I always tell my pregnant friends to make plans on their due-dates. “Make sure you have something to do,” I say, because most babies aren’t born on their due dates, and by the time one is at the end of her pregnancy, a due date can feel like a bull’s eye on the calendar, fixed with Every Hope.
I carried more water-weight than Lake Erie at the end of my first pregnancy, and I remember wielding that considerable girth down a sidewalk in mid August, and I recall that a well-meaning passer-by asked, “When are you due?”
I said–only honest, “Today.” The beautiful boy didn’t make his appearance for another week. Which was fine. It has worked out fine.
A due date is an educated guess, a shot in the dark, a single box selected from the calendar grid. Meanwhile, labors and deliveries most often hang on the mystery of hormones… or something. I’ve heard it said that not even doctors fully understand what exactly triggers it.
Make plans.
Tomorrow is a due date for me, too, albeit a more certain one. It was selected by my publisher last (2015) July, right after I signed my contract. It was chosen for reasons I didn’t quite understand at the time, but my editor said it would allow time for editing and also for about six months of marketing.
And it gave me Time–something I didn’t realize at all that I would be needing.
At the time, last July, signing the contract to publish the novel I had been working on since time out of mind, I was eager to get it Out There. I thought all it needed would be a glance or two by a generous eye. I had already crafted and re-crafted it, and I’m an edit-as-I-go kind of writer: I can’t let an error wait for later, and I test the rhythm of my sentences even as I’m churning them out. I return compulsively to paragraphs to correct redundancies. I write with dictionary and thesaurus in hand, so to speak.
Surely this book wouldn’t need more than a year before it was Out There.
But it wasn’t long, working with my editor, before I realized that this book of mine Needed Help. It wasn’t just a good idea–it was Absolutely Necessary that the story be kept in the quiet shelter of some shared files for a while. We decided that the edits needed to be finished in January, and suddenly the time that had seemed too long couldn’t be long enough. I sat for hours with laptop and drafts, trying to work through and smooth out and figure out the presenting problems of this book. In all the time I spent writing this novel, the last hours of editing were decidedly the hardest.
And then they were done.
After which the waiting really began, because covers had to be designed and promotions had to be sought, and I sincerely thanked my publishers more times than I could count for all the expertise they had on all of these things that I couldn’t possibly begin to guess at.
And then there was the book.
But even then it wasn’t time to get it Out There, because the real promotion had only just begun. So there were trips to Chicago and Orlando, and all kinds of meeting people who might possibly (we hoped) decide to give Maddie a read. And every time, with every conversation, with every title page insribed, I thought about that book carried away from me in the hands of a stranger, and I knew without saying so that just a little piece of me had walked away with it.
Maybe that’s when it began to feel–back there in the months of May and June–that it was actually a very good thing that the book wouldn’t be Out There for a while, that I would be more than happy to wait until September–until mid-September, actually–for people to start reading this book in earnest.
There have been some Incredibly Helpful moments along the way. At the end of June, Kirkus Reviews amazed us all with a glorious (and glowing) review. There has been nothing like that moment–in all of this process–sitting high above Orlando in my hotel room and reading those words: “Most powerfully, Stevenson links the spiritual to the physical…letting love for the mortal body open space for love of the divine.”
And there was the conversation, just over a week ago now, with a literature-professor friend who asked the very questions I had hoped the book would provoke and then some. We talked for an hour but it felt like minutes, because the ideas and methods and elements he explored in the novel were the things that had fascinated and held me, that had compelled me to lose sleep and sit silent for hours, to give up–senselessly, it sometimes seemed–an otherwise vibrant life to fill page after empty page.
And then there was Amazon, enormous warehouse and distributor that it is, who decided (because what else is one to do with books-in-stock?) to ship Maddie–without warning more than a month before she was set to go.
Suddenly there I was, due date circled in red, a bull’s-eye in mid-September, delivering this baby about six weeks premature.
Except that I wasn’t delivering it. Amazon was. “It’s as if,” I said to my husband, “I went to the hospital for labor and delivery, only to be told that my baby was already down the hall.”
So much for due dates.
That was a tricky week. So many people happy to get their book in a surprise and early delivery, and I felt like I had lost something–my footing, perhaps, the proverbial rug pulled out from under and I’m sprawled somewhere down the hall. It wasn’t a huge deal; it was decidedly a first-world problem, but there was something about the unanticipated exposure that I wasn’t at all prepared for.
I think that anyone who makes art might understand what I mean. If you make art, then it’s likely you’re passionate about it. It’s probable you believe in it with all–or nearly all–that you are. It’s an expensive thing, in its way, to make art. It costs. My editor said it about this book, and in truth, her words help me to understand how I feel about it: “It’s one of the most beautiful, brave books I’ve ever read,” she says.
Well, I hope it’s beautiful, and I do think it might be. But I’m pretty sure it’s brave–because it terrifies me.
When it comes to making art, there’s a white-knuckled, deep-breath sort of moment before the curtain rises, before the doors open, or before the book is chosen from the shelf.
And I missed it. Like all three of my human babies, this baby didn’t come on her due date.
Which is fine. It has worked out fine.
Because a glorious gift of this early release–a gift bestowed unwittingly by Amazon–has been the joy of the early readers. I’m sure I haven’t heard from everyone who has read it, but time and again I am learning that that people love her, that they “get” her, that this is a book that will stay with them.
I am delighted.
What more does a parent, an artist, a writer want than to know than that her child will thrive in the world? Will be, moreover, a blessing to others? What more, indeed? Never mind the timing of her birth.
It makes one want to celebrate. Which I will do. On September 13th. On Maddie‘s (second) Birth Day.
