[SWP: Behind the Book] Breathe, Part Two
Contributor
Written by
Kelly Kittel
March 2014
Contributor
Written by
Kelly Kittel
March 2014

Author's Note: When we left off at the end of Part One, our narrator--me--had been working on Breathe for two years and was in Guatemala kneeling at the feet of famous authors who filled her head with their infinite wisdom ("avoid taking the reader to the bathroom!") on the banks of Lake Atitlan, also known as the bellybutton of the planet. Onward to Part Two, the next five years . . .

A month after I returned from Guatemala in July of 2008, we rented out our house in Rhode Island and moved to Costa Rica for the upcoming school year. There our days began and ended with a howler monkey alarm clock, and I walked and swam the beach daily, puzzling out plot and story structure. I began working on platform with the advent of a New Year’s resolution blog and had my first published success as a writer when my essay, Noah’s Name, was published in a bereavement magazine. I wrote and I wrote. Some days I’d look up from my keyboard and half expect to see Noah come toddling across the tile floor to me, arms outstretched. Many days I’d wave my kids off to school, sitting down with a hot cup of coffee at our dining room table, only to greet them many hours later when they walked back in and said, “Mom, have you been sitting there all day?” And, mostly, I had. I finished the manuscript again, this time calling it The Light of the Son, but it was still very, very long. Start over.

When the school year ended in June of 2009, we relocated to the coast of Oregon and built two yurts by a creek nestled in a national forest. I attended Wordstock in Portland and my second writing conference, this time near Seattle, where I was introduced to that four-letter word, theme. I joined She Writes online and became the co-chair of the Willamette Writers Coastal Chapter, meeting authors and learning something new about craft every month. By then I'd realized that my unspoken motto was, “Why write less when you can write more?” so I hired an editor to help me cut my manuscript to a manageable size. Surrounded by the setting in which a good chunk of the story took place, I wrote in my alpaca glittens all morning while Bella was at kindergarten. In the afternoons, my daughter Christiana and I would take long walks along the creek, watching the salmon spawn while brainstorming book titles.

In August of 2010, I attended my first Willamette Writers (WW) conference, where I pitched my freshly trimmed manuscript to five agents. Then I moved back to Costa Rica for another school year, unpacked in our tree-house and sent my manuscript off to them with a prayer for acceptance. I met a writer at the kids’ school and another on the beach and the three of us started a lunchtime writing group. We called ourselves Tuesdays with Amy and met poolside at the Langosta Beach Club, chewing salmon paninis and sipping real-sugar Cokes while Bella played in the pool. We traded literary agent contacts and tried to figure out how to get our manuscripts published--and these kindred spirits became my first readers. I revised my manuscript again, submitting chapters to WeBook with good reviews. In between morning and evening beach walks and homeschooling Bella, I queried over 150 agents from my casa on the playa. I also continued building my platform by writing the Costa Rica section of Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America.

Back at the yurts in 2011, I returned to the WW conference, pitched to eight more agents, then went to Wordstock again, where Steve Almond encouraged “radical disclosure.” I paid for another partial edit and revised again, adding conflict and tension, and changing the name to East Meets West. My WeBook advanced to Round 2 and I queried another 20 agents. By then I’d racked up over 100 rejections, typically receiving some variant of “your project is not right for our list.” Was it my writing? Or my lack of platform or marketing skills? I continued to work on all three of those things, and one day I realized that I didn’t need anyone’s approval to be a writer. An author, maybe, but not a writer. I kept writing in a variety of genres, and an essay I wrote in Guatemala, Yoga Matt, was accepted for a travel humor anthology—Moose on the Loose. With Bella in school all day for the first time, I fine-tuned character development while swimming countless pool laps and agonized over theme while watching seals on beach walks.

