The old ennui

Well, guys, Christmastime is coming....my dining room is full of wrapped gifts, my inbox is full of well-wishes, my calendar is full of upcoming events and all I can do is sit and ponder my - and I use this term loosely - writing career. How sad is that?

Tomorrow will be the anniversary of the day I sold my novel. Grand Central has decided to title it, Love in Mid-Air, ergo the title of my blog. (I call this "marketing.") But the novel, alas, seems also to be in mid-air. Publication date pushed back to January 2010 (which feels like forever) and I never hear anything from my agent or my editor. I'm well aware that the next year will be very challenging for me and part of the challenge will be my efforts to go from a "writer" (i.e., someone who lives alone, works alone, shuffles around in her bathrobe talking to people who don't exist, but who at least has complete control over her work) to an "author" (i.e., someone who is expected to have a public persona and convince people to buy her book and who has absolutely no control over anything.) This scares me.

Okay, now I'm getting ready to say two things that are contracdict each other and are yet equally true. I am afraid nobody is going to buy this book. I have a lot of friends who are writers and I'm painfully aware that there's a long list of things that can happen when you publish your first novel and that one of those things is "nothing." My agent only took me on as a favor to my friend Alison, who is an important client of his. My editor seems to have fluctuating enthusiasm for the project. I didn't get a big advance. Or at least not an advance of a size that will force them try and create publicity for the book just to protect their investment. I fear my book falls into the publishing category of "Let's throw this against the wall and see if it sticks."

And I'm afraid that somebody is going to by this book and that I will be the one thing I've feared most in my life. I'll be seen.

I know, I know. I'm bitching and most people don't have an editor, an agent or a sold book at all.

I know, I know. Even authors who get big advances and have the publicity pushes and involved agent/editors often deal with the same sort of worry and disappointment.

I know, I know. I am, with no sarcasm intended at all, among the blessed of the earth.

Yet still I ponder and still I stew.

My only prayer for surviving a year of waiting, I think, is to try and find some lesson in this process. Try and make some sense of what's happening to me and what's not happening to me. That's why I've started this blog. Stay posted. I have only yet begun to whine.