. It was daytime. There was no reason to allow any space for fear.

I hoisted an admittedly overfull laundry bag over one shoulder and time seemed to slow as I took my next step. A thought of the brick room crept in, but maybe even calling it a tangible thought is giving it too much credit. It was more a sliver of unease. I was stepping up and somehow I slipped, and in that long breathless moment I teetered, the weight of the laundry bag pulling me down toward gray concrete floor, toward bottom. I righted myself, jolting forward, and felt a small lightning strike of pain in my shoulder as the strap of the heavy bag pulled. But I made it upstairs. I rushed to the top of the steps, got out, closed the door, locked the door, dropped the bag, laughed at myself, and that was it.

Only, no. This was about to be a lasting injury that I’m still dealing with. Whatever I did to my shoulder (I thought it was only my shoulder) caused incredible pain in the weeks after, turning into a numb arm and hand, an inability to turn my neck or carry things or bend over, sharp prickling pins and needles running straight through to the tip of my index finger. My right arm, my right hand—my writing arm and hand—were barely usable for more weeks than I want to count. Doctors’ visits told me this injury was in fact a pinched nerve in my neck. That’s why my arm was burning with fizzy pain and why half of my hand was numb weeks and months later, and why it was painful to sit in a chair and attempt to type words on a computer, let alone work on my book at my desk.

Such a small thing, a slip on the stairs. I caught myself. I didn’t fall. And yet.

Photo by Icarus Yang on Unsplash

It goes without saying that my book deadline hit a frustrating roadblock, my momentum lost. I blamed the staircase. I blamed myself for over-stuffing the laundry bag. I blamed my irrational fears.

It’s months later, and I’m still healing. The rush of pins and needles in my arm and hand is far less frequent, and the pain is much more manageable. I can sit at my desk now, propped up with pillows and with a new ergonomic setup to keep my neck from bending. I’ve found ways to help (OMM therapy, stretches and other exercises, THC tinctures, Dragon Anywhere dictation software though thankfully I can type now without much/sometimes whole days without any pain). I’m getting better, yes, but the truth is this injury set me back for months. I ended up asking for a class I was due to teach to be canceled (technically postponed to spring), I stepped aside from other opportunities, I lost hold of my book. I had an allergic reaction to pain medicine and lost more time, then when I was leaving my house only for masked physical therapy twice a week, I somehow caught COVID and lost two more weeks of time.

I lost so much precious time.

Photo by Kyle Laviree on Unsplash

I have always been irrationally afraid of staircases. Yet if I think on it, this isn’t the first time I’ve hurt myself on a set of stairs (the cold iron steps outside Think Coffee on Mercer Street, the sweeping stairs that begged for leaps in Nef Studio at MacDowell), so it could simply have been healthy bursts of premonition.

What happened may have delayed me (and frustrated me), but it has also given me a forced pause, a time to rethink and reimagine, and re-listen.

Don’t concern yourself so much with what’s behind you.

Don’t worry about who’s watching.

Maybe I was wanting this to be a quiet, tucked-away announcement no one may ever read about why my next book is taking so long, but I also know this is only the latest obstacle to come during the writing of the third draft. There were other difficulties during the pandemic and during other drafts, other pits of dread and brick rooms of lost time and heartaches and mistakes, let’s be honest.

How many staircases are between me and the finishing of this book? What is there to be afraid of at the bottom… and also at the top?

Keep steady. Keep climbing. Don’t look back.
When to Resurrect the Dead Manuscript Under Your Bed?

Nova Ren Suma

November 27, 2015

I’m struggling with something, an ongoing thing I’ve been struggling with for years. It’s about the novels that live under my bed. The two unpublished novels I wrote before I almost gave up writing, and then discovered ghostwriting, and, soon after, YA.

Two novels totaling eight and a half years of my life.

Two novels encompassing almost the entirety of the writing work done in my twenties.

Two novels that, in their own distinct and specific ways, broke my heart.

Every once in a while, I think of them, the way you’d think of an old love, someone who disappointed you deeply, but someone who meant a lot to you way back when. Someone who could’ve been a real and solid someone… if only things had gone another way.

I’ve only ever been in love once—with a human—but with books? I fall in love with each one I’m writing, over and over, again and again.

Lately I’ve been thinking back to my first novel.

I think that’s because an important yet tiny little piece of The Walls Around Us was taken from this novel, and snatching that piece and heading off into the sunset with it got me thinking about it again.

Today, the day after spending Thanksgiving at my mother’s house, I found myself drawn for no conscious reason to the cobwebbed recesses of my hard-drive, where some old drafts of the very first novel I ever wrote can be found. This book was my heart in a shameless, undeniable, mortifying way. It was more autobiographical than a novel should be, and it’s not something I could publish as is now, even if I had the opportunity, because many of the people in this story are still out there, living. It would have to be rewritten if I wanted to do something with it. I know this… and the weight of that has stopped me every time.

