Being On Submission: In the Backrooms of an Almost Debut Novel

Understand that even before I landed an agent this last spring, I’d heard how stressful it is to be “on submission” with a novel. Especially a debut. Sometimes it takes months. Sometimes years. Sometimes never. And sometimes right after you give up a random publisher decides to double-back and jump in with an offer. There are thousands of ways it can go down, and most of them involve an excruciating amount of waiting.

I’m only four months in so it’s early days, but even with the thrill of having my horror novel (currently titled House of Bad Bones) hitting the ol’ trad publishing inbox circuit, and even with all the excitements pouring in from family and friends, the main feeling I’ve wrestled with has been anxiety. Part of me feels absurd for admitting that. I should be (and very much am) grateful to have a shot. I like my agent, his history, his ideas. I feel good about it, and it’s been a long hard road to this point. Simply being in the position of having an agent after searching since 2010 (with some very early, not-ready-for-prime-time novels of mine) is by itself a huge feat and a joy. Especially for someone who has wanted to publish a novel since I was a kid. And I also saw how challenging it is for both authors and agents to find the right connection from my time working at Writers Digest and hearing tales of desperation, frustration, success, and abject failure from almost every angle. It’s hard as hell to find that one specific book (or agent) you believe in when you’re awash in a sea of books (and agents) you don’t.

And so while I kept writing and kept submitting, years passed. Novels that didn’t get a bite went into the drawer and new novels went out, and more years passed. I started to feel like traditional publishing might be a little beyond reach. And it still might. Rejections are expected. You roll with them. You use them to push you forward. I’ve gotten used to them over the years, and sure they never feel great, especially when your brain is telling you things like this book isn’t good enough, or you’re blowing you one shot at trad publishing, or your agent is going to pull the plug any minute now. None of which may be true, or all of it could be. Schrodinger’s Publishing Deal, you know? So long as I don’t hear that my chickens have come home to roost, they’re still out there clucking and pecking and searching for that editor who wants to take the book on.

And that’s where I live, in that in-between stasis. In that “backrooms” of the publishing world, winding my way through long corridors of being on sub hoping the next turn brings me good news and not a sudden drop into a dark oblivion where monsters wait.

For the most part, I’ve been trying to lay low while I let my agent do his thing. No sense in pestering when there’s no news. He knows what he’s doing, and I know what I need to do while I wait: keep writing. Polish those other novels, write new ones, create a dugout full of possible books ready to step up to the plate if the time comes. But I’m also conditioning myself (or trying to, at least) to remember that I liked my life prior to going on submission. I like writing and publishing poetry in the small press world. I like my bookshop reviews and publishing my lit mag, Hobo Camp Review. I still enjoy writing novels and have always written them for myself because I like the process, sitting there late into the night getting lost in the storylines, the revising, spending time in those places, with those characters. I’ll keep doing that regardless. And I have great family, friends, hobbies, a steady day gig. There’s a roof over my head and a few bucks for cocktails and weekend matinees in my pocket. Life is good.

And I think this is a pretty great novel too, a haunted house tale with some heart and some hope, and nightmares mixed in between. I originally called the book It Won’t Leave during the first three drafts, renamed after some good discussions with my agent. I wrote House of Bad Bones after going through a year of chemo and other medical treatments, with mixed results. After joining a clinical trial in 2016, which did turn out to be successful, I was talking with a friend about it down in San Antonio, who also told me about his new (very old) house he was renovating. He’d gutted it and had big plans, saying, “It has good bones.” It made me think, “What does a house look like that has bad bones?”

A haunted one, of course, with dark spirits and ominous curses seeped into the very structure of the home. And after everything I’d been through with chemo, it struck me that a body with cancer is very much a haunted house. There’s this thing inside that you want out, and sometimes the things you need to go through to get rid of it are terrifying and deadly. And even then, are those spirits ever truly gone? So that’s what the book is about, and because it’s a bit more personal than any other I’ve written, I’m really hoping it finds a good home, a bunch of eager readers, and gives proper spooky props to my second hometown of San Antonio, where the novel takes place and where I briefly lived in a possibly haunted house. More about that another time. In the meanwhile, back to writing…