The Pressure of a New Release

Publishing and Parenting strike again

I had a baby 18 days ago. That’s less than three weeks. I have to say those numbers to myself over and over.

I have to remind myself those aren’t numbers that scream “Get the hell back to work.”

I have to say that because I’m already back to work. Not at my dayjob, which comes with maternity leave I am very much taking. But I am back to stressing about my upcoming book deadline. I am back to polishing up LGBTQReads posts. I am back to talking Cool for the Summer’s final cover (which I approved from my hospital bed) (and which I love) (and which will be revealed on September 23rd) and That Way Madness Lies’ internal design (which I just saw, loved, and approved yesterday), and filling out a questionaire for [redacted] and [redacted] for [redacted] and don’t get me started on Buzzfeed.

Or the new blogging gig I just accepted.

No, I can’t explain why I thought two weeks post-partum was a reasonable time to accept a new gig.

(Also, I want to be clear here that I have a toddler in school and I also have a nanny and I also have a wonderful husband who’s currently on paternity leave. It’s not because I’m Superwoman-ish that I can do this stuff; it’s because I am privileged as all get out. Let’s be clear.)

Last year I realized the agent I had signed with after much deliberation was not actually the right agent for me at all, and I signed with a wonderful new one who is exactly what I both wanted and needed. At the time, I did not have a new manuscript to query with, because Cool for the Summer had been my query manuscript and it sold in a two-book deal that meant I wouldn’t have a free new YA for a while. However, whereas last year I made the determination that I was not an author who could query without a brand-new book, this year I made the determination that I could. I had things in the works, I had some open subrights, I had a partial adult manuscript I wanted to shop, I had a brand-new anthology proposal…I had stuff.

Then other things moved and suddenly my dance card was weirdly full. (More on that soon. I’m sorry. I swear news is coming at some point, but, you know publishing.) I had to sit and think through publishing season by season and when I’d be writing and editing and I was stretched so, so thin I literally could not submit one more proposal.

And I was also having a baby. A very wanted, long-tried-for baby.

“I am a bad mother.” It hit me so hard, the realization that I had done all this work toward my publishing career only to realize I had no idea how bringing another child was going to fit into it. I hadn’t planned for books to fill in the cracks in family time; I’d planned for family time to fill in the cracks around books. Somehow. Hopefully.

This is where I’d insert the realization of why I was wrong, how I’m actually balancing it all beautifully, but I’m not. I struggle with putting anything other than work first and I don’t even know why. “Capitalism!!1!” I think in my snarkiest moments, and maybe that is all it is, a completely fucked-up mindset from growing up in the US. I don’t know. Even when I see through it, even when I know I don’t need blogging money on top of everything else, even when I know I could put in half the hours at LGBTQReads that I do, I can’t stop.

I had a baby 18 days ago and I am writing this from my desk, where the unfinished questionnaire haunts me and my inboxes fill with press releases from publicists who want to know when and where I’m covering all these books and my book 2 due in January is stuck at 27K because even when I open it the prospect of moving forward is terrifying, even though (especially because?) I’m up to the very scene I wrote in my head through so much of my pregnancy, just waiting to get there.

I am writing this from my desk where a few clicks would take me into my dayjob email where emails are addressed to me as if I’m checking in every few days, as I know my boss hoped I would be, as I sort of implied I would because I knew it was what she wanted to hear. But I haven’t checked in a week, and as I watch the number of work emails on my phone grow, I am filled with a steady panic that will only increase over the nine weeks I have left to this leave.

I am writing this from my desk and I can’t seem to just hit Publish because when I do, I have to decide what to do next. Open the manuscript again? Finish the questionaire? Write the thank-you cards I owe to family members? Schedule the toddler’s flu shot even though I can’t stop picturing him terrified and crying at the needle and it freezes me in my tracks before I can even pick up the phone? Get back to work on either one of the blog posts I have due next week?

Or do I take a nap, because I was up nursing and changing diapers for hours in the middle of the night?

I’d really like a nap.

But let’s be real.