While the title to this post could apply to many things, I'm speaking specifically to thrusting myself back into the query trenches.
That's right, once again I'm in a search for representation. It wasn't an easy decision, but I'd been having reservations about my literary agent situation for quite some time. Nothing bad or wrong, just that I wasn't getting to where I wanted to be. With the turning of the New Year, it seemed a perfect opportunity to address what I'd been sensing. Essentially, I posed a few questions to my agent about what I more I could do to make my publishing dreams a reality. His answers were many and true and honest, but when I read between the lines, I could see that hidden conclusion both of us were uttering without uttering: it would be better to part ways and move on. Maybe there are greener pastures. Maybe not. I certainly won't know until I venture out there. The darker part of my brain always whispers in these trying moments: You've wasted two years. You're a failure. You'll never make it. It's a cold voice, one I don't always recognize. Then, a moment later, I realize it's only myself speaking and I can choose to control it--even when it doesn't seem I can. The better part of my brain speaks as well: You've written more in these last two years than ever before. You know more of what you expect out of your representation after this time. If you keep trying, you'll eventually make it. That's the warm voice, the hopeful voice, and the one I want to use more often. It's a voice I hope to embody more and more, deeper and deeper into my being. Sending the missive to my agent was difficult. I didn't want to do it. I don't want to sink back into the query trenches. I never wanted to wake up daily again, feeling as if my path was unknown again (truth is, publishing is always unknown, but at least when you're signed with an agent, there's someone else with you) and dark. Sometimes, querying almost feels like warfare: daily, weekly or monthly, you're sending out queries like bullets, trying to hit a moving target head on. More often than not, you miss. But it had to be done. I could have gone on, quietly biding my time and tamping my feelings down while knowing the truth. That's when I realized it takes more courage to forge the difficult, unknown path than to stay on the same path. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It's courageous to try something new. So here I go, carving out a new path for my career.
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Writing is a solitary process. It's lonely and frustrating. You never really know where you're headed as you write a book, even if you know where you're going to end up.
The only way to get through the writing of a book is to staple your pants to a chair, keep your head down and write the thing. Once you're finished, though, can often be the most frustrating aspect of the entire process. You've sweat, you've cried, you've squeezed every ounce of creativity you have in your body and bled the words onto the page. In short, you have a book. But what do you do with it? You publish it, of course. And that's the thing. There are two broad options to publishing your book: you can easily self publish it (Self publishing on Amazon is very simple), but most likely your work will end up in the obscure recesses of the internet and never be seen by more than a handful of people. The real test, though, the most arduous path, is the traditional publishing one. There are many blogs and vlogs out there that go into the incremental steps--query letters, finding agents, writing synopses, etc--so I won't go into it all, but you can do it all the right way, get so close to the finish line, and it can still slip through your fingers. That's possibly the hardest part of the journey. You query, you get your agent, you work on it some more, and then your agent submits the book to publishing houses. It's out of your hands. There's nothing you can do other than wait. And that's why it's so hard. It's like you're in a forced stasis. You've gone from typing on the project every day to emailing possible agents to receiving a few rejections to finally signing that representation contract and then, you edit and type it all over again only ... to let it go. Once your agent starts submitting the book, there's nothing else you can do. Except wait. And wait. And wait. And wait some more. You can see your goal. It's right there, just out of reach and it doesn't seem too far. In fact, it seems like a short dash--it's tangible and it's only twenty feet away--but the problem is, you're in a zero gravity environment with nothing to push off of. The only way to get there is to hope someone comes along and gives you that little nudge or a helping hand. Otherwise, you can try to swim, but you'll look more like Wile E. Coyote fruitlessly flapping his arms just after he's gone over a cliff. Only you won't even plummet. You'll just flap your arms forever, beads of sweat building up on your forehead, lungs running out of breath, until you give up or someone pulls you in. The weather is finally changing. Funny how it's always too hot until it's too cold and then you wish it was hot again.
