Launching my Debut Novel was... Messy

Which maybe should have been expected, considering it was June 2020

This is the second installment in a series of posts about the journey I’ve been on over the past three years. (Part 1 can be found here if you missed it.)

The first part of this post is an excerpt from the newsletter I sent out a month after the release, which pretty well captures how I felt at the time. The second delves into the details a bit more.

Chocolate cake topped with fresh raspberries, baked by my daughter

1. Baking the Most Epic Cake

One day, you decide to bake a cake.

But not just any cake. No. This is going to be the most ambitious, the most elaborate, the most epic cake that you've ever attempted. Excited, you find a recipe and bake a test version. But it doesn't come out quite right, so you bake another. And another. Every trial run brings it a little closer to the way you imagine it. The kitchen starts to accumulate a layer of grime from all the baking. Sweet grime—powdered sugar dust and drips of batter—but grime nevertheless.

The cake becomes a team effort. You get feedback from the expert bakers and eaters in your life, and have long, meandering discussions about the merits of buttercream vs. ganache. You enlist a professional cake decorator to make a small flock of beautiful marzipan crows to sit atop your masterpiece. When the cake is finally done, you step back and allow yourself a moment of awe to take it all in. It's undoubtedly the hardest thing you've ever done, but the finished product is gorgeous.

You turn your back on the kitchen, where a massive pile of dirty dishes has accumulated. There will be time to deal with that later. But now, it's time to serve the cake and bask in glory! You bring it out to your guests, who are waiting in the garden, and take a slice for yourself. It's strangely anticlimactic. There's nothing wrong with it, the cake is perfectly fine, but it's just not quite what you expected. Where is that transcendence you've been chasing, that bliss? Maybe you're not as good at baking cakes as you thought....

Unsettled, you look to your guests, curious to see their reactions. Some devour their slices quickly and ask for more. Some savor the cake, making their slice last, enjoying every bite. Others think it's way too sweet. Others, not sweet enough. Some just wonder what the hell was going on with that tart cherry layer, the red filling that oozed out of the cake when it was cut. That layer was important to you, so this comment stings a bit. It also reminds you of the glass bowl of leftover filling that sits precariously atop the pile of dirty dishes. Probably shouldn't have left that there. But it'll be fine. It's all fine, everything's fine.

The guests begin to leave. You carry a stack of dirty plates back to the kitchen and see it with fresh eyes. You smell it, too; it's been a long time since you've taken out the compost and the stench of rot is becoming apparent now that the sugary cake-smell is dissipating. It's kind of horrifying, the mess that awaits you.

You don't want to deal with it, so you return to your guests, but most of them have now gone home. There's still so much cake left, and no one wants any more. You've just picked up the platter and are wondering what to do with all the leftovers when the earthquake hits.

For a minute the shaking is very intense, the earth rolling beneath you, and you stagger back toward the house. But you lose your balance and the cake falls to the ground, exploding there in a sad pile of frosting and crumb. The cherry filling leaks onto the grass. A marzipan crow sinks slowly into its crimson depths.

By the time you make it inside, the shaking has stopped. In the grand scheme of things, the earthquake was only minor, causing no lasting damage. But your kitchen—it's an absolute disaster. The bowl of filling slid to the floor and broke, leaving sticky red goo everywhere; most of the dishes are on the floor now, and at some point during the afternoon the ants found the sweet remains of your baking and now swarm every bowl, every plate, every part of the kitchen. You inch closer, knowing that the time has come to deal with this chaos, and step on a shard of glass. It embeds itself in your heel.

You'd thought that creating this cake was the hardest thing you'd ever done. But now, you realize, with a sharp pain in your foot and your kitchen in utter disarray before you, that the harder job is yet to come.

2. Cleaning Up the Most Epic Mess

I was not at all prepared for the psychological fallout of launching my debut novel. Sure, I’d been following writing blogs for a while and was aware it might be a bit anticlimactic. But the magnitude of that anticlimax exceeded even my wildest dreams! 

True, the timing was… not ideal. The release date of When We Vanished had been set in January of 2020, when I’d started sending Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) of the novel out to be reviewed. In February, when the first confirmed COVID-19 death in the US occurred in our local area, I told my kids they should prepare themselves for school shutdowns—even that early in the game, I sensed huge changes were coming. I’m not going to rehash the awfulness of those early pandemic days here; as you know, they were truly terrible. I found myself feeling extra haunted by the situation, though, because it paralleled certain plot points in my book to an eerie degree. In a way, I even felt irrationally responsible. Like I had written the pandemic into being. 

Then release day rolled around on June 2. Only eight days after George Floyd was murdered.

I’d been planning on going into full-on Book Release Mode, but my heart was just not in it anymore. Though WWV was about challenging systemic injustices and felt very relevant to the cultural moment, I was profoundly uncomfortable promoting it during such a tumultuous time. It just felt wrong to be out there trying to get attention when there were far more important issues to focus on. 

Looking back at it now, the best option was probably to do as I did: dial back on marketing and spend my time going to marches instead of creating promotional content. But at the time, it felt like I was doing everything all wrong. The thing is, when you’re publishing on your own, you’re… on your own. There’s no one else to blame if sales don’t go as well as you’d hoped.

(Here I must pause and note some facts: the launch wasn’t a total flop! Family and friends reached out to congratulate me on the launch and order books. Some of my #TeamCrowbie street team members posted truly heartwarming things about how much they’d enjoyed WWV. I am forever grateful to all the Crowbies out there ❤️)

Nevertheless, the overwhelming inner dialogue constant throughout my head that June was, “You don’t deserve to take up any space right now. Your stories are stupid (plus they contain way too much coughing, ew), and they don’t matter, and you don’t matter, and all of this was a waste because YOU FAILED.” 

At the time, I also had very little conscious awareness of just how terrifying it was for me to release my work. I felt it in my body, absolutely, but I didn’t allow myself to acknowledge this because it didn’t seem like something I should be feeling. So I ignored it. Until it got so bad that I couldn’t ignore it anymore. (To get back to our cake story: a small earthquake shook up my world and I was like, oh shit, I guess I’m going to have to deal with this now.)

And so one morning, I finally worked up the courage to call my health provider and find out what my mental health care options were. I was holding back tears, trying to spit out the phrase many of us have been trained never to say: I can't do this on my own. I need help.

I really can’t overstate how hard that step was for me. But I did it, because I knew it was time to face the messy kitchen that my mind had become.

Often, this moment tends to be portrayed as the “happy” ending of this particular story arc: I finally asked for help and found a therapist! For me, though, this was just the beginning of a whole new journey. More on that next week!