Christin Taylor: Words on the Side

So, we’re moving again. This time across the country to Gettysburg, PA – as in Penn-syl-vania.

For the last nine years, we have lived on the West Coast. I’ve written a whole book (scheduled to hit the shelves next Spring about our years in LA, the way in which Dwayne and I grew into ourselves there. So, there’s not a whole lot more left to say in this small space of a blog about all that Los Angeles means to our family.

And then, our time here in Bellingham has been a gift, an answer to the longings I’ve had for making home. I have found here a lifestyle I could not have achieved in LA for our little family, a lifestyle tucked into the many shades of green.

When I left LA, my Spiritual Director gave me a word. The word was “thrive.” She felt the Holy Spirit had told her I would thrive here in Bellingham. And when we first moved here, I found no small amount of coincidence in the fact, that the Northwest is a place fit for thriving. Trees and plants flourish in it’s temperate and wet climate.

But unlike the the trees marching up the arboretum behind our residents hall, I did not sprout green shoots as soon as landing in Bellingham. For the first year we lived here, I was sick and pregnant and writhing, battling food allergies and illness and depression. I kept wondering just exactly how the word “thrive” fit into the picture of my days.

I remember one particularly dark Sunday evening, when the pain and the panic and the worry felt as heavy as a house on my chest, our small group gathered around me, put their hands on me and prayed. I wept and wept under the warmth of their touch. And then, at the end, Ed, one of the grandfather figures in the group looked at me from under his bush of salt and pepper hair and said, “Christin, I want to tell you that God has not forgotten the promises He gave you about this place.”

Ed had no idea about the secret word “thrive” my spiritual director had given me a year earlier. But I’ve come to learn in the last two years of my time with Ed that he has a particular gift for speaking into the unseen and unknown. He seems to sense things in his bones that escapes the rest of us, and to this day he has never spoken a false word.

I looked at Ed that night and drunk in the meaning of what he was saying to me. God had not forgotten that this was supposed to be a place of thriving for me.

Now another year later, I can say confidently, that Bellingham has been a place of thriving for me and even my family. Ironically, it was the pain, the writhing that forced me to break out of sick and old patterns and pushed me to find help that ultimately healed me beyond just the immediate pain.

Through the pain of pregnancy, I discovered my gluten intolerance (which I believe now has always been there under the surface and was just triggered into a new level of ugliness with the pregnancy). Now I feel better than ever. I feel healthier and stronger than I have in a few years.

Also the sickness of pregnancy threw our marriage into an upheaval and brought to the surface some of the hidden weaknesses of our relationship. Rather than suffer in private with our dysfunctions, Dwayne and I decided to take our resentments and hurts to a councilor who gently and wisely led us into a new season of health and vibrancy in our marriage. This year has been a glorious year of repairing and proactively protecting our marriage.

Also, since Nathan’s birth, I have found myself arriving at the role of stay-at-home mom with new joy. Somehow, everything seemed to click into place with our routine when Nathan was born. Now it’s not just Noelle and I looking at each other all day, trying to figure out how to do things. Now it’s the three of us, a little tribe, living each day together. We do gymnastics and Music Together and we’ve been in Bellingham long enough now to have a strong network of friends for playdates.

I also dove head first into the local MOPs group and also began taking ballet classes, a childhood dream.

Last Fall, I wrote about starting the Christin’s Health and Wellness program, doing things intentionally to help invest in my self-care so I could be a healthy mother and wife. I’m here to report that the program has been a success. I’m doing really well! The best I’ve been since Dwayne first went back to school four years ago.

So all of this to say, when we leave Bellingham and the West Coast next month, it will be with no small amount of sadness and nostalgia. We are uprooting some significant parts of our past and present to make this new journey East.

But we have known all along that we could not stay here long. We knew that Dwayne’s job was only 3-4 years at best and that there were not many (if any) options for employment around here beyond that. One of my friends, Kellie, asked me once, “I don’t know how you don’t just shut down! If I knew I would be moving in a year or two, I think I would just disconnect.”

I couldn’t answer her right away. Her words stayed with me for a long time, rolled around my heart and mind. I could see her point of view. I wasn’t quite sure why I continued to invest in friendship and routines and building a home in a place I knew eventually I’d be leaving.

But in the end the question comes down to this: Is it better to have loved and lost, then never to have loved at all?

I think hands down, 100%, I will choose the former. I will choose every time to love and lose.

I’m in Auckland, New Zealand this week, helping my sister with her brand-new little baby, Rowen Atawhai. I have to say, I know I’m biased, but I think my little nephew is about as cute as they come! He is so pettite and small and he makes Nathan, who has taken the trip with me, seem ginormous!