Here, in Georgia where I live, the weather can change on a dime. It's a bit more gradual than in Texas where I'm originally from, but still, it was in the eighties one day and the next, I woke up shivering to 35 degree temperatures. Sweating and then shivering. It's like I'm inside the flu. 2020 has been an incredible year. One to go in the history books, I think. I'll certainly remember it as a year of momentous change and nail-biting uncertainty. Between job furloughs and school cancellations due to the pandemic, I've had so much time with my family. It's a weird mix of pure joy to be around them and debilitating dread because of the unknown. With the free time, I've been able to write and create more than ever before, but also with that extra time, I'm almost more stressed because I feel the need to fill that time with things I think I need to do rather than those I want to do. It's like if I'm not achieving something, I'm wasting the time. It's an odd paradox. Things have been so up and down. It's like the year slipped away from me one minute, but then I remember that I've written three books, taken two road trips, visited a dozen cities (always wearing a mask!) and spent countless hours with my wife and two boys. Things are good. There's also been a raging pandemic, so much social unrest, a crazed man in the Presidency and uncertain economic woe. Things are bad. Back and forth that pendulum swings. When I feel my poorest, I remind myself that at any time, I can go into the next room and pick up one of my boys and feel their warmth against me, their spidery legs cling to my sides and know that it's all going to be okay. No matter what, I'll have that. And it's good. The Deceivers by Margaret Peterson is a worthy follow-up to the first installment, The Strangers.
Certain mysteries continue, the plot deepens and twists in unexpected ways, but the most important aspect of the first book remains solid: the relationship of the charming Greystone kids and their friend, Natalie. If you haven't read the first book, stop reading here unless you want certain aspects to the story spoiled. In The Strangers, the Greystone kids find their mom missing after another group of children in a different state--who have the same names and look identical to them--are kidnapped. Chase, Emma and Finn know the two things are connected, but they don't know how. What follows is a fun, heartwarming (at times, heartbreaking) adventure to figure out what happened to their mom. Along with their new friend, Natalie, they follow clues left behind by the Greystone mom and discover that there is an alternate world they escaped from years before. They eventually find their mom, but have to leave her (and Natalie's mom) behind so they can help the "twin" versions of themselves get home. It's all a bit like reading a Nancy Drew mystery with a very fantasy twist. In The Deceivers, the main goal of the Greystone kids and Natalie is to return to the alternate world, find their moms and get back home. It seems simple enough, but what follows is a page turning mystery filled with more questions, several dual personas and a secret passage filled house where almost everyone is a possible enemy. The way Haddix changes perspective in each chapter is clever, so you see the mysteries unfold from each child, but the book is at its absolute best when all four kids are together, deciphering clues and hatching plans. They each have their own part to play and their individual skills, traits and mistakes impact the story in surprising ways. I really loved this story and believe readers will be taken on a wild ride that will stimulate their own curiosity about the world around them. Since the beginning, the Coronavirus has seemed like a threat that’s over there.