Even so, every once in a while, every few years, I take this manuscript out of its dark place, and I consider it.

I think of what could be done and redone.

I think of the possibility.

(I think, too, of the five years I spent writing and rewriting it—who wouldn’t—and I think, I do admit, of how incredibly amazing it would feel if one day, years into the future, I was able to publish a shiny, new version of it and how much I’d celebrate and probably cry.)

I look at this manuscript every so often, with curiosity.

Could I do it?

Would someone publish it?

Is it worthy, after all these years?

I’ve often heard—and I tell this to writers I teach as well—that for many writers, you need to write some practice novels before you reach the one you are meant to publish. The first novel you write may not be the first novel you publish… and maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe you are better than that.

In my heart, Imaginary Girls was that novel I was meant to publish first (complicated by Dani Noir, I know, but publishing is nothing if not complicated). So much of what I wrote before Imaginary Girls was what led me to be able to write it. See? See how it was meant to be? If I had to have all that practice time, all those pages, all those years, it’s worth it to me, to have Imaginary Girls.

I regret nothing. Well, I don’t regret putting it aside then.

But hey, what about now? When I’m a better writer and could make something of this story in a way I couldn’t before?

When I have the distance?

Maybe there is a reason I keep opening this old file and peeking at the scenes I wrote so long ago that there are actually two spaces between sentences… (Aaargh! I was young! I didn’t know!)

My heart hurts today because I read some of it. I didn’t let myself read the whole thing—it’s a tome, overwritten and meandering and clocking in at an even 500 pages. But I read the opening pages, and I went through each of the seven sections, reading the last pages of each. By the end of the sections, by the last scene of the book, where my character finds a kind of closure with the person who’d terrorized her throughout her life, I felt a hard, heavy lump in my throat.

But I also had some ideas.

This novel was written before I knew what YA was. Now that I do, now that I have a career here, might that change some things?

I would have to rewrite so much of it.

I would have to reimagine, rethink, re-plot.

I would have to disguise a great many things.

Barely anyone has read this—the manuscript was only ever read by a single (adult-fiction) agent. I put the manuscript aside mainly because it was too close to me, it was too true, it was too painful, and I was unable to separate myself. I wonder now… has enough time passed? Can I be honest, can I be serious, can I be ruthless?

It could be a YA novel, or a middle-grade novel, if I cut out some things—I’m not yet sure.

It could be something.

And yet, do I want to go back there?

• • •

I wonder, fellow writers: Have you ever returned to a long-buried novel that you relegated to live in your closet, or desk drawer, or deep under your bed?

Have you performed a resurrection?

And if you have, did it fail and did you have to shove the corpse back under your bed, or were you able to breathe new life into something that, it turned out, did ultimately deserve to have a day in the sun?
The End-of-Year Quiet

Nova Ren Suma

December 22, 2013

Why, hello there.

I’ve been quiet. Since I last spilled my thoughts here, I worked hard to get my first draft of The Walls Around Us done by deadline.

I will tell you the truth, want it, want the truth? After everything I said in that post—shouting my love and appreciation for deadlines from the rooftops—I didn’t make the deadline.

I needed a week’s extension.

Sometimes things are impossible, and sometimes you need to trust your gut and face the fact that you need more time. Writing creatively on deadline is one of the most frustrating things I’ve done. (Oh and sometimes you get a case of the giant hives while you are writing on deadline, so you look like a bright-red, itchy pufferfish, which is all well and good until your fingers swell up and can’t bend and your hands burn so you have to hold an ice pack, thus making typing on a laptop physically impossible. Yeah, that happened.) Moving on.

I worked hard, and that’s what matters.

It’s now the end of December and I’m revising—and revising is my most favorite part of the book-publishing process, even though I will fully admit it’s not easy. Next deadline is in January. I meant to blog about writing and revising and all that, but I’ve found myself in a silent state. Not just here, but in real life, too.

So a step back. A healthy dose of alone time. Building a little writing tent in the bedroom. Gathering hopes and goals for 2014. Revising this book with everything I’ve got. Trying to keep the doubt spiral at bay.

As I was typing up this blog post, I got my last rejection (well, I hope it’s the last one!) of 2013. And I feel fine. It looks like 2014 is going to be the first year since 2009 that I won’t have a writing residency… Which seems right. I’ve had a lot of luck these past few years, and I’m traveling enough as it is next year and want to stay home with E, so New York City: You will have to be my writers colony. See you in the café.

If this blog stays quiet and I don’t post in the next couple weeks, I am wishing you a happy New Year!

p.s. I just realized I haven’t shared this here yet… Good news:
On Revising: Why Can’t It Just Come Out Perfect the First Time?

Nova Ren Suma

July 10, 2012

We’ve been talking about revision lately in my online YA Novel Writing Class with Mediabistro—which has been such a great experience, and ends in about a week! (If you want to take this class, I have no plans right now to teach it again, but my friend and incredibly talented author and teacher Micol Ostow is heading up the same class starting in September. I highly recommend Micol’s class, and here’s where you can enroll.)

