Post-Debut Paralysis

Will I ever fall in love again?

It’s been eight months since my debut novel came out. Events and interviews and even book clubs have largely petered out (though I am doing a bunch of events in October). My publisher is working on the paperback edition (with a brand new cover!) and gearing up for that, but mostly the shiny newness of having a book out is gone.

A lot of people I respect believe that the best thing you can do for yourself after the publication of a book, mentally, is to be working on your next book. Many friends of mine who published around the time I did are already knee-deep in their next books—a couple of friends who published the year before me already have their next books in with their publishers.

Me? I just stare at the blank page with dread.

People who aren’t writers ask me what it feels like, to have a first book out and if I’m working on a second. They ask if I feel like I understand how to write a book better now, so perhaps it’s easier? How I wish it were so. But, what I tell them is this: That it feels like having trained for and successfully completed a marathon, just to be told that now I have to run another one.

To be fair, no one is making me write a next novel. But obviously, I expect myself to do it. I assume I’ll do it. I mean, this is the life I’ve built. I’ve made entire life decisions around my stubborn insistence on being a writer — not just a writer, but a novelist. I don’t get to quit. (And on a very practical level, I can’t — I stopped actively freelancing to work on my novel and no longer have a day job for various reasons. I basically have to get another book out soon or start searching for jobs I can hold in Taiwan, and I feel like the latter would consume me so much I would definitely stop writing.)

The problem is, I feel absolutely paralyzed.

I think my main problems are these two points:

1. I’m super aware of what a long and arduous process it is now and therefore commitment-phobic. I went in with my first book with no idea it would take me as long as it did, and zero knowledge of how I would work it to death to a point that I no longer felt anything towards the book by the end. In fact, I started my first book not even knowing it was a novel — I thought it was a short story, but I was so taken by it that I wrote 120 words in 4 nearly sleepless nights. I barely ate because all I could think about was wanting to write. After those first breathless days, I hit a roadblock and that’s when the hard part happened, when I stalled out and became uncertain of what I was doing. And yet, I pushed through. I wrote and wrote and edited and edited, and even at points where I felt like I was flailing, I loved the book and the characters and believed in it enough to keep at it even when things were tough. But now, faced with having to start a new project, I keep asking myself, Do I like this enough? Enough to commit years of my life to it? To push through even when things get hard? Does this excite me enough? Is my baseline love for this idea high enough that even when the process robs me of my passion for it, I will still want to see it through? And I find myself quitting before I’ve even properly began because I’m just like: Eh. I don’t feel it. It’s a cool idea, but I dunno if I want to see it through. (Tbf, this is also kind of how I dated.)

2. I’m super aware of the “market” now or the business side or whatever you call it. I hate this. I hate this. Because I never, ever thought about the marketability of my work before I had a book published. While I wrote Homeseeking, at some point, when I was far along in the process that publication became a possibility, I thought, “There’s probably no market for this, but maybe a small press will buy it. I’ll be happy if I get a mid-5-figure advance, maybe a few modest sales.” But what I cared about was the story, getting it down, writing it to the best of my ability. I was absolutely consumed by it and it never crossed my mind not to finish, even if I knew there was a possibility it might never get published. Now, eight months of obsessively checking my sales figures later, I cannot help but think about what other people besides me want. What my agent wants, what my editor and publisher want, what the reading public wants. I cannot help but be aware that I wrote a particular kind of book and even though I have said to people that I have no desire to write another historical novel in this vein, that I want to write different kinds of things and not be hemmed in by genre, I cannot help but be aware of expectations. Every time my mom forwards me a Goodreads review (because I don’t read GR reviews myself, but my mom likes to forward me the good ones) that is like, “I can’t wait to see what she does next!” or “I’m a new fan and will read whatever she writes next!” I am simultaneously grateful and terrified. I think: I am going to disappoint you. My next book is not going to be like this book at all and you will hate it and me. I think about the disappointment my editor will try to conceal as she rejects my next manuscript because it isn’t what she hoped it would be. Because it won’t be something as marketable or commercially viable or whatnot. I think about how my next book will fail—I can already imagine it—and it’s not even written.

I’m sure to a degree this neurosis and paralysis is totally normal for writers post-book publication (at least, I hope so! Please don’t tell me I’m the only one!). And I’m sure there are some writers reading this who are like, “Don’t say this part out loud! You have to act like a star so people believe you’re a star!” But I don’t want to pretend, to act like writing is such an easy thing for me, because the truth is, it isn’t.

Listen, I am extremely grateful. By all measures, I had the most perfect, dream of a debut season. Amazing reviews from trades and national media. A major book club pick and national television. Positive reader responses, international rights sold. I know this. I am not humble bragging, I’m just stating the facts. I know I had a killer debut most people only dream of, and I am very grateful, every single day.