It’s always seemed real—I’ve never doubted its seriousness—but at the same time as I watched it unfold in China, I also watched a comedienne I follow on Instagram traipse across Asia as if nothing dangerous was occurring. Sure, she and her travel partner wore masks and used sanitizer like next gen make-up, but they still frolicked with the joy of traveling through a foreign land. YOLO and all that. My wife is even a Flight Attendant with a major airline and right before taking a short term leave to wait out this crisis, she actually went to South Korea on one of her last trips, which felt a little like she was deliberately throwing herself directly into a fire the rest of the world was trying to put out. Despite our worst fears, her trip was pretty much like any other, only with masks and limited movement in the city once she landed. She mainly just went from her room to the roof top restaurant and back. Even now, I’ve only personally known one person who caught the virus and it was essentially like a case of the flu; fever, chills, aches and gone in about a week. Now, this isn’t to downplay Covid’s severity; it’s just to illustrate that it’s always been a bit at arm’s length for me and my family. Watching it unfold on the news, it’s like Outbreak and Contagion are unfolding before our eyes, but I look out my window and it’s like any other normal, sunny day. Our neighbors wave to us. The same cars head into the town square just down the block from us. It’s hard to mesh the very real dystopia occurring in almost every corner of the country with the Andy Griffith reality in front of me. Since early March, both of my son’s schools were shut down to flatten the curve, and we’ve done our best to stay in and socially distance with these two budding, rambunctious personalities under our roof. They’re four and six now. Both had birthdays since the pandemic’s beginning and thankfully, they didn’t really know the difference between this birthday and birthdays past even though they each wanted to go to (respectively) Chuck E. Cheese and an indoor trampoline park to celebrate. Each of those wishes being massive, indoor petri dishes, we declined. Through all of this, I’ve continued my writing regimen. My goal 1,000 to 2,000 words a day and I’ve mostly met that goal. I’ve completed one book, which should go out on submission soon, finished another, which still needs a massive edit, and have halfway drafted a third—all this with boys running around like dinos (today they’ve been a pair of stray dogs), swashbuckling through our living area and constantly needing stimulation. They've basically been on a five-month Summer break at this point, so as the school year has approached, I’ve been looking forward to kicking their tails back into the classroom so I can get some peace and quiet in the mornings. That was before the most recent rise in cases, doubling and tripling each day. Seeing those graphs continue their steep rise, it makes me want to scream that our government didn't do more to hasten the spread like virtually every other country in the world. I can't count the times I've wanted to cream that this could have all been done and over with by now. So, now, despite my frayed nerves of being locked with a pair of insane children who almost literally bounce off every wall in the house, my wife and I have decided to opt for the online, distance learning classes instead of risk their health in the petri dish classrooms. GOD HELP ME. I’m not a reality show guy. Truly, I’m not. Beyond the rogue reality cooking show—Top Chef, Chopped or something similar—I avoid reality television as strongly as a vampire avoids light. Or garlic. Or both. Something about the Kardashians, Real Housewives, The Bachelor and the rest of its ilk just angers and frustrates me.
Maybe I am allergic. Yet, every now and then, something reels me in like some kind of alcohol soaked lure, smelling of the fumes of failed, wannabe actors, and I get addicted to its drama. Almost a decade ago, my wife and I were bored one night and somehow started hate-watching Bachelor in Paradise. I don’t if what was the sheer debauchery, the ridiculous drama or the ineptitude of the participants (probably all of the above), but we were glued for the rest of the season. To this day, I couldn’t tell you any of the names of the people or what exactly occurred across the show, but I do remember how much my wife laughed at the show. Now comes Love is Blind. We’d seen advertisements for weeks. Neither of us really talked about it beyond our chats in the morning when we discuss news of the day. I’m sure we just kind of chuckled and shook our heads at the new dating show like, “Who would be silly enough to watch that show.” Us. Me and my wife. We’re that silly. One evening, after several minutes of random Netflix searching (it’s an unspoken rule if you’ve finished a series you actually enjoy that you flip through Netflix offerings for at least ten minutes before giving up and just saying, “this’ll do”) and we stopped on Love is Blind. There was a mischievous glint in my wife’s eye as she hit play. Now, I could blame this all on my wife, but I’d be lying. