How Far I've Come
I am learning to love writing again
This was written in December 2023, though I never sent the newsletter. Now, in December 2024, I’m resurrecting it.
In January 2023, I penned my first and last newsletter of the year. I said in it that if I did not write another word of In Kahoots with Kvita for the entire year, I’d call it a well earned rest.
It was indeed well earned.
I did not rest.
By the end of May, I’d parted ways with the agent I’d signed with the previous October. I won’t get into those details, but suffice to say the process was utterly demoralizing. I’d spoken in my last newsletter, Where I’ve Been, about giving up, but I didn’t realize I hadn’t actually done that yet. I still revised several books in the time I’d “given up.” I’d queried, signed with an agent, gone on sub. I thought I’d written the best book I’d ever written, and yet when we parted ways, I put that book down, and I did not pick it up again.
I did not write any original fiction for months. From January 2023 to July 2023, I did not write a single word of my own stories. I admit I began to write one overly long, overly indulgent, barely coherent fanfiction for a fandom I will never admit I’m in. I wrote it for just me and my partner. I fed it to them chapter by chapter. There was never any pressure to publish. It was delicious.
This maybe wasn’t my longest break from original fiction ever, but it was my most absolute. I felt in that time that the dream was dead. I buried her. I mourned her.
I resurrected her in July.
She was beautiful, then. She took the form of a short, partial revision on two of my books. I did it because I wanted to see if I could. I went back to my old work to see if I could do it better, and I found, surprisingly, that I could. Time and distance had fostered the growth I needed, and though I wasn’t, and am not, perfect, I was better than I’d been. So I threw two books into the query trenches, just to see what would happen. And I settled in. And I was quiet.
Sometime in October, I realized how far away I was from the writer I’d used to be. How far I’d come. And truthfully, while there were huge avenues of growth, there were also huge chasms that had opened up. Ones I didn’t like.
I didn’t feel inspired, and I didn’t feel excited. The fear of failure had overshadowed my interest in the challenge itself. I had lunch with a friend who talked about some of the same, about needing to focus in on the writing itself, not the act of publishing. I walked out feeling like all that was standing in my way was myself.
Believe it or not, I’d never really taken writing seriously. It couldn’t make me enough to be my career, so it would always be my on and off again hobby. It was hard enough that I feared it, and consuming enough I couldn’t escape it. I approached my Word docs from the side, as if a sudden movement would cause the words to abandon me. Drafting was agony, but editing was demoralizing—these two truths were all I had.
Then, in December, I received my first of three offers of rep, and my writing exploded out of me. I was set the challenge of writing a whole new book, and my vision for it unfolded in a burst of clarity. I explicitly thought that I needed to find a way to unpack the writing process for myself in a way that I’d done with all my other artistic processes—painting, crafting, architecture—but had been too afraid to do properly with writing. I took what I thought I knew and threw it out the window. I edited as I drafted, something I’d always been too scared to do before. I tried to have fun with it, like I did with the fanfic I wrote. I thought about writing it only for me, to feed to myself chapter by chapter. I wondered what I, personally, would find delicious.
I don’t know if it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, but it is the most rewarding.
It is a book about coming home to something you used to hate, and finding new beauty in it. It is a book about coming home.
And I realized I wasn’t ready to sign with someone new. None of the three agents were right for me, but critically, I wasn’t right for them. I didn’t have clarity of purpose for my writing or my career yet. I needed to write without an agent’s expectations, without publishing’s expectations, and see what came out. I needed the challenge for the sake of the challenge. So I turned all three of them down. It was awful. It was the biggest relief of my life. I was placing faith in myself for the first time in years.
Writing novels is the hardest project I have ever picked up. It is also the most inevitable. All paths of my life bend toward the written word. I will never be free of this. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. These contradictions sustain me as I look to 2024.
However far I’ve come, I’m grateful to be here.
Addendum [Dec 2024]:
The book I wrote after turning down those offers turned into my debut novel AN UNLIKELY COVEN, which will release in October 2025 from Orbit/Hachette. I wrote it in 2 months, queried it, and signed with my now agent James McGowan at Bookends in March 2024. James was precisely the right champion for me, and the book sold by June in a three book deal. I am learning to love writing again. That is the result of being surrounded by some very good people. You should all probably add AN UNLIKELY COVEN on Goodreads and, eventually, preorder it, so you can read my acknowledgements where I will list those very good people, and then some.
As I head into debut year, this newsletter will see more use and a lot of it will be book promo, but I still hope to continue writing just like this—a heart to heart with my readers, a style reflected also in my actual fiction. In 2025 you’ll meet Joan Greenwood (star of AUC) and you’ll begin to see what I mean.
Until then,
Kvita