But now that the dust has settled, I’m faced with the reality that I now have to do it all again, somehow. And I don’t know how, if I can. There’s that sneaking suspicion that I got really lucky, and that somehow it’s undeserved. And that when I try this second time, I will find out that it was all luck, and not because I inherently had anything to do with it. (Yes, I know the truth is somewhere in between—I was both lucky AND I wrote a pretty good book. But, hi, welcome to my very mean inner monologue I’ve spent years of therapy trying to shut up!)

This document was the one I used when I first began drafting HOMESEEKING. This was the opening as I first wrote it. I haven’t opened this document in years. There are details I wrote in here that I’d long forgotten and entire scenes I ended up taking out. After this, I migrated the document to Scrivener so I didn’t have to wade through 125 pages every time I wanted to make a change.

Anyway. If you don’t see another book from me for another 5-10 years, you’ll know why. I’m still mucking about, looking for a book that I’m madly in love with again. A book that will drown out my self-doubt, the outside noises, the paralysis, the concern for external audiences. A book that will pull me in so strongly that I just want to live with its characters and world once again.

Because that’s my favorite place. My favorite part about writing fiction. When I’m really in it, the rest of the world fades away, and I stop thinking about anything else. I lock into the world, to the words, deeply submerged. The hours fly by and when I re-emerge, I feel changed. Happier. Buoyant. It’s my favorite part of writing, the certain breathlessness I get when I know I’ve hit upon something I want to see through to the end.

I don’t know if I’m naive to wait for that feeling to strike me again, if I should just be pushing forward with something I only feel lukewarm about, hoping it’ll catch fire as I move on. But I keep waiting, to feel pulled into a world, to fall madly in love.

In the meantime, I remind myself of something I really believe: that living is part of writing. That spending time with my toddler is writing. That watching tv shows and reading books and honing my aerial practice and going to the gym is writing. That listening to podcasts and musics and belting out songs and dancing while doing housework and cooking is writing. I do believe that writers go through different seasons, the writing seasons and the living seasons. I hope this is just a living season, to fill me up with enough life that it’ll eventually spill upon the page.

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Things I’m…

Eating

Boon by Ce La Vie

I really wanted to try this place because Hungry in Taipei posted about it, so I dragged my husband, toddler, and dad to have a late lunch there one Sunday and it did not disappoint! It’s sort of a Western-Korean fusion spot, reminiscent of the kinds of New Korean restaurants popular in the States now. The Jajang Squid, Mussel Bibimbap, Abalone Porridge were all sooo good, fresh and flavorful yet well executed. I wish I had remembered to take pictures but whoops, we were too hungry and I ate it all. I told my husband I want to go back and do their full dessert course thing where you get a bunch of different desserts!

Watching

The Last of Us (HBO)

The husband and I blew through this in a few days. I was looking forward to watching it after hearing that so many people liked it, but I have to say I was a bit… underwhelmed? Maybe because I knew it was based on a video game, I kept thinking like “Oh, here’s the part in the video game when they have to fight the zombies. Here’s the shot for shot sequence of xyz…” But on top of that, I don’t know… As someone who watched The Walking Dead faithfully up until the moment they killed Glenn off brutally (I never finished that season, it was just over for me), I guess I felt like there were more interesting questions posed by TWD and in a deeper way. The thing that I enjoyed most was watching the relationship between Joel and Ellie grow in Season 1, but beyond that relationship, I wished there was a bit more depth to the show. Without naming spoilers, I’ll just say that Season 2 felt a lot flatter in many aspects — pacing-wise, plot-wise, character-development-wise, but MOST OF ALL, it becomes an incredibly bleak and cynical show that I just… do not love watching? There’s like, nobody to root for, and it’s just dark, and I think it’s hoping viewers will keep watching on the strength of the affection they built for the characters in Season 1.

Listening

The Other Territory — This American Life

I finished listening to this episode this morning while sewing buttons, and I was so livid at one point, I stabbed myself. The episode focuses on the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank, specifically after the events of October 7. The ways in which Israeli officials have made public statements about their intentions to make Palestinian lives miserable in an effort to drive them out, or the way they have purposely made conditions in prisons so terrible so they suffer (even though many of the prisoners are being held without being told what the evidence is against them and without any rights) — it’s inhumane and enraging. Anyone with a sense of humanity should be able to see all the ways in which this is wrong.

Reading

I am reading, but it’s for stuff I’m planning to write blurbs for, and I don’t know if it’s weird to write about something I’m going to blurb before actually writing a blurb and sending it out (and my blurbs have to be way better written than these paragraphs I just rattle off without thought) so I cannot put anything down here! Besides the blurb stuff, I have not really read much else recently, as I truly can only focus on one thing at a time (and haven’t found anything on audiobook I like, as I’m very picky about the books I can listen to via audio!)