So my big news this week is that I finally turned my book Angels Before Me into my agent. It feels pretty good, not the least because it’s the first book I’ve written start to finish from scratch by starting with a synopsis.
Technically, it started with a paragraph. See, when Richard took me on as a client, he took me on as a nonfiction client. I’d written a proposal for a book about women in the military that, oh, I don’t know, doesn’t paint us all as suffering victims of rape and misogyny. But that book – for now at least – has been killed by the ethics police.
Which prompted Richard and I to have a couple of conversations. About like, oh, I don’t know, where to go next. So I shot him about 8 ideas, 6 of which I cheated with and already had at least 1 draft of the book written.
The only 2 he liked existed in synopsis form only. Really? I mean, here I was getting ready to take command and I needed to have something already done. Nope. He liked the 2 that weren’t written. Cue need to learn a process that did not involve throwing out the whole book and starting over. Technically, you could say I wrote this book 6 times, 3 in synopsis and 3 in full draft. But having just turned it in, I’m kind of oh, I don’t know, terrified?
Cause I wrote a young adult novel about war. About family violence. And there’s a little bit of faith thrown in, sometimes abandoning it and sometimes coming back to it. And this a kids book. Now, I won’t go and say there’s gratuitous violence in it but I also didn’t pull back on certain things. Certain things that Richard said oh no, you’re cheating if you don’t put them on the page.
I was not comfortable with the idea of putting some of these things on the page. Some remained off stage. Others, though, other scenes found a way onto the page. And I just know for a fact that I’m going to have some folks highly pissed at what I’ve written.
I think back to the blog I wrote about the censorship over in Humble Texas and Eileen Hopkins’ books being banned from the teen reader event. I think about being put in that same uninvited category (presuming of course that this thing sells). At the end of it, I looked at the reasons that Ms Hopkins wrote Crank. As a means of understanding. As therapy. As a way of bringing something that teens are dealing with into the broad light of day and acknowledging this is real.
At the end of it all, I wrote Angels Before Me as a means of understanding. As a means of putting myself in my daughter’s shoes. As a means of seeing my transition back to being a parent through my daughter’s eyes. Angels Before Me is fiction but I won’t tell you I didn’t pull from some deeply personal emotions. I hope it sells. I hope people can see honesty in the pages. I hope parents read it with their kids. I hope soldiers read it before they come home. I have so much hope for this book. I hope it doesn’t get banned but I can see where some parents might be afraid of their kids reading it.
I wrote it. And when I did my final read through, I asked myself: would I let my own children read this, when they’re old enough? Yeah, I would. I mean, its not something I want my 6 year old reading right now. But down the road? When she’s curious about everything that happened when Mommy and Daddy came home from Iraq together? Maybe it’ll give her a little insight into what we were going through. Who knows. Maybe she’ll never read it.
And maybe it won’t sell. But I wrote it honestly. I wrote the story as I thought it needed to be told. And if that makes parents uncomfortable, they don’t have to read it and they don’t have to let their kids read it. But I hope they’ll read it for themselves first and decide for themselves.
In many ways, Angels Before Me is a first book to me. But in many more, it will remain special to me. Wish me luck folks. I’m sending my baby out into the world for everyone to either laugh at or enjoy or tell me its ugly. At the end of it all, I just hope its worth reading.