The Book That Took 18 Years to Find a Home

When I initially put pencil to paper for my first novel, God Bless the Child, it really was a primitive operation. Armed with a stack of yellow legal pads, two or three sharpened pencils, and roughly six miraculous hours of freedom each week, I started pushing out a story that took 18 years to publish, but I think this book and I needed that time together. We’ve both grown and changed. We are ready.

(I Got 8 Agent Offers; Then, My Book Died on Sub.)

There is a sassy three-year-old who is an essential part of my publication story. Her name is Charlotte. When I started putting shape to the novel, I thought she was too little to ride the bus by herself to the preschool that was about seven miles away. Her backpack was bigger than she was. I just could not do it. Her big brother and sister were in school, and I was freelancing at the time, so I took Char to school myself. Rather than drive all the way home and back, I watched her march into the building, still miffed that she wasn’t on the bus, and I hid in the back booth of a nearby little café, where I was a regular twice a week for that full year.

Looking back, I don’t think this book of mine would have been born at all if I hadn’t allowed myself to camp out in that booth. So many tasks could have easily filled that time instead: laundry, dishes, and sweeping up tumbleweeds of hair from our sweet Golden Retriever named Frank. When you are mother to three young children, carving out time to do something lofty and dreamy like work on a book seems frivolous, self-indulgent, and well, lofty and dreamy. I’m still glad I did it.

Eighteen years later, that three-year-old has graduated from college and traveled the world all by herself. And her mama’s book is finally getting published.

It’s important to point out that it did not take me all that time to write the book. The first draft was ready in about 18 months. I was fortunate to be working with a professional editor. He encouraged me, but also helped me unload some bad habits. We started pitching to agents. It’s a grueling process that humbles you. A thick stack of rejection letters is tucked somewhere deep in the bowels of my basement that proves just how subjective and capricious the whole thing can be.

One agent requested that I send in the full manuscript. Writers know this is a coveted request to receive. Shaking, I sent it off with my fingers crossed. Several weeks later, she called, wanting me to dive back in and make some changes. My skin had thickened up enough to know that this was just part of the process. I didn’t think this would be a problem, until she described what she had in mind. I would need something sharper than a red pencil. Surgical gloves and a scalpel would be required to remove a primary character and plot line. This was no cosmetic surgery; it was essentially a soul transplant. I told her I would think about it, knowing that I would do no such thing. It was part pride, part conviction that I knew my characters, my story, better than she did. I cried all weekend and put God Bless the Child in a drawer for a while.

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Life kept getting in the way. We moved. I started working full-time. There was illness and loss. Dinners needed to be made, towels folded, and birthdays celebrated. We weathered storms as our three kids grew up and we all learned together that life isn’t fair or particularly orderly. We’ve lost parents, changed jobs, and navigated our son’s serious mental illness. During this patch of life, finding a booth to hide with my paper and sharp pencils felt impossible. There was more than laundry and dog hair at stake. It’s just what you do when you love deeply.

As our children have grown into incredible adult versions of themselves, the nest has emptied, but not all the way. We’re still needed. We work full-time. There are meals to be prepared, weeds to be pulled, mail to be opened, and loved ones to be loved. It finally dawned on me that waiting around for giant pockets of free time to float downstream to find me was not a solid strategy.

I decided it was high time I reclaimed space and time for joy, and writing is my idea of a good time. It felt like a relief, like running into an old friend. On a whim, I reached back out to my editor to see if he’d give my new short stories a read. He was glad to hear from me and happy to read my new work. He also nudged me to pull God Bless the Child out of the vault. I’d been avoiding this but opened a bottle of wine and started reading. We agreed it still had legs. He thought together with the new stories, we had the makings of a solid three-book series.

We got to work tweaking the novel and crafting a proposal for an agent he thought would be interested in the project. She took me on, and before we knew it, I had a contract for the series from a traditional publisher. The first people I called were my husband and three children. There has been whooping and hollering and shared joy from these people, my people. I love them for knowing this piece of me that needs sunlight and watering.

One book published is a win; a three-book series feels like a great big piece of cake waiting to be devoured. It has been worth the wait. In that waiting, time has not stood still and neither have I. I’ve been stretched and seasoned, pushed and pulled, roughed up a bit, and softened, too. The writer left standing is neither withered nor diminished. She is nimble and grateful, and capable of knowing that so many true things can happen in a minute, an hour, 18 years, a lifetime.

There are beginnings and ends, and sometimes, if we’re open to it, there are sweet spaces waiting in the shadows to be noticed and claimed.

Check out Anne Shaw Heinrich’s God Bless the Child here:

Bookshop | Amazon

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