Ephemeral

Some not-great news

This is a post I never wanted to write. Please rest assured that, in writing it, part of me feels like an emo teen on Facebook circa 2007, with a profile pic carefully angled from above to suggest I am a reflective, mysterious person as I type a status suggesting no one has ever known pain quite like mine. Anyway, yes, to quote the Roxette Greatest Hits compilation I played on repeat aged 11: don’t bore us, get to the chorus.

My first two novels are going out of print.

There, it’s real now. I have been informed by my publisher that, as of the end of June, ‘Disbanded Kingdom’ and ‘The Way It Breaks’ will no longer be available to order, and the rights will be returned to me.

In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a big deal. I’m self-aware enough to know that the literary world won’t miss what it’s never heard of. My bank account will remain untroubled by royalties. And I’ll own the rights to my work, to do with as I see fit. Finally, I’ll be free to rewrite ‘Disbanded Kingdom’ as an immersive video installation at Tate Modern. I can turn ‘The Way It Breaks’ back into the suburban English thriller it was initially conceived as. (Seriously, I’m sure it would make a solid miniseries if there are any TV execs reading this.)

Of course, I’m being facetious. I can’t deny that this news was unwelcome. It’s difficult enough to accept that your years of hard work never really paid off, so to have any hope of latent payoff taken away on top of that is, well, disheartening.

Not that I sit down to write with the expectation that it will bring success and fame — if anything, as both a reader and former bookseller, I recognise that my writing isn’t that way inclined. My aspirations are simple: to put things I’ve created out into the world, to be consumed by whoever wants them, and hope they have some kind of positive impact. It’s a thing of beauty to read the words of someone a world, even a century, away and feel a connection. I’m fortunate enough to know, while still alive, that both those first two books achieved that on a small scale. An email from an unknown German reader still warms me when I think of it. And it still amazes me that someone liked them enough to take the risk of publishing them in the first place — I’m thankful to Cloud Lodge for their belief in me.

I’m accustomed to my theatre work being ephemeral. I produce shows and cast them out like paper lanterns on water, knowing they will shortly be snuffed out. I knew what I was letting myself in for. My books, on the other hand, I preferred to see as beings that stood a chance to float off beyond me, even if they never set the world alight in the process.

I’m not the first writer to go out of print. Worse things have happened, even to me. Simply logging onto X makes me feel more hollowed out and despairing, tbh.

So why this sadness? I’ve already discussed my complex feelings about ‘Disbanded Kingdom’ — despite the fact that it was long-listed for the Polari Prize and, as my debut, got a bit more attention than the others, I don’t even know if I like it anymore. Do I want it out there in the world, representing me, my interests and my writing, when I’ve felt almost since the day of its release that I’d claimed a changeling as my child? As for ‘The Way It Breaks’, that was pretty much dead on arrival. Even friends and relatives have never heard of it. Just before it was released, I found myself wanting to have it recalled, wishing I’d waited a bit, hung on for an agent, another edit. In a way, I’d already wished this on myself. Despite the fact that both I and its handful of readers generally regard it as the strongest of my three books, I can truthfully say I’m fine with it disappearing into obscurity. Maybe it’s for the best. It may re-emerge someday, improved (*cough* maybe as a Netflix series *cough*).

In theory, my firsttwoborns could be picked up by another publisher. In reality, no press in its right mind would spend money on re-releasing two books that made no impact, when my still-available third hasn’t either. Publishing is a business, and books are costly to produce. In theory, I could self-publish. In reality, I won’t. My Impostor Syndrome requires the validation of gatekeepers. If I ever decided to set up an indie press, it would be geared towards publishing other writers, not me. So, the matter is closed.

The unwelcome news also came during a seemingly never-ending barrage of creative rejections. This included rejections from both an agent and a publisher, for the manuscript I’ve spent the past two years working on and annoying my husband about. To say this made me question my belief in my writing is an understatement. It all felt like a coordinated effort to let me know, definitively, that my words have no place in the world. (Dramatic, I know, but my grandma used to tell me bedtime stories about the horrors of war, so the drama is deeply embedded.)

‘I need space,’ I said, breaking up with my latest piece. A little time to reassess our relationship, to objectively identify our strengths and weaknesses. A painful but necessary process. Like logging onto X to check it’s still a cesspit.

In the meantime, I’m taking my husband’s advice: I’m trying to recall enjoying creativity. This means putting down the idea of writing something with the goal of an agent or publisher or even readership in mind. A few weeks in, I’m already doing better. I’m (once again) reworking that book I first wrote 24 years ago, but this time I’m clinging to how that 15-year-old felt, sitting down every day after school to write a story purely for himself (and maybe his mum). I’ve been practically skipping to rehearsals for the am-dram play I’ve been cast in, for which I have no expectation other than the thrill of staging something with a bunch of people I’ve come to know and care about.

Every so often, intrusive thoughts will present me with the worst outcome of my endeavours: failure, again and again. That this next book, two decades in the making, will be finished and published but flop and sink. That I’ll be dreadful in the play, mess up so badly that it’s the only thing the audience will take home with them. I have only one response to these thoughts, one bit of ammunition left: “Who cares?” It doesn’t matter if something is only temporary. As long as it did its best under the circumstances, it was a thing that existed in the world for as long as it did, and nothing else should be required of it.