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t at least morbidly curious about the concept. It’s at once relatively simple, but unnecessarily complicated, and in that way, Love is Blind seems to encapsulate everything wrong with reality television. It’s a combination of Big Brother, Bachelor, Marriage at First Sight, and I’m sure a host of other TV shows as well. The essential question, which they ask inside almost every episode, boils down to, “Is love blind?” The question makes sense within the first two episodes as the “experiment” (as they continually call it) revolves around two households, one of men and the other of women, which are connected by windowless pods. Everyday, the men and women go on dates in these pods, but they can’t see each other, almost like a perverse twist on confessional booths. There, they talk, get drunk, and (hopefully) fall in love. The show is most entertaining and perversely interesting in this stage. Yet, following the second episode, the stages of physical relationship begin, and even inside the sterile, staged environment of the reality television world, the reality of the “real world” seeps in. Relationship issues that typically take years to unfold or stagnate seem to arise within days and weeks. Everything happens so quickly—declaring love AND proposing marriage inside of two weeks WITHOUT ever seeing the other person and getting hitched within a month. It’s mind boggling that someone would actually want to participate. At one point, a delirious contender says something along the lines of, “If I can’t find a partner doing this show, how can I ever?” I wanted to shout back that you have bigger problems in your life if a reality stunt show is your best shot at love! Another perplexing situation has the perpetually hair-flipping Jessica feeding a glass of wine to her dog in the middle of a serious conversation with her fiancé. At the same time, Mark’s attachment to Jessica is totally infuriating as she drunkenly flits between him and her other would-be fiancé, Barnett and doesn’t even try to mask the infatuation. It’s all so unreal at times, you wonder if its all scripted or if the contestants are in on the machinations of melodrama. In the middle of the proposal and the marriage, they do have a couple of weeks living together, but even that is so staged and unreal as they experience a honeymoon style trip in a posh resort in Mexico, followed by a stint in a hotel-esque apartment set up that feels more like a movie set than real life. It’s also at this stage that the supposed experimental question of, “Is love blind?” essentially undermines itself. The answer to the (not so tantalizing) question also reveals itself as a resounding NO. Love is not blind. Not that certain aspects of your love don’t or can’t turn a blind eye, but that love is never so simple. Yet, the show is so expertly crafted and edited to compel you to continue watching, episode after episode. There are couples you believe in (c’mon Kenny and Kelly!), couple you knew were doomed from the start (Diamond and Carlton), and couples you love to eat popcorn as you watch (Mark and Jessica). The entire series is a slow moving car crash you can’t peel your eyes away from. It’s sad. It’s dangerously entertaining. Yet I do wonder what the next iteration of reality tv could possibly be. Could we continue this descent? Can producers come up with even more insane concepts? As long as the shows continue to film, there will be desperate enough folks to contend for a part and those of us interested enough to lean in and watch. Keep searching Netflix to find out, I guess. Our subletting situation was supposed to be simple: we pay rent to Reggie and Reggie pays the mgmt company for our building.
Turns out, Reggie didn’t pay the rent. He’d stretched himself so thin setting up the mansion—and now the mansion was a complete loss with everyone who’d paid him rent money demanding refunds—so Reggie opted not to pay our rent, instead doling it out to other people he owed. It was a bad situation. Bad. We knew NYC apartment laws were on the renter’s side for the most part, with a lot of notification necessary to evict a resident. But we were nervous. Of course, Reggie continually told us everything was fine, fine, fine, but by then, for all the excuses we’d accepted from the guy, we were done. We needed to find something new. A stable solution. Between our individual jobs, it was tough to schedule appointments to see apartments. We needed so much paperwork. Years of tax records. Pay stubs. Bank statements. Like I said, renting in NYC is about as stressful as buying a property anywhere else, and to make matters worse, renting an ideal spot at our price level was dauntingly competitive. Apartments move fast and typically had multiple renters at the ready. I remember viewing another basement spot in Manhattan. It was a good price (for Manhattan) for a studio apartment and the location was unbelievable, right down from Astor Place and on the border of NOHO and East Village. But it was a basement. And you had to walk through a weird boiler room and janitor closets to access the spot. It was like something out of the Oscar winning movie, Parasite. The poor family’s place, not the rich. Remember how crazy that apartment was, looking out to street level by the ceiling window? This spot was like that. I’m not joking. I remember how weird it felt to go through the underbelly of an apartment building, literally underground, and access the apartment between the water heater and boiler tank and thinking, “Is this even legal?” It was. Despite the oddities, there were several interested parties. My real estate guy actually brought two of us to tour and at the end (all 30 seconds of it because you didn’t need longer to see the whole place), the agent kind of dangled as a completion—“Whoever gets their paperwork in first gets the apartment.” I declined. I regret it in a way—because the location was seriously unbelievable—but I just couldn’t imagine living there and being happy for long. We lasted in Reggie’s sublet for about three months, with each passing week discovering an eviction notice on the door. We even tried to sidestep Reggie for one month, sending the rent check directly to the mgmt. Eviction notices continued to appear. Eventually, we signed a lease on an apartment on Roosevelt Island. It was one of the few spots that had onsite management and was more of a traditional apartment set up—without agents and such—which made us feel more at ease. We only lasted the year afterward, about a year and a half in NYC total. With all the setbacks and difficulties we experienced at the front, much of the mystique surrounding NYC dissipated for us like steam off a hot spring. NY residents for barely a month and we already prepared for a second move.
