The Package that took Six and a Half Years

I spent the entire day listening for the knock on the door that would signal the delivery of the package.

Six and a half years of waiting for this package… it had been a long wait.

The irony is that I had to take a phone call from my boss, and by the time I got off the phone the truck and come and gone without my hearing it. And when I found the box on the porch and peeled back the cold cardboard, I can say I was actually afraid.

My book had already been published—it was already out there in the e-world, making the rounds. But something about knowing that now it existed in the three-dimensional world, with two covers and a spine, and (gasp) actual pages to turn… that’s scary stuff.

When I first held it, the thing that struck me (aside from how cold it was from being outside) was the weight of the book. At 282 pages, it’s sizeable, but not huge. It’s not the volume that surprised me, but the heaviness in my hands as I held it between them for the first time.

It occurred to me that, until now, the only other place its completed body had been contained was in my mind.

The original manuscript, jotted in one and a half notebooks, was not complete. So many changes had been made that altered the themes—or rather, those changes happened later as I realized what the themes inherently were. But here, at the end of a six and a half year long process, the developed, revised, completed product of my mind had been delivered to my doorstep by a person I never got to thank—enclosed neatly between a two-sided cover.

I hardly knew what to think.

After paging through it and seeing that everything looked all right, I finally stopped feeling afraid. Everything was in order. The physical appearance of the book was not going to single-handedly wreck my burgeoning literary career. On the contrary, I don’t think I could be happier with how the cover looks (shout-out to my amazing designer Ana Ristovska in Macedonia!).

But if you’re a writer, or have ever written something that mattered deeply to you, you know the feeling.

That thing you’re staring at in your hands—it’s a part of you. It weighs something.

And if you’ve been through the revision process, you know how agonizing it is to rework and rearrange and rewrite things that didn’t work on the first or seventeenth draft. And if you’ve been through the publishing process, you know how discouraging it is when rejection letter after rejection letter comes—or worse yet, when you get approached by a publisher, only to find out it’s a scam group. (Yep, been there.)

But you know what?

Aside from the characters in that story, the thing I’m most proud of is the eleven rejection letters I got along the way. If I had the wall space (which I definitely don’t), I would frame them all.

Because each time someone said no, I had to take that as “not yet.”

And when it comes to freelancing, that absolutely has to be your mantra. Of course, the version that is now in print is very different from the first version that crossed a publisher’s desk—which is a good thing. Each time someone said no, it not only went to someone else, but it got better. And now that it’s here, copyrighted, published, and printed, it’s the best it’s ever been.

I like to think of some stories as a bottle of wine: the more time they spend in the bottle, the richer they are when poured out. So six and a half years? Yeah, it was a long wait. Eleven rejections? Yeah, it was tough.

But I wouldn’t wish for one year or letter less.