I Turned in My Book

On letting go of the project and fulfilling a lifelong dream

To all of my subscribers: thank you for hanging in there. I’m back! Huge thanks to my paying subscribers who haven’t left. I appreciate you so much.

For the past three weeks, I’ve worked twelve hour days on my final revisions. If all goes well, HOTSHOT will be published next summer.

Me with the hotshots on a fire in Oregon, July 2002. I was twenty-one years old.

I’ve been working on this book for five years.

I started working on the proposal while I was working 50 hours a week as a nanny in Seattle. I’ll never forget waking up at 5am and driving to the coffee shop near my nanny house, eking out two hours of work before starting my day caring for two infants, then working at my favorite coffee shop (Hello Analog Coffee!) on the weekends. I had no idea if the proposal would sell, but it did. I spoke to my editor at Grove Press while holding a baby on my hip. I barely had a moment to stop and celebrate.

Here are all the things that happened between the time I sold my book (May 2019) and now:

• I was offered a Fulbright in Czechia, and instead of saying no, I said yes. I taught a section of creative writing in Hawaii and left for Europe in August 2019.

• I left my Fulbright in November 2019, having realized that I couldn’t do both. I spent my winter pet-sitting throughout Europe…

• Covid happened. I flew to Seattle, moved in with five people I’d never met, and turned in my manuscript in August 2020. Then I didn’t hear from my editor until February 2021.

• I worked as a nanny (again) in Seattle, until I left my job in September to pursue writing full-time.

• I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and ADHD around the same time.

• In March of 2022, I experienced a catastrophic spinal injury that had actually happened when I fell while nannying. I couldn’t walk or sit, and lost the use of my left leg. The family I worked for had failed to insure themselves for worker’s compensation and I stupidly didn’t hold them accountable. A month later (after my insurance had finally approved my MRI) I had emergency spinal surgery.

• In July 2022, I moved from Seattle to Florida to begin my PhD in literature and creative writing. I finished a revision in three months, then revised again in spring of 2023, also in three months, while teaching a 2/2 load and taking PhD level classes. It was grueling.

• In Spring 2023 I was diagnosed with autism.

• In July 2023, I bonked my head and suffered a concussion.

• In August of 2023, my editor returned my manuscript and I started on this revision, right as school was beginning again. There was some Substack drama and another writer threatened to sue me, sending me a barrage of emails questioning my mental stability and slandering me on the platform. In January 2024 my body broke out in a searingly itchy skin condition, likely a result of my RA and stress. It lasted two months. I had to push back my revisions, but kept working on my book, teaching, and coursework.

• I turned in the full revised manuscript on May 19th, 2024.

Some things I’ve learned from this process:

• THINK HARD before taking on commitments. I am so glad I did the Fulbright! So, so glad. And I wish I hadn’t quit, because it turned out that turning in my manuscript was not as urgent as it seemed at the time. But I also wonder how much better that manuscript would have been had I not taken the Fulbright and instead cloistered myself in a little rental apartment and focused solely on the book.

• I will never sell another book on proposal. I know; never say never. But writing a book with an editor rather than on my own has been a harrowing process. That is not an understatement. I’ll write more about this once my book is…published. I look forward to writing my next book on my own, without immediate feedback or frantic deadlines.

• Prioritize my most important work and stop giving everything 100%. This was an essential lesson for me! Like many autistic folks, I tend to give everything 100% effort, but being a writer means prioritizing the writing. I had to let myself be a good teacher and a good student. Not the best. Just good enough. Surprisingly I still did well and got great student evaluations. I am grateful to have learned this lesson and wish I’d learned it sooner! My writing gets the most energy, all the time. Everything else is secondary.

• There will always be a crunch time. No matter how much I work on a project, there will always come a time when I need to shut everything else out and focus solely on the project. There is no escaping this.

• Trust my intuition above all. Working with an editor has drawbacks and benefits. My editor is incredibly skilled at her job. As a working-class writer and first-time author, I was scared to assert my own vision for the project. This is especially relevant in terms of word count. I took things out of the book that still feel sacred to me and essential to the project just to meet a very narrow word count. In the future, I’ll push harder for what I want in my book, because it’s ultimately my book, not the publisher’s.