It is so beautiful here. The view from my sister’s deck looks out on a tumble of roof tops and trees. I appreciate how Auckland does not devour the greenery, but rather sprouts up between green spaces. Every roof is courted by foilage and yards and the neighborhood is coursed with parks and walkways.

At the moment I’m listening to a bird whose call I’m unfamiliar with. Kah-hoo-hoo-hoot. Kah-hoo-hoo-hoot. And the buzzing rap of cicadas lets me know I’m not in Bellingham anymore!

I have absolutely been in my delight around here. Soaking up the warmth and the sunshine, carrying my little nephew in the baby bjorn, while hanging my sisters laundry out to dry, cooking, vacuuming. Why is it so satisfying to do these things for my sister? It brings me absolute joy.

Yesterday, Annie and I began talking trough sleep routines. My little nephew is very sensitive to sounds and more and more as he comes out of his newborn stuppor, he finds it harder and harder to fall asleep.

So, yesterday I showed Annie the touchstone baby advice that has been passed down to me from friend to friend, “The five ‘S’s”. And I brought her my sleep bible, _Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Baby_.

How much of this has gone in to my sub-conscious, into my veins? After two kids, I find it cropping up to my mind like little green shoots at exactly the right moment, right when I need to know it. It is such a pleasure to pass along all I’ve learned to my sister and to watch her wade out into the waters of motherhood.

She and Graeme are nothing, if not competent, caring, and gentle parents. They are doing great! And will continue to do great. It’s just a matter of learning the ropes and oh, how this takes me back, all of it, to the first weeks and months when Noelle was born and Dwayne and I were in the same place, pawing our way through the fog of information and sleeplessness, learning bit by bit what it meant to take care of a bright, incredibly perceptive, baby girl.

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Okay, let’s do a quick recap of the actual logistics of how I wrote my book – just for all my writing-nerd-buddies out there.

Jan – Feb 2009: I generated 50,000 words of a rough, rough draft.

Fall 2009 – Spring 2010: I wrote a first draft of the manuscript that was roughly 57,000 words. At this point, I gave the first draft to a small circle of trusted readers, just 5 in all. These readers included Kristin Ritzau, who you read about last week, and Dr. Mary Brown, my writing professor and mentor from undergrad. When I got the feedback from my 5 trusted readers, I saw clearly that there were foundational weaknesses in the manuscript and realized that I needed to start completely over again, re-writing the manuscript for a second time from an older point-of-view with research.

Summer 2010 – Summer 2011: I wrote the second draft of the manuscript, doing research into young adult identity development all along the way. I finished this draft 5 weeks before Nathan was born.

As soon as I finished this draft, I printed it up at the local copy shop, because as Kristin likes to say, “If you live by technology, you’ll die by technology” and heaven forbid that my computer crash and my back-up drive spontaneously combust and I’m left with nothing to show for three years of writing.

I read the hard copy of my book cover to cover making structural edits by hand and then went back and cleaned those up for a Third Draft.

Then I began sending it out. I re-wrote my book proposal to better match the book I had actually written and made it my goal to send it out to 5 literary agents/publishers. So I did that and I got interest on my book from every agent and publisher that read the proposal, but ultimately, nothing happened with these leads.

It wasn’t until my father connected me to Rebecca, a professional editor, to help clean up my manuscript and do line edits, that I finally got anywhere with my submission process.

Rebecca is married to Dr. Bob, a prolific writer and professor at my alma mater. He has published books with both Wesleyan Publishing House and Abignon Press. When Rebecca read my manuscript, she passed it along to Bob who contacted me saying that he was very impressed by my writing and wanted to connect me to the head of acquisitions at WPH.

He told me that WPH was looking for young voices in the genre of narrative non-fiction, and he thought I’d be a great fit for them. I was over the moon, and deeply moved my Bob’s generosity in helping me. He went so far as to give me advice about which chapter he felt was the strongest chapter to send to WPH along with what information to include in an abbreviated proposal for them to consider.

He also went the extra mile and wrote me a recommendation letter. Even as I type this I am blown away by Bob’s incredible kindness toward a stranger. He will forever know that he was the one who ultimately kick-started my publishing career. Thank you, Bob!!

So I e-mailed the head of acquisitions at WPH, along with my abbreviated proposal, sample chapter, and Bob’s recommendation letter and within a matter of weeks, I heard back from their editor. They were interested in my book, and wanted to contact me for a further conversation. This was around November of last year.

I wrote back and told them that I would be close to Indianapolis over Christmas visiting my family and would be happy to meet with them in person.