Revision has been on our minds partly because the last assignment is for revised pages, but also because it’s looming there on the horizon for all the first drafts, class assignment or no… When the first draft is done, they will have to revise. We all will. A book won’t get done without revision, and I know how all the hard work eking out those first-draft pages can appear so futile when you look ahead and know you’ll only have to make changes later.

And make changes after that. And make changes after that. Honestly, in my experience, there have always been multiple rounds of revision. I’m always writing toward what my book is meant to be, and though I do love this discovery process, when I’m up against a deadline and an inability to make things perfect, it can be very disheartening.

I have to tell you, I’ve been frustrated with myself as I’ve been working through revisions on 17 & Gone these past months. First off, frustrated that I can’t seem to articulate certain changes I’ve known I’d have to do for two drafts now. Also because my attempt at fixing things sometimes works to break them worse than before. And simply because I wish I could just get it the first time. Why can’t I just GET IT RIGHT the first time?

My editor seems to think it’s perfectly normal for a book to go through multiple rounds of revision like this and for a writer to be getting closer and closer to what she is trying to say with each new draft. She doesn’t seem to think I’m an alien or a hack because I need these revisions. This is what she tells me, so I am choosing to believe her.

It’s what I told my class, too, so I should believe what I’m saying, yes?

I do believe it. But when you’re deep in it, the end seems so very far away. I keep thinking it will be easier and faster with each new book, but I’m not sure. I do know that I’ve learned some things with this book that I plan to do differently next time. So maybe it will be faster? Check back with me in a year or two.

Sure, I wish I could get it right the first time, but my words don’t come out that way. Perhaps there are some magical writing creatures who know the exact right words from the beginning (do these mythical writers exist?)—but most of us will only get our books to be better by going back. By revising.

So that’s what I’m doing this week. Working on my book some more to make it as good as I can. I’m close, though. I can feel it.
I Am That Girl

Nova Ren Suma

June 1, 2012

I’m close to finishing this revision, but so much of what I’m doing is tied up with worries of what will happen to this book, what people will say or think, or not say or not think, and I wish I could get rid of all that. Go back to a time before, when I didn’t think about it because I couldn’t fathom being published and I didn’t care.

A long time ago, writing was all mine.

I am in the apartment alone for the next couple days writing in a makeshift encampment in the living room. My eyes alighted on a book I’ve had since high school. There are my doodles on the front cover.

This book was a gift from my friend Maggie—I’d forgotten, but she’d written an inscription to me on the inside—a friend I met at my first-ever writing workshop, Simon’s Rock.

The book opened to this dog-eared page:

A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren’t enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warn the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.

—from “The Black Art” by Anne Sexton, my favorite poet when I was 16 years old
The Isolating Writer

Nova Ren Suma

May 17, 2012

When I have a ton of work to do—like, for example, right now with freelance copyediting deadlines, teaching responsibilities for my writing class (which I think is going really well! I love my students), and novel revisions and a nice, solid book deadline I have noted in beautiful panic red in my calendar, among other things, because there are always other things—I do tend to regress and do this thing that helps me focus and get calm and breathe: I isolate.

Here I am writing in bed in my writing sweater, which I love wearing during isolation. Photo by Laura Amador, taken at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program.

It’s comforting to be in a cocoon of my own making, where my mind can find some quiet, and where my panic can slither away and leave me alone so I can get shit done. It’s comforting to avoid all social interactions and let my roots grow out because who cares what I look like. It’s comforting to sit on the floor of my dark apartment eating a tub of blueberries and thinking about the climax of my novel until the “aha!” moment comes. But this kind of behavior doesn’t help me keep friends. Truly, I don’t know if anyone understands when I do this. Sometimes it’s all I can do, you know?

The good thing about isolating in the face of deadlines is I feel like my mind gets sharper, which is a necessary thing for solving plot issues in a novel, and also for getting through freelance jobs. I’m just a usual introvert who needs some Alone Time, as we call it in my house, to recharge. And sometimes this Alone Time spreads out over weeks.

I hope no one takes it personally.

How do I explain this to people so they understand? Fellow introverts, let me know what helps you and how you keep your friends and families intact during and after times you need that comforting, and necessary, bout of isolation to keep your head on straight.

p.s. Change of subject. Do you want to win a signed paperback of Imaginary Girls? The paperback comes out next month and you’ll have chances to win a signed one here on this blog, but in the meantime here’s the first giveaway as a part of Laura Pauling’s Spies, Murder and Mystery Marathon (oh, how I wanted to add a serial comma!). I wrote about mysterious girls from books who catch my imagination… Comment and tell me the “mysterious girl” characters you love, and you could win a beautiful paperback of my book.

Enter the giveaway right here.

The new cover look is gorgeous. This picture doesn’t even show how glossy and delicious this paperback is in person. Wanna see?

(Pre-order links can be found on my website!)

Now back to isolating…