Slowly but Surely

It's all Coming Together

And by it, I mean a few things.

One: My book.

I’m excited to share that I’ve officially decided to go the Indie Author route and do this on my own terms with my editor, Ron Seybold, of Trampoline Press. After a lifetime of trying to prove myself, I’m uninterested in spending months or even years writing query letters and begging an agent to give me a chance. It’s too reminscent of cattle call auditons and sniffing out the competition. If this is the route you’re going, that’s amazing and I hope it goes exactly the way you dream it will, it’s just not for me.

Instead, I’m learning how to be my own Patron, as Ron likes to say. But I would be remiss not to mention the immense privilege associated with the opportunity to fund this project on my own, and I believe it’s important to acknowledge that.

Anyways…

Hey. I’m Anna. I’m an Indie Author, and I’m fucking stoked about it.

The past few weeks have been nothing short of a whirlwind.

My editor and I met with Asya Blue and discussed cover design and internal formatting for both the hard copy and the e-book. Talking with an expert about how they want to communicate what my story respresents visually was humbling to say the least.

I also got some Author photos taken for my website and book. My extremely talented friend Sam Ehrnstein always finds a way to capture someone’s unique essence in just a snapshot. The black and white portrait featured in this article is thanks to him.

Finally, I’ve been meeting with the amazing Steve-O Wimberley to discuss a brand design, website, and overall aesthetic for my online presence. It has been so much fun discussing colors and patterns and how these speak to who I am and what I’m trying to do.

Next comes proof reading, sending out advanced copies for reviews, recording and engineering the audio book, and building a network of people who are interested in what I have to say so that I have a soft place to land when I launch the book this Fall.

Two: My internal world.

Something else coming together, so to speak, is my emotional state. The big feelings that have populated my psyche since I was a little kid are starting to make sense in a way they never have before.

There are these chunks of me that have been floating around aimlessly since before I can even remember, and something about this process is allowing them all to settle back in the center of my chest. When I got the urge to write it all down—the bits and pieces of stories and feelings that I’d never put together into one cohesive narrative—I never thought a piece of fiction would be the thing that validated the ache in my chest, finally allowing it to feel at rest.

Three: My purpose.

Finally, I feel as though my entire identity as a member of the human race and as a writer is all coming together. Writing and reading in a way that builds community fills my days with joy and meaning. I was reminded of this when I opened a Substack newsletter from my inbox this morning.

Jason Areheart is a wonderful writer I follow and subscribe to on here, and his newest piece was the first thing I read this morning with my coffee. He’s a middle school English teacher as well as a writer, and his musings about The Outsiders and the way his students engaged with the material was so raw and real that it made me think of my own experience in an English class many moons ago.

Story Time

It was my junior year of highschool and I’d just become a daily pot smoker. Sophomore year I earned my reputation as a weekend warrior, but by early fall of 11th grade, I couldn’t make it through the day without smoking at lunch. I can still remember sitting in my Honda CR-V parked across the street from McCallum Highschool on Sunshine Drive like a raisin baking in the sun while the first notes of “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga filled the car in a way that felt like I was being summoned by some dark delicious force I never wanted to part with. Fame Monster had just come out and changed my life forever.

But AP English was my first period class, and the only drug I had access to that early in the day was caffeine in the form of the large iced coffee I insisted on buying with my moms credit card every morning. My boyfriend was the keeper of the bud, after all. Even back then folks knew not to trust me with the stash.

It was early November and we’d just finished the section of The Catcher in the Rye when Holden has the young sex worker up to his hotel room, and we were discussing this passage:

“Hey, how old are you, anyways?”
“Me? Twenty-two.”
“Like fun you are.”
It was a funny thing to say. It sounded like a real kid. You’d think a prostitute and all would say “Like hell you are” or “Cut the crap” instead of “Like fun you are.”

– J. D. Salinger

Holden goes on to say, “I felt more depressed than sexy, if you want to know the truth.” As someone who’d been having sex for six whole months to the eerie soundtrack of a budding addiction, I had never related to anything more.

Anyway, my teacher was a really cool guy. Late 30’s maybe, attractive, smart, funny. You wanted him to like you. But when he handed back our quizzes from the day before, he jokingly praised the 3rd period class for doing better than us.

“I’m just saying, their average score was at least ten points higher than y’all’s,” he said. This is Texas after all. It’s a miracle we were reading a book in the first place. “I guess they just understood the book better than you guys,” he added with a laugh.

“Like fun they did,” I said without missing a beat.

I’ll never forget the way a chuckle escaped him as he shook his head with a wide smile, rubbing the back of his neck and looking down at his shoes. It wasn’t the first time I’d found a way to be charming, witty, and smart at the same time, but when the scholastically relevant jab rolled off my tongue in a way that genuinely amused one of the coolest teachers at school? That high beat a lunchtime joint any day.

I’d think about that moment a lot in the years to come when I’d get too high or drunk to walk let alone tell jokes. All my wit and charm had gone up in literal smoke by the time it got that bad, and there was seldom an hour of the day when I wasn’t under the influence of something. I had missed making people laugh.

Now at 32, with almost a decade sober, I get to read and write and make people laugh with all my mental faculties intact. But until today, I didn’t even know that kid—the one sitting in a classroom, unaware of the fact that she was slowly but surely becoming a slave to the one thing that turned down the noise in her head—needed to be invited back into the picture. My picture. She can’t believe how cool I am. Or how chubby I’ve gotten.

But that’s the thing. Someone wrote their truth and shared it this morning in a way that reminded me of my own and another lost piece of myself got to return home because of it.

I am living in some kind of dream world where I get to do something I love every single day. What a gift it is to share my writing. What a gift it is that you’re reading it. And what a gift it is to walk these tender parts of one another home with our art lighting the way.