Despite it all, we still trusted Reggie. He was well known in the airline community, Cam had rented with him for years and we didn’t think he had any reason to deliberately deceive us. Up to then, we accepted that our bad experience had been a series of miscommunications. So, we looked at Reggie’s place. It was a 1-bedroom spot with great light, hardwood floors and he was going to give us very good price. With the mansion situation escalating, we accepted and with all we’d been through, we hired a moving company to transport our furniture. Reggie’s place was great and we were so glad we moved. So glad. Because barely a week after moving, we received messages from a couple of the mansion renters that police raided the mansion in the middle of the night. Everyone was kicked out. If we hadn’t moved a couple days prior, we’d have been out on the street with nothing. NYC is a weird place. Unlivable situations almost anywhere else are normal in Manhattan. A guy at my work in his forties still had three roommates in his apartment. Places like microapartments, studio spaces renting at $2k/month, closets converted into bedrooms or “crashpads” are all normal in NYC. It’s shocking, but normal. So, when we still lived in the basement apartment of the mansion, we didn’t think much about the evolving situation in the upper floors beyond annoyance. The more and more bunk beds, the growing number of people living full time and the weird, thin walls being erected for more bedroom pods. Cam and I kind of shrugged. We didn’t like it, but we accepted it. Amid all of this, we saw a news story about an immigrant family burned in a house fire close to us. They’d been trapped in an illegal residential situation much like the one Reggie was building out. A false wall without a proper fire exit had been erected and the family couldn’t find their way out in the smoke. Everyone died. Days later, the NYPD became aware of a mansion in Queens with a disturbing amount of residents (tipped off by upset neighbors, I’m sure) and raided the place in the middle of the night. No one was able to take anything. Get out immediately, they were told. Upon hearing of it, Cam and I were breathing a sigh of relief that we’d already moved. I don’t know how we would’ve coped if we’d been there, so we cuddled up in our one bedroom spot, feeling rather cozy. It was barely a week before we discovered an eviction notice on our front door. We were at a loss. No idea where to go or what to do. Our list of problems felt totally overwhelming:
1.I started a new job the next morning (it was around 9pm by then). 2.We had a moving truck filled with our belongings, which we had to return in five days. 3.We had no apartment or place to live. It was like treading water and someone decided to throw us a dumbbell. Reggie seemed genuinely sorry. He thought the lease was a done deal. It was all the real estate agent’s fault, he said, and the proper paperwork hadn’t been filed and he needed a couple of days to dot the I’s and cross the t’s. If we could just stay in a hotel in the meantime, we could move in promptly. So, our first night in NY, we scrambled to find a hotel nearby with a parking lot large enough to park our moving truck. We were exhausted and took the first, nearest hotel we could find. The hotel was awful—and could be a long story in itself—but it was inexpensive, close to the subway and our moving truck fit in the lot. Before sleeping, I scrounged up suitable clothes for work the next day and we collapsed into bed. The next three days are still a blurry fever dream. Neither of us could eat or sleep. While I started my job—trying to retain a semblance of professionalism to mask the terror I truly felt—Cam was in constant contact with Reggie for housing updates, calling on available apartments, and—the worst case scenario—looking at storage facilities if we ran out of time with our truck. Finally, after 3 days of cheap hotel living, we got the call from Reggie: we could move in. We were thankful to finally have a foundation. We cleared out the space, moved our furniture in and set