The Pickled Cucumber

I have been working on a novel about the great tea clipper races since 2008. It has been a long voyage. Lots of rewrites and editing. It seems, perhaps, finally, to be heading toward home port. After having worked and tinkered and rewritten I am finally ready for a few people to see a version of the whole thing.

I’ve been a member of a writing group in my local community for several years. They are delightful folks. Extremely helpful. We meet every other week to discuss each other’s work. The problem is that with a fluctuating group of 6-10 people, the math doesn’t allow for you to submit and get feedback more than 3-4 times per year. Our last meeting was in early December before we took off for all of the holiday and end-of-year ruckus. This left a span of several weeks during which I proposed that they just read the rest of the second half of my book which they had been nibbling on for the past several years. They graciously agreed.

Despite the years I’ve tried to write, and my time in an MFA program (consisting almost entirely of writing workshops), it’s still a bit nerve-wracking every time I send my work off to someone else. You write hard, and research, and work on the thing, but you don’t know how it looks to outside eyes. Sometimes, you think it’s pretty much ready for publication, only to be unceremoniously disabused of your fool-hearty notions. Occasionally, something that’s been simmering so long in your mind that it’s lost all flavor and color still gets a surprisingly positive reception. It’s just hard to know how things are going to go. The menu of writing techniques I still need to learn scrolls on into infinity.

The same general post-election dysphoria that led to me restarting this blog also inspired me to work harder on my novel than I ever have before. I unsubscribed from all political podcasts. I avoided the news and got off of social media. I put my head down and just wrote for a month. Monk mode. Undistracted in the calm before the storm.

I feel pretty good about what I’ve accomplished. The book is closer than ever to being ready to start sending out to agents. It’s still got a ways to go, though, I think.

The frustrating thing about any creative pursuit is that it’s sometimes hard to know how to make it better. Your artistic submarine sends a ping out into the darkness. You get a reading back about what lies before you. You fiddle with nobs and levers and squint at your pressure gauges and hope that your adjustments move you in a better direction. Hard to know, though. Sometimes you run into stuff. Sometimes alarms start blurping and you’re dangerously low on oxygen. Hard to see it from the outside. It’s all very inexact. An art, as it were, rather than a science.

The feedback I got from the group was fantastic as always.

I got some ideas of the big-picture problems, a sense of where things seem to running smoothly, and a plan for what to work on next. I’m hoping to be able to knock these edits out in the next few weeks. I’ve got a couple other beta readers to send it to.

After that?

After that a chasm sort of opens up before me. While my experience in the writing world is fairly practical and hard-won, querying agents isn’t something I’ve done with any earnestness before. I’ve had a couple of projects I’ve toyed with, completed books which I enjoyed writing, but which I didn’t really seriously believe were good enough to publish. This is different. I’ve been at this for 15 years. This is kind of a big deal for me. I really want it to work.

But… statistically speaking… there are no guarantees. All of this work could be for naught. There’s no way to know until I start sending it out. That’s scary. Much like sending stuff to a writing group, I guess.

I’ll keep you posted.

About Joshua Rigsby

Joshua Rigsby runs an independent bookstore in a small southern town. His writing has been featured on Thrillist, Atlas Obscura, Southern California Public Radio, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Atlantic.

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