I arrived on the steps of WPH three days before Christmas to meet with the editor, head of acquisitions, and head of marketing. The minute I met these gentlemen, I felt a resounding and overwhelming peace. I was immediately impressed by how down-to-earth, kind, and unassuming they were. I could feel in my bones that my experience with them was going to be completely different than my time with The Consultant.

I felt both excited, and ready to share with them my work, my project, my vision. After all, I had learned alot in the five years leading up to this meeting and I did not feel like a young girl asking for her big break. Instead, I felt like a woman, grown into her own skin, into her vocation, into her gifts, and ready to share confidently about my project. I believed in myself and I believed in my story, and my book, and so it was a delightful, life-giving meeting.

I think they could sense my confidence, sense that I wasn’t trying to sell them anything or spin anything, but instead that I was looking for a partner in the work that I am already doing.

Perhaps the most surreal thing was that I went to the meeting expecting to pitch my project to them, but instead found them trying to pitch themselves to me, as a publishing house excited to work with me. But they didn’t have to do this. I already knew about them. Had already done my research. I liked the quality of their work, the other authors they’ve worked with, and already knew I wanted to work with them.

My dad laughed when I shared this with him on the way home. “That’s the thing about this career where you spend all of your time working on something that doesn’t see the light of day. You wonder sometimes if it will ever be worth sharing. And then it’s a surprise when people see it for the first time and get really excited about it and want to pay you for it.”

Did I mention that my dad wrote two books published by Zondervan, before he became a big hot-shot university administrator?

So I got the contract in the mail about three weeks ago. Dwayne and I laid in bed and read over it together. I have to admit that I didn’t sign it and mail it back right away, though I knew I would and had absolutely no qualms with the condition of the agreement.

I just couldn’t get over the surreal-ness of having a book contract in my home. I just kept it on the top of the desk for a good week and a half to look at it and savour the experience of having it. Finally, I signed it and mailed it in.

My deadline for getting the manuscript to them is June 1. I have a few names I want to change. I few things here and there I want to adjust. After that, I’m not sure what comes next in the book publishing process. But I can tell you that Shipwrecked in Los Angeles is slated to be released Spring of 2013.

So stay tuned for that!

The end

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I don’t remember what happened to my writing life the first year after Noelle was born. I remember that I went back to work when she was four months old and taught two classes a week, which was a wonderful little stint away from home each week. I spent the afternoon nap-times and bedtimes making lesson plans and grading papers.

I do remember marveling at how much more efficient I was with my time management, than before Noelle came along. Having the structure of taking care of her made me value what little time I had to do work. So I was much more motivated post-baby, than I had been pre-baby. As soon as the door closed on her room, with her cherub face screaming behind it until she fell asleep, I would run to the computer, or grab my stack of freshman composition papers and start marking.

Around the time Noelle was 14 months old, a friend from Mosaic, Carrie Arcos, introduced me to NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write 50,000 words during the month of November. Now Carrie has three kids and was teaching adjunct like me, so when she took on NaNoWriMo, it lit a fire under me. If she can write 50,000 words with three kids and classes on top, I have no excuse, I thought.

* I might stop to add here that Carrie’s first novel, Out of Reach, is forth coming from Simon and Shuster’s YA imprint, Simon Pulse, this Fall. Uh-mazing! *

And so, I decided to create my own NaNoWriMo, but instead it was Write a Memoir in a Month. Between the Fall and Spring semesters, I had just around five weeks off, so I decided to dedicate that down-time to writing the manuscript of “The Devil Wears Kiton.”

Everyday, during Noelle’s 9 a.m. nap, I chained myself to the small pine desk we inherited from my great-aunt Alice and typed away. By the end of the month, I had 48,000 words and was very close to the end of the story, but there was no hiding the stinky-ness of this manuscript. You could almost smell it from across the apartment, it’s rubbish-ness wafting down over the stairs, through every corner of my mind. Yes, it was bad. No, I’m not being modest.

So I went back to work teaching English 110B and avoided the manuscript like the rota-virus.

Somewhere that Fall of 2009, I heard rumor of a consultant, retained by the office of the provost to help faculty get published. This consultant came to campus twice a semester and we, the lowly adjuncts, non-tenured, unpublished cretins of the University could sign up to meet with him!

I sucked in my breath and dove in, putting my name down for a consultation somewhere in mid-October. I brought to the meeting my book proposal for “The Devil Wears Kiton” and on that sunny, hot October afternoon in Southern California, I pushed my proposal across the smooth surface of a conference table and told the consultant all about my project.

