I Did Something Stupid

and I'm feeling strangely fine about it

Photo by Carolina Heza on Unsplash

On 24 January I missed a scheduled one-to-one with a literary agent. It was granted via New Writing North as part of the Northern Writers’s Award I got last year. I was told about it in July, and I was fired up about it at that time. I’d had a request from an editor at a fairly well-known publisher via this route too. I forwarded what the editor asked for and never heard back. The one-to-one wouldn’t happen until January and it strangely hung over me through all the tumult of my autumn/winter.

The day the meeting was arranged for was when storm Éowyn tore across Ireland and the UK, with the brunt in places where the dearest people in my life are. We were pretty pummelled by it here in North East England, too. Between that and preparing to start a full-time job I didn’t expect to get so soon and being too much in my head about personal things, me and my energy-limiting, cognition-affecting chronic condition at some point went ‘no’.

I had shaped my day around the Zoom meeting at 4pm, but when I got to the house (let’s not call it home for it’s part of the landscape of my persisting anxieties) a little after 3, it went clean out of my head. Feeling faint and exhausted from a persistent insomnia flare up and the difficult trudge uphill in at least 50mph winds (we might have clocked 64, though - enough to fell trees and tip lorries on the motorways), I lay down and just forgot. In my apology email later I said I dozed off, but in truth the clattering and banging of my housemates around my room prevented any kind of rest and I felt no better when I dragged myself up again at about 5.40.

I was unaware that I’d forgotten anything until I checked my email at 5.42. There was a message from the agent received at 4.12 checking up on my attendance. I couldn’t believe it. It’s just not like me to let someone down like that, especially when I know they’ll have taken time to read the fairly long sample of work I sent them. I sat with my head in my hands for a long time over this.

But not at not having the meeting.

I remembered what a coach had told me about approaching things with curiosity and I pondered all evening why someone usually so organised and dependable - even when feeling as dysregulated as I did - would forget about something so important.

Perhaps I really do have ADHD and my control over it slipped. But I’m extra careful at writing things down. It was on my mind all day. All week. For months. Other things were cluttering my racing brain too, but I’d spent my quiet spells in work looking over my submission and had planned to leave early to prepare. So I don’t accept that or my fatigue as an excuse. I concede they may have been contributing factors, but I don’t remember ever doing this with something important before apart from in anxiety dreams.

I spent the emotionally tough last few months living and breathing my also emotionally challenging manuscript and on many Zoom and Teams calls for things concerning it. Lately I have struggled to feel motivated to do anything involving meeting virtually. It wipes from my head as soon as I enter the house. It’s shown that I urgently need to address my anxieties around that place. Part of my happiness at my new job is the financial freedom I will have to get a place of my own later in the year. I often struggle to hear and feel present in virtual meetings because there’s often some kind of fuss disturbing my peace. But was this a more straightforward rebellion against the online life?

I’m an overthinker and other issues niggled at me. When emailing back and forth to arrange the meeting, my first preference was a day when I could do between 1 and 3pm. The agent suggested that day starting at 3pm. I reread my email and didn’t know how the wording ‘between 1 and 3’ could be taken as me being free at 3pm unless it hadn’t been read properly. In my mind, if this person is themselves too busy and distracted to think I could meet at my availability cut-off, then how can I trust them with 6000 of my carefully crafted and emotionally charged words?

One of the great boons of connecting with other writers is that we talk to each other. I keep hearing from writer friends and those I follow or hear giving talks about how hard it is to find an agent. That’s not what this meeting was for - it was a freebie conversation and not about representation. But I keep hearing anecdotes of knock-backs where writers have been told ‘this is really good but I don’t know how to sell it’.

There’s the rub. It’s not about the work in itself, but about the money, about them getting their commission. I don’t know if my manuscript belongs in that environment. I wrote it because I needed to write it. I’d like people to read it. I’d particularly like people out there who need to read it to show them something or reassure them to be able to find it. In a market full of noise, how possible could that ever be? I’ve felt for a while that I’d prefer to try independent small presses even though I’ve been encouraged to be ambitious and approach agents. I can’t see the weird stuff that falls out of my brain ever being desired by the kind of commercial press this agent works for. I don’t know if I need or want a conversation about how much my work doesn’t fit that world - and certainly not when I’m not seeking it. I know I’m a misfit. The weird kid. I don’t want to change my work to make it saleable. It’s my story and it’s written the way I needed to tell it. I don’t want to compromise on the bigger picture. Typos and awkward, unclear sentences, do please point them out, but I’m not for changing much else unless I am convinced by good reasoning that it’ll aid the story, not someone else’s bank balance.

Perhaps I’m being defeatest, or lacking in confidence, or maybe I’m realistic. At this time the bottom line is I haven’t the energy for the hustle. This is partly why I’m starting a full-time job. I can’t live with the precarity of freelancing and casual work anymore. I was heading this way anyway, but it’s more pressing now I need to be self-sufficient and settle into a lifestyle befitting a private and not-very-well fortysomething stuck living with young (and not that young but immature) strangers and their dramas. I’m doing better professionally and emotionally these days, and my increasing clarity on life is exposing how little truck I have with having no routine and cooking meals whenever the kitchen’s free instead of when I need or want to eat, and being hypervigilant so I lessen my risk of bumping into housemates whose behaviours stress me out.

I don’t want my working life spilling into that place anymore. And while I rent office space, it’s often practically unusable for me. The building had a gas leak and was without heating during the coldest two weeks of the winter so far. It’s a large shared space with some active people bustling in and out at irregular times, and I can’t guarantee I’d have peace to take a call at 4 on a Friday afternoon. If it’s not that, then locks are unexpectedly changed, or a new system’s been put in place that prevents me from moving around freely because I haven’t been told or given what I need to buzz myself in. The room is beside rehearsal space for a musical theatre group, and when I do manage to work (as I’m doing typing this), the earplugs are in and my tinnitus amplified. Then with going full-time during the week I’m effectively paying for furniture storage until I get a place I can move it to and do my writing and competition judging from home again.

So my tiny world is a bit the wrong shape at the moment. It’s not bad, and things are progressing in good ways. I am grateful for what I do have, but a lot of what I have are nonetheless sources of angst. Perhaps in the spring I’ll have more headspace for the publishing world, and should have feedback from the Literary Consultancy to consider by then, which I would like to wait for before I plan a next move. My manuscript has been years in the making and I’m in no rush, because crafting it was the thing.

When inspiration takes me I’ve been writing speculative short stories and flash fiction - generally having fun experimenting and seeing what I can do. It is telling that sharing one is what I used my time on during the last meeting of my writing group instead of asking advice about speaking to an agent the next day. The timing’s not right. I feel on the verge of a burnout and I need to rest.

I also feel truly deeply terrible for messing someone around. And that is separate from not feeling bad at all for not having the meeting. This humbling experience is helping me see what I want for my life and work. What really matters to me. I can’t take everything on. I’ve rebuilt myself and I’m strong, but a fragile heart beats too fast in the chest that I’ve figuratively patched together from torn-apart pieces. I have healing and becoming still to do, and just now I need peace to do them.