• Don’t call out other writers. Or, if you do, don’t name them. You never know how someone will react.

• Celebrate! I have a hard time pausing to celebrate my victories. I’m learning how important this is. I think it’s an ADHD thing: there’s very little feeling of accomplishment when I finish a project. Instead, I dwell on what I could have done differently, or immediately focus on what needs to be done now. Taking a pause, even for a day or two, to feel proud of myself and what I’ve accomplished is essential. Otherwise everything will simply pass me by, and none of it will feel complete.

• Let go of the people in my life who can’t celebrate with me. This was a hard lesson. The closer I got to publication, the more I encountered people who wanted what I have, and thought I was somehow undeserving. These people were, interestingly enough, often folks who grew up more privileged than me. They peppered our conversations with subtle put downs and constantly compared themselves to me in ways that made me feel as if I needed to take care of their emotions and make myself smaller for their comfort.

  I remember back when I was an aspiring writer, and a then a baby writer (though I was in my thirties before I got anything published), and I’d look at people who had book deals and feel jealousy or envy. I wanted that. I deserved that. I thought there wasn’t enough to go around.

I compared myself to others constantly. At some point I stopped doing that— I realized that it takes hard work to be a writer, and there’s no way around that. Everyone’s path is different. Everyone’s definition of success is different. I have no time or space for other people’s jealousy or envy, because that’s frankly not about me. It’s about them, and what they truly believe they deserve. How capable they think they are of making their way to their own dreams.

My first year on the hotshots. I had Gold Bond on my face because my poison oak was so horrendous.

I’ve learned to celebrate my friends (two of whom just had book releases! you can find Frankie’s book here and Myriam’s book here) and to celebrate my own accomplishments.

I’ve also learned never to make myself smaller for anyone’s comfort.

Letting go of the project

I never realized how a book project can always be retweaked and reworked. I could spend my entire life working on this book, especially because it’s about colonization, ecology, and the history of fire suppression in the United States, all of which have ongoing debates and research. It will never be perfect in my eyes. But I have to let go of it at some point and remind myself that there will (hopefully) be other books. And I’ll be publishing some of the material in my other newsletter,

WILDERNESS

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This book has been a part of my life for five whole years. And in those five years I’ve learned so much about myself through the process of writing it. It’s hard to let go of it, because I have no control over it once I do. It’s not really mine anymore. But I am letting go.

In two days, I’m heading to Seattle to pet sit before teaching again in Honolulu. This summer is packed with teaching and some travel, but I’m going to try and find time to rest. And swim in the ocean. And enjoy my life. I can already feel new ideas bubbling to the surface and I’m excited to be back here in this space, sharing my writing life with you.

What does it mean to fulfill a lifelong dream?

Throughout the process of writing this book I spoke with many of the people I fought fires with. Back then, I dreamed of being a writer. It was a dream, though. Not something I thought was possible. Somehow I got myself to college and into a supportive (and funded) MFA program, where

George Saunders

advised my thesis. That book, a novel, never got published, but it led to this one. Nothing is wasted in writing.

I contacted one of the men I used to fight fire with to fact check some of my own memories, and he wrote, “It’s pretty cool to see you fulfilling your dreams.”

It’s easy to forget that I am actually fulfilling my dreams. This is the life I dreamed for myself. It looks much different than I thought it would— the thing about a book deal or any level of success is that it doesn’t change who we are. Actually, it has amplified me. I’ve been confronted with my own internal sense of self-doubt and fears of success. My fear of being seen. And I know that no level of success will make my life some technicolor dreamland. Not unless I open myself up to the world in ways that can sometimes feel impossible. But I’m doing it, and that is what I dreamed. Hopefully at some point I can find some financial stability, too.

I want my book to be successful. I want to be successful. I am successful, in many ways. Defining what “success” means for me has been an important part of this process. If I locate the success in the process, rather than in some external factor; that’s when I am at peace with my life. That’s when I can really say I’ve fulfilled my dreams.

So tell me, where are you finding your definition of “success?” What does it mean to you?