I’m Writing My Book Proposal

It’s 10:48 p.m., and I’m sitting in my mostly dark den with the TV off and my husband snoring in the background. The hell kitty is curled up asleep at my side under the quilt, and I really need to go pee but refuse to disturb her, so I keep tapping away at this keyboard instead.

I’m writing a proposal for my first book to send to agents. (Well, I was until I got sidetracked, but you know how that is.) It isn’t the first book I thought I would write, but it’s a book.

I have been subconciously trying to find excuses not to finish this project. Surely the dishes are more important, and the laundry needs folding. Charlie definitely needs to go for a walk.

But I told Mama I would do it. A couple of months before she died I promised I would, and promises made to a woman preparing her world to be without her get kept, even if it’s a decade later.

Before she died, I talked to my mama on the phone almost every day. This particular day I was sitting in my bathroom giving myself a pedicure, and we were talking about the random things that mothers and their grown daughters talk about when she said out of nowhere, “I can’t believe you haven’t written a book yet.”

It would be easy for one to think that this one little sentence was a guilt trip, an admonition, an expression of disappointment, but one would be wrong. This simple statement was quite the opposite. It was an expression of my mother’s great belief in me, her absolute confidence that I could do what I set my mind to do, and I had always said I wanted to publish a book. Her observation was a jab in the heart, though. I was nearing 40, and the closest thing I had to a book was a vague idea that kept me awake now and then, but I did want to flesh that idea out someday and write it for the world to read. When she died two months later, all I could think about was that she would never read the book I hadn’t written.

Writing a novel, however, is no small task, and it takes a sort of singularity of focus that I could not muster in the months after my mother’s death which just so happened to be the year after my father’s. In truth, the best I could do was focus enough to get out of bed and work my regular job, and my dog had to drag me from under the covers to do that—or drag the covers from me. What I did do, though, what I needed to do, was write poetry. It was the salve my heart and soul needed, and it was the gift the universe gave me in those broken times. I would be working out or driving down the road or walking a trail or lying sleepless in bed and words would come, sometimes in snippets and sometimes in long trails, and I would grab my phone or a piece of paper and scramble to put them down. In the following days I would add lines or hone the existing ones a bit, and usually in a week or so I would consider it finished. Although I had always sort of piddled with poetry, this sort of cosmic therapy started after Daddy died and escalated when Mama did.

Eventually I would start working in earnest on that novel, and that has been a slow project. The poetry, though, has kept piling up, transforming from an outlet for grief to a study of the wonder of life.

I love my Kindle, and my Kindle app, but there’s just something about poetry that begs to be on paper. I like to hold a book of poetry or a copy of a poem in my hand. In all fairness, I like to hold any paper book in my hand, but poetry just seems to be a must. So a while back I printed all of my poems to put into a notebook and have in one place. Looking at that stack of papers, maybe Mama nudged me a little or maybe I was just feeling optimistic, but I decided that that would be my first book. It didn’t have to be a novel or a memoir or any sort of prose at all. It could be the gift the universe gave me to soothe my broken heart and then to remind me that this world, despite all its pain and heartache, is filled with beauty and wonder. My first book was a book of poetry, and I didn’t even know it until I saw it sitting there stacked up on the dinner table.

After a couple of weeks of questioning the sanity of presenting my bleeding heart to the world on a paper platter, I decided that it needed to be done. I have shared enough conversations and tears with friends and strangers to know that we all need to heal from something. We all need occasional reminders that magic is all around us. We all need to know that we are not alone on this journey, and that is why I decided that my book of poetry, rather than the novel that is yet to be finished, would be the first book that I present to agents and publishers.

Getting it arranged into an order that makes some sense did not take long. I spent a few weeks alternating between thinking, “Huh, maybe I do have a little talent,” and “Good lord, maybe these are terrible. What if all anyone can think when they read this is ‘oh, bless her heart’?” and eventually I decided I was finished. Then came time to develop a plan to get all of it into other people’s hands, good, bad, or ugly, and that is where I am now—working on that plan.

Once query letters and book proposals are polished and sent, the next order of business will be carrying on with writing poems and novels, reaching out to book stores for an eventual book tour, and recruiting readers for my work. Which leads me to this expression of gratitude: thank you. Thank you for being here. Than you for reading my work. If you enjoy what you read, you can help me convince the agents and publishers to take a risk on my book by subscribing here and following me on social media if you haven’t already. You can find the links below.

Thank you.