He lit up. He was thrilled by the premise: a young girl comes to Hollywood to work in the film industry and learns she’s meant for something else. “It’s like those stories of the boys who want to be pro-basket ball players and try out for the NBA and get their dreams shattered.” The Consultant (as I will refer to him from here on out) was a middle-aged, portly man with greying hair, a grey mustache and sparkling blue eyes. Author of 26 books of his own, I had no reason to doubt his endorsement. In fact, his encouragement sent me home on a vector of new hope.

“You are much further along than you think,” he said. “You’re already running workshops and you have your own blog. I think you should try first to send your book to publishers and literary agents. Then we can talk about independently publishing if those don’t work.”

Having published so many books of his own, The Consultant had many many connections in the Christian book industry and thus began a two year journey of working with him to find a home for my book. He gave me resources about how to write a strong book proposal, as well as how to organize a book project. Both resources transformed my work and took it to the next level. He then sent my proposal out to one contact after the other, and I waited for each rejection – not discouraged yet because “it takes a lot to get a book published” and now I finally had someone in my corner. Someone who believed my story was not only worth telling, but worth selling.

I had no reason to believe that working with The Consultant might actually lead to one of the biggest and hardest blows to my journey toward getting published.

to be continued …

Well, this is kind of phenomenal: I found out last Wednesday that my book, Shipwrecked in Los Angeles, the book on which I have been working since I was pregnant with Noelle, has been picked up by Wesleyan Publishing House.

It has taken me until today for the news to sink in.

In so many ways, this is such a monumental moment for me, and I have to take some time to reflect a bit on the journey to here. At the risk of sounding pompous, or vain, or completely full of myself, I’d like to write about how – ehem – I just got a book deal.

Not to rub everyone’s face in this fact. No. So many of you have graciously asked me about my book along the way, and I want to keep you involved in the life of this book.

Also, as many of you might know who have tried to write anything in your life, the act of writing, especially the act of writing a book, is such a whole-being endeavor, so full of emotional peaks and valleys, so wrought with doubt and frustration and despair and delusion, and triumph, that I feel I need to stop and reflect on the journey of this book, for sanity’s sake.

I have to remember. I need a moment to gather up all the pieces of this story and make them whole. These pieces, after all, span across 5 years, and stretch back before either of my children were born. Much has happened to me and in me during the inception, gestation, and creation of this project.

I wont bore you with all the details, because much of writing a book is tedious work, and much of selling a book is drenched in the fine print and technicalities of business. But let me tell you a few of the names. Let me introduce you to a few of the people who helped shoulder the burden of this project and bring it to completion.

I have discovered along the way that a book is much too big a thing for one person to carry all on their own. I never would have been able to realize Shipwrecked if it weren’t for the support of so many people along the way.

Let me name some of those people:

First, there was Chris and Yvette. I was just newly pregnant with Noelle and at the time this idea of an essay was rolling around my brain. Dwayne and I were living in El Segundo, on the second floor of an old terracotta apartment complex built in the 70′s. From the landing outside our door, we could watch the massive jets at LAX landing and taking off with chest pounding volume.

It was on that landing, during a small group party that I stood with Chris and Yvette, catching some air, munching on party food, telling them this idea I had for an essay, maybe even a book. I called it, “The Story of the Painting.”

You’ll have to pick up my book and read it to know just want I’m talking about. This essay became the heart and soul of Shipwrecked, and ultimately, the epilogue. But the essay is about a painting that hangs in our hallway at this moment, which my boss gave me when I was working at the film financing company in Beverly Hills. I sensed that somewhere at it’s core the story of the painting represented all I had been through in Los Angeles chasing my dreams of working in the film industry.

Anyway, I was standing on the landing with Chris and Yvette munching on party food, telling them the story of the painting and when I was done I said, “I think there’s a book in there somewhere. It feels like a story worth telling, but I’m not sure.”

Chris and Yvette looked at each other and then beamed from ear to ear, “Christin, you HAVE to write that book!” Yvette said leaning toward me.

“Yeah, that’s definitely a book people need to read,” Chris echoed.

Not only did Chris and Yvette cheer me on that night, they were like a dog on a bone. They wouldn’t let the idea of the book die. Yvette frequently checked in with me, “How’s the book coming? Have you started writing it yet?”

I took their encouragement to heart and made a plan to draft a book proposal and write a sample chapter to start sending out to literary agents, editors, and publishers. My deadline for this assignment was Noelle’s due date. I wanted to get the proposal written and out into the world before she was born.

I called the proposal, “The Devil Wears Kiton” and the premise was pretty attrocious: a Christian version of The Devil Wears Prada. Ach, I’m embarrassed to even write that! But like a little vice grip clamped somewhere deep in my soul, this story, this painting wouldn’t let go.

Though I couldn’t quite see the shape and meaning of the book, I pushed on and got ready to send it to my first real-live contact in the publishing world.

To be continued…