The Dating Game

by Beth Ford Roth

I am a writer. I’ve written one novel, and am half-way through another. But don’t try looking for my books on Amazon.com. You won’t find them. Not yet, anyway. I’m one of the countless authors out there still waiting to be published.

It’s more than just waiting, really. I regularly send query letters to literary agents asking if they’d be interested in representing my book. If they are, they ask for a few chapters, and sometimes the whole novel. And then the dating game begins.

I use the term dating because that’s exactly how it feels. I’ve made myself emotionally vulnerable to another person, and then I wait to see if he or she is The One. Rejection is painful. A letter or e-mail from an agent telling me how the project’s just not right for them but to keep at it, feels just like hearing “it’s not you, it’s me” from a boyfriend.

Being a writer with an unpublished manuscript reminds me of the question: if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If no one reads what I’ve written, is it really a book? Or just 300 pages of wasted paper?

I quit my job as a public radio reporter a year ago to devote myself to finishing my first book. The decision was a lot easier than you might think. About three months before I quit, my mother was diagnosed with cancer, then subsequently a brain aneurysm. I accompanied her to most of her doctors’ visits and hospital stays. I saw waiting rooms crowded with people who didn’t have much time to live. Women and men wracked with pain in hospital beds.

It hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized how angry, how regretful I’d be if I were in their shoes. I had been wasting day after day in a job I didn’t like. The people in the waiting rooms reminded me that while I may not have a terminal illness, my time here on earth is limited. I should spend it doing something I love. Now I know, if I died tomorrow, I am living the right life today.

That doesn’t mean my decision to go for broke isn’t a painful one. It’s tough on the ego. Working as a reporter, I had daily deadlines, and felt a sense of accomplishment each and every time I met them. I got used to hearing those accomplishments on the radio each day. Now I’m working in a medium where despite my daily hard work, there’s no real measure of the quality of work I’m doing, except what’s in my own head.

I still do freelance reporting and even babysit from time to time to make ends meet at home. I cook pretty much every meal my husband and I eat, and have become a grocery store bargain shopper that would have made my Depression-era grandmother proud. I have reduced my financial footprint in our household to whatever I can earn freelancing.

By now, though, I’ve gotten used to being asked by well-meaning family and friends when I’m going to get a “real job” again. I just had a friend quit her job, and excitedly say that we should take a vacation together since we’d both be unemployed.

That really hurt, because I don’t feel unemployed at all. I feel self-employed. And I’m a tough boss. If I’m not sitting at the computer writing, I’m thinking about writing. I’ll wake up at three in the morning unable to sleep, and promptly use that time to work on my latest manuscript or short story. I may not work a straight eight-hour shift, but writing consumes more of my time than any other paying work I’ve ever had.

Believe me, there are times I wish I could be happy doing something else. To paraphrase John Lennon, if I could be a fisherman, I’d be a fisherman. If I could be happy working as a teacher, or lawyer, where there is a clear cut path to achieving the job (college degree, post-graduate work, internship, etc.) I’d do it. I’ve tried, and it’s like making a relationship work when you’re not in love. It’s exhausting and tiring and, as I learned, life’s too short and unpredictable for that.

I do have another career looming on the horizon. My husband and I are now trying to have a baby. If and when we succeed, my full-time job will be motherhood, with writing as a part-time job tacked on. I’ll take my mother (now completely healthy) up on offers to babysit so I can get in some quality time with my computer.

I know as a stay-at-home mom I’ll be in for more of the same, though. Questions about when I’m getting a “real job”, worries about not bringing in enough income, and concerns that I have nothing tangible to show for my efforts. But I have a feeling that just like writing, being a mom will have its own small daily rewards that no one else may see, but in the long run will be well-worth the sleepless nights and worry.