up house, and for a couple of weeks, we were good—even happy—in the space. Now, when we initially spoke to Reggie on the arrangement, we understood the top levels would be rented as a crashpad. We were cool with that, as we had our own entrance and separate space, but we thought it would be for fellow FAs. Whenever Cam had rented the crashpad from Reggie in the past, her stays were infrequent (only used when she needed it, which amounted to two or three times a month) so we wrongly assumed it would be relatively quiet much of the time. What Reggie didn’t disclose was his plan to cram as many people into the top floors as he could, filling every available inch with as many bunkbeds as space would allow, and then, he even hired a contractor to place false walls into living spaces to maximize the rentable space. And on top of flight attendants, he rented out to anyone with a pulse. Anyone with need of a place to crash. Anyone who couldn’t afford a traditional apartment. There were college kids, international students and day laborers, but it also attracted seedier folks as well. We weren’t happy and started looking for an alternative arrangement. That’s when Reggie proposed for us to sublet again. A quick background on Reggie: as well as being a flight attendant, he was a small time landlord in Queens. He managed a few apartments as “crashpads” for fellow flight attendants.
*For those who don’t know, a “crashpad” is an apt filled with bunkbeds (say 5 bunkbeds in each of the 2 bedrooms in 1 apartment and he’d rent out the place to 20 people—each renting 1 bed for far less than an apartment—and the FAs have a spot to literally “crash” between trips. It’s ideal for commuters). * Cam had rented one of these beds in Reggie’s “crashpad” for years. He was well known in the community. So, back to the story … Reggie said he felt awful and partially responsible for our needing to scramble for a place. “Maybe I’ll be ready to sublet in a month or two—you’re first on the list,” he said, “but for now I have another solution.” He’d decided to expand his “crashpad” operation and just leased a beautiful mansion in Kew Gardens. It’s unique because it had a big yard and directly across from a sprawling park. He was only going to fill the top floor bedrooms with bunkbeds, so there’s an, “entire basement apt—with completely separate entrance from the house—it’s yours if you want it.” We did. As we continued prep for the 2000-mile trek across the country, we drooled over pictures of the new house we’d live. It was multi-million dollar mansion with a large, heavily treed yard, perfect for our dog. We couldn’t believe our luck and Reggie’s small one-bedroom apartment vanished from our minds. We loaded everything into a Penske and started our road trip. By then, we had 2 days (3 days, max) to get into the city and start unpacking. I’d set up a new job in Manhattan and my new boss was taking a bit of a chance since I wasn’t actually living in the city upon my hiring. I assured him I’d be on the job by Monday. It was Friday when we officially took off. Memories of the trip are colorful. We were excited for the new chapter of our lives. Even being under the gun, so to speak, we had a blast listening to music and books on CD in our truck cab, and staring at the rolling green hills of Appalachia. It wasn’t til we reached the tolls and bridges crisscrossing Manhattan that the stress of living in New York poured over us. At one point, we had to U-turn out of a toll plaza because the booth didn’t take credit cards. It wasn’t until we pulled up to the mansion that things really went wrong. There really was a mansion (pictured above) and Reggie was planning to set it up as a new crash pad. That part was true. He just hadn’t actually leased it yet. His promises of the basement apartment were hollow because it was his to rent out. We met him at the house and we stepped into the basement “apartment,” chock full of office furniture: desks, bookcases, computer equipment. It wasn’t Reggie’s place and it wasn’t livable. |
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