This is a test

What if I just write?

Months ago, on one of the first warm days of Spring, when I was just starting my intense string of Spring babies, my literary agent called me.

Let’s backtrack here and talk a little about the epic journey my book proposal has been on:

I started writing it in September 2020. I had almost a full proposal by January of 2021, but waylaid by long COVID I put it aside for some time, and didn’t finish it until August of 2021. I sent it to a few agents, talked to a couple of then, and then signed on with a dreamy one.

Here’s something about publishing that I didn’t fully appreciate, even having worked at a publisher for a year when I was 21 and having had my dissertation courted by an academic press (though I never published it, too burned out by a year of writing it in an unfinished basement with a newborn attached to my breast and a 2.5 year old doing somersaults above me). There is an interminable number of steps between coming up with a non-fiction book idea and then actually writing that book. There’s writing the proposal, which is in itself practically a book — a book with a structure and conventions of which I am not particularly fond and find fairly unnatural, because you’re trying to convince people that your book is sellable. Then there’s finding the agent. Each agent you talk to will have a different vision for the book. When you choose the one whose vision is the most exciting and aligns the most with yours, then you start revising the book proposal again.

Which is what we started doing. The revisions were not impossible, but they were substantial. And before I started them in earnest, I got pregnant with Hanif. After which time I proceeded to spend my pregnancy brutally nauseated and anhedonic from anti-nausea meds. In other words, I could not write. At all.

In December, when I was 36 weeks pregnant and still nauseated, Andy got laid off from his tenured job, and the glorious leave we’d planned for me — me, who had to go back to midwifery school 3 weeks after having Jo, who had to go back to teaching (remotely) 1 week and (in person) after 3.5 week after Wren — was suddenly gone. I spent the year after Hanif’s birth doing only 2 less births than I did the year before. I also spent that year building a midwifery mentorship program that has exceeded all my most wild imaginings— because it was necessary, because I wanted to, because other people wanted me to, and also, to try to supplement our income without spending more nights away from my baby. I also started this substack, figuring that if I was going to write, I might as well make a little money for it.

Meanwhile, the proposal sat, gathering proverbial dust.

So the call from Soumeya on that first warm day of Spring could have easily been a “bitch where’s my proposal?” call. It had been, after all, two and a half years since I’d started working with Soumeya.

But it wasn’t. It was a “the world needs your book” call. It was an “editors are asking about you” call. It was an “I sometimes wonder whether you think you deserve to write” call. And it was also a “the world has changed since you wrote your last proposal, so maybe you need to rethink the whole project” call.

In other words, in that hour we spent on the phone, I was by turns invigorated, exhausted, terrified, reassured, curious, intimidated, and exhausted again. The idea of rethinking the proposal, of scrapping so much hard work and rewriting when I already felt like it had been sitting for so long, sounded completely impossible.

And I still had to get through my Spring births before I could even think about it.

I expressed all of this to Soumeya. One of the last things she said to me was, “I think you need to play with it. What if you just write and see what happens?”

Easier said than done, I thought, getting off the phone so I could go back to seeing clients.

But friends, that is what I just spent the summer doing. I just wrote. I didn’t worry about the form of the proposal. I just wrote, and wrote, and wrote, in between prenatal visits and nursing a toddler and long languorous swims in Vermont lakes and crying over testimonies from Gaza and bringing my teen to a college writing program and picking her up from a college writing program and doing homeschool paperwork for the upcoming school year and meeting with my mentees. I averaged just 3-4 hours a day, 3-4 days a week for eight weeks…somewhere between just 72-128 hours total, around the equivalent of 2-3 full time work weeks if I was considering writing a traditional 9-5 job. In other words, not a lot. But, I wrote. A lot. By the end of summer I had 150 pages of writing I’m really proud of. They’re not perfect. And, still, the proposal is not done. But, I have a much stronger sense of my project. I understand exactly what I’m trying to do, and how each chapter fits to do it. The rest of the revisions I need to do, things like the marketing section or the comp titles, will come easily because of I really really understand — on a different level than I did before — where this book will fit into the world and the work it is going to do.

Just writing.

This is all by way of saying, here is why I haven’t been in this space — because I have limited writing time and it all went toward my book project. Now those pages are in Soumeya’s hands, and because there are a lot of them, it will probably take some time before I know how she feels about the direction I’ve taken the project in. So it’s a good time to return here. But it’s felt intimidating. I still have all the same questions: how do you write about birth and parenting — or anything — in a world where the United Nations is warning us that “almost the entire population” of Gaza will be annihilated if we continue on the path we are on? I feel pressure to provide something great, something insightful, something worth the wait. And that internalized pressure just makes me stay away longer. So I finally decided to pose to myself, and to you, the same question Soumeya posed to me all those weeks ago: what if I just write? What if it’s enough, today, to just say: hi. this is where I have been, this is what I’ve been doing. What if I have faith that those of you who have shown faith in me, by being here, and by sticking around here, don’t think I have to write some magnus opus every single time? What if you might be willing to accept me saying, this is where I have been, this is what I’ve been doing and still be curious about what I’ll write next?

So, here is that test. Consider this a tentative little hello. Consider this an invitation, a question to you: this summer, where have you been, what have you’ve been doing? (Tell me, in the comments!). Consider this practice, re-acclimation, me dipping my toe into the big intimidating waters of this little space I’ve built and perhaps neglected, with faith that my body will adjust to the water, and that pretty soon I’ll swim.

Love,

Robina

PS: if you have any burning questions for me or subjects you’d like me to write about, I’ll happily take them! It can only help me get into the water faster. :)