It’s an exciting and scary thing to publish your first book. I suppose that may be true for any book. Especially when you never considered yourself a real writer, but I’ve been told to stop saying that. Because the very act of writing something, they said, means I am a writer. In order start moving past the distraction of self-doubt, I had to listen to the encouragement from friends and family and get over the idea that I may not live up to my own expectations.
I had to face the fear of possibly being very horrible at this new endeavor and just shut up and do it.
But I had a new problem. Where would I even begin with this particular story that I felt so deeply about and was still evolving and growing into something I could have never imagined?
After all the family trees I’ve made, conversations with older relatives, pouring through thousands of pictures…I thought I knew just about everything there was to know about my family history, at least for the last four or five generations. Sure there were the natural genealogy ‘brick walls’ and things that would have to wait for me to have the time to research and truly get all the facts. But nothing was earth shattering. Interesting and lovely and important, but not a threat to everything I already had in my archives—those things were absolutely truth, fact, set in stone.
So when I realized the only way I could potentially start to not obsess over the story every day and find myself relaying it to complete strangers was to write about the whole ordeal, I just opened a google doc and started typing.
Naturally, I got stuck within the first few months. I had my binder of records, album of photos to reference, digital files, etc. I knew I couldn’t tell the story through anyone’s perspective but my own. I don’t actually KNOW what my grandma was feeling and thinking. And in 2017 she had been gone for almost eight years at that point. I could take a wild guess and probably be close, but I couldn’t fictionalize her experience. I talked to my dad, my uncles, my aunts, my grandma’s best friend, and started shaping a narrative with glimpses into the past. I wrote about the events that led up to the discovery and the in-the-moment interactions and surprises that I experienced along the way.
Dramatic much? And yet, I’m also intensely persistent and stubborn so I kept at it. Good or bad, published someday or sitting as a file on my computer forever, I had to write out what I knew. How I felt. What I learned. In spite of any self-loathing and imposter syndrome.
An amazing thing happened when I finished a complete first draft: The weight that had been on my shoulders for more or less four years had lifted, like a deep breath after holding air in my lungs for a little too long.
After a few family members and a few other readers scanned through it and gave initial feedback, I made adjustments and prepped it for sending to publishers. I told myself I would publish it one way or another, but I would love to try to work with someone to do it before I self-publish. Plus, self-publishing is now a very successful much more respected now than in times past. So either way, I knew I would someday get this story out there.
Summer of 2022 I sent numerous publishers manuscripts, snippets, plot summaries, the works. It was a very good exercise for me in knowing my book, being able to give it a hook or a pitch, create both long and short version summaries. It made me familiar with my own work.
No bites. Form letters explaining “no thank you but good luck, in various ways. “…not what we’re looking to publish”… and I had nothing else in my professional background that screamed an identity of a writer, let alone future author. I’m an artist. I create things, make things. So my approach was to craft this story in the way that was most meaningful to me.
And then it happened! After sending out a second round of submissions in January of 2023, April 3rd brought my inbox an email from an author/publisher that was interested in taking on my book. I had to reread it a few times to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. Jodie Toohey with Legacy Book Press saw something in The Record Keeper and I’m so extremely grateful to her for giving me an opportunity like this! When that message came through on April 3rd of last year, I remembered something. It was the sixth anniversary of the exact day that I had my realization of the truth within this family secret discovery in a message with my new found cousin, Jen. I love when stuff like that happens, don’t you?
We are winding down the last of the edits and proofreading, and Jodie is extremely patient with my newbie ways! Soon we’ll have a finalized cover and ARCs.
I hope my family’s story inspires others to not be afraid of finding out truths in their ancestry. Don’t underestimate the ways that bringing painful events and uncomfortable histories to light can bring understanding and incredible healing in ways you wouldn’t even expect.
Don’t miss the next Get a Clue post.
Subscribe to my newsletter and get the latest article,
practical genie research hacks, updates about
my book The Record Keeper, and more!
0