In the summer of 2012, I pitched to seven more agents at the WW conference and moved back to RI, where I read about the new She Writes Press (SWP). I dedicated an e-mail folder to them in my inbox, sent in my chapters with $25, and was accepted as a Track 2 Writer in September. But I was not selected for the Passion Project or the She Writes/Seal Press publishing contest, and I was still hoping to hear something positive from the agents I’d pitched. With two kids in college, I just couldn’t make the financial leap. I joined the Providence Writers Guild and spent another nine months submitting and revising my book in its entirety to accommodate their fiction-writers feedback. I guest blogged, published another essay on a website, and wrote two articles and a book review for a local magazine. And those six pages I’d initially written about salmon? They swam into an essay, Dam It, which was also published in a literary journal.

Last July we received an unexpected payment on an outstanding debt and the opportunity to publish with SWP was finally within my grasp. By then I’d sent over 200 queries, pitched 20 agents, fielded over 120 rejections, attended 3 conferences and countless workshops, and worked with 5 editors. I’d been in 3 writing groups and had 15 readers of my full manuscript, including 3 agents, and had revised my manuscript too many times to count. We’d moved 5 times and I’d solidified our familial reputation for being late for everything by telling my kids too many times, “Just a minute, I need to finish this sentence” before dashing out the door to one more soccer game or school event while wondering what we’d have for dinner. And then, of course, realizing I was still wearing my Grinch pajamas. When I began writing, my oldest daughter, Hannah, was a junior in high school looking at colleges and I was still nursing Bella, who was two. Hannah graduated from college three years ago and is now in graduate school, while Bella, age ten, has never known a time in her life when I haven’t been working on this book. For seven years this book has had me scribbling notes on every piece of scrap paper I could find and has woken me up in the middle of many nights like a newborn baby with its own urgent needs. And just as you would to prepare for any pregnancy, I’ve been reading, studying, gathering advice, attending classes and learning to Breathe!

I signed with SWP on September 28 to publish Breathe and a week or so later I received my draft tip sheet from Brooke with my randomly assigned publication date—May 14, 2014. May 14 happens to be the day that our son Jonah died and was born, in that order, as recounted in Breathe and also in the forthcoming SWP anthology Three Minus One. As I said, for me the seven-year journey of writing this book has been akin to the longest pregnancy ever, and publishing it the literary equivalent of birthing. I am grateful that I’m being given another chance to bring forth new life on May 14. I’m praying that, this time, it will be vital; it will be breathing. Just as I do for all of my children, I pray that it will march forth and make the world a better place, that it will be treated kindly and will help people. And that it will have a long, long life.

KK

 

P.S. For all of you, my fellow She Writers, I wish for you the perseverance and fortitude required to live your writing dreams. Publishing is like life: everyone’s journey is different. I pray that your path will be shorter and simpler than mine, but if it’s not, hang in there. Keep working on the things within your reach—your writing, platform, and marketing skills—and, most of all, don’t lose hope.

 

‘Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul; and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.’

– Emily Dickinson

 

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Comments
  • Liz Gelb-O\'Connor

    Awesome story, Kelly!

  • Rossandra White

    Wow! High-five my friend. I feel I can call you that because I've been on this path with you, with a slightly different landscape, a few character changes, but with all the travails and small victories of spirit. Can't wait to read your book!! 

  • Janet Singer

    Thank you for sharing your journey with us, and I've been writing along with you since 2008.....my memoir is now complete, but the journey continues. I'm excited to see how/when it will be published. Looking forward to reading your book!

  • Helen Rena

    This is a phenomenal story. Good luck with the publication!

  • Rita Gardner

    Kelly, thank you SO much for sharing your writing story.  My own (expat) memoir has taken about 12 years to fully come to fruition, and I too, after countless re-writes and submissions to agents, chose SWP.  The path to publication is certainly a learning experience, and expect will be all they way up to my publish date (Sept) and beyond. Writing is one thing; becoming visible to the world is entirely another!   I can't wait to read Breathe.  Thanks again for your bravery and perserverance.

     

  • Kelly,

    I am excited to read your book and certainly can relate to that long road towards your joyous celebration. 

    Hats off and good for you. Congratulations!

    Cheers,

    Prissy