I have a green thumb and I have long prided myself on being able to grow just about anything. The year I got married, I bought my first orchid. It felt like an adult thing to do. They’re fickle, slow growing, and, as I would learn, don’t appreciate generosity when it comes to water. Then they only bloom once or twice a year, and that's if you don’t kill them in the interim. My first orchid and I were not so lucky, and I swore I'd never buy one again. There's only room for one diva in this house, and it's not you, I'd whispered to it withered corpse as I slipped it in the trash.
Years later, my debut thriller was picked up by Pegasus Crime in 2019. A tour was scheduled. My cover was THE cover for the summer catalog, which arrived via courier with a handwritten congratulations note from my editor. I had done it. Arrived. Made it. I bought second-hand dresses that would pack easy and could be accessorized to match any temperature from New York to Atlanta, (where the tour would end at the Decatur Book Festival, that much I knew.) The book would release a few months earlier: May 5th, 2020.
I don’t need to tell you what happened next. But I do wonder if many people understand how hard Covid-19 hit NYC and, specifically, the publishing industry. It’s hard to print books with no cardboard. Hard to sell them with no one leaving the house. Hard to promote them when we’re all ditching the idea of modern life for sourdough starts and wondering if this is how it all ends. Hard to convince people to spend what money they have on an author they don’t know, especially when they also don’t know how much longer they’re going to be employed. Hard to muster up enthusiasm for a deranged serial killer story when the real world is so… scary.
I woke up on my debut’s release day in my bed. No emails congratulating me in my inbox. No chatter buzzing on social media. No suitcase packed. No phone calls. No one cared. That sounds dramatic, but it may not be all that far from the truth. How could they when the world had come to a screeching halt and people were dying?
Even my husband forgot.
He’s a doctor. Their realities changed exponentially, too. He’d been ordered to cancel all elective surgeries and shave his beard, among other things, and to expect to go the next 4-6 months without a paycheck so they could keep enough salaried staff paid to keep the clinic doors open and the lights on. Most days, I was sympathetic. Not on May 5th. I texted him half-way through his workday. I forget the exact words. Something snarky and passive-aggressive, no doubt. So, he stopped at the store on the way home to buy me a flower. I would bet you know what kind of flower he walked in the door with, but I’ll go ahead and say it. A potted orchid. Delicate white blossoms with butter yellow centers.
I took it in hot, trembling hands and glared at it. Glared. At a flower. Well, at seven flowers in two tidy rows on one stem. I am pretty sure the effort made me a little cross-eyed. Anyway, the point is that I hated that thing. In retrospect, it was the one tangible object that I could use to direct and absorb my frustrations for what was and my grief over what could have been and my guilt for caring this much at all when people were dying by the thousands every day. It was also the only physical proof – other than the book – that the day had happened at all. I had no choice. I had to keep it alive.
Begrudgingly, I journeyed from room to room, looking for a Most Perfect place that would give it enough light without too much sun, all the while silently lamenting that I still didn’t have an official workspace in our house. I researched how to take care of it, how to know when to prune it and re-pot it, how to know it was… happy.
Here’s the thing about orchids: once you find their place in the just-right-light, they usually don’t need much at all. They grow slow. Agonizingly slow. They only need a little water every now and then. You can effectively forget about it for a week or more and it’s none the worse for it. Then, in a flurry of activity, they need to be pruned and repotted (with their own kind of mostly not-dirt dirt,) and misted to reduce the risk of shock, and back in their happy place they go. If you’re lucky, a new pair of leaves and a new stem will grow, roots slowly traveling over the surface in search of a hold on a tree trunk or a mountainside that doesn’t exist. Hurry up and wait. Then hope and hope and hope.
Publishing can be a lot like that.
Drafting and editing a book can take months or years as you search for the right light, the right ground, the right amount of water to make the stories and characters grow instead of just making everything so wet it rots, the right invisible mountain to attach the roots. Then you query agents, or you submit directly to indie publishers, or your agent sends it out to acquisitions editors, and there is nothing left to do but to hope and hope and hope. (And write the next book, if you can focus on anything new.)
When a book is acquired, the same cycle begins again: Wait for content edits, then hurry for deadline. Rinse and repeat through line edits, typesetting, proofreading, and galleys. Wait for the cover and jacket copy to be revealed, for trade reviews and author blurbs to come in, for the publisher’s yes or no on your next book, then hurry Hurry HURRY to spread the word, push the book, stay relevant, stay present, stay accessible and approachable and grateful and motivated and humble and interesting, and write the next book.
A debut book often isn’t given a ton of time to earn a more permanent place on big box shelves. And the truth is, most of them don’t. Silence on Cold River sure didn’t. The flowers of that day fade, petals shriveling and dropping off the stem (literally and metaphorically speaking.) I won’t lie. It hurt. It made me… sad. And when all those flowers were gone, I briefly entertained the idea of chucking the orchid, pot and all, out the back door. Maybe my laptop, too. I'd even picked up that pot in both hands. You only bloom once a year, I’d said to it. What the heck is the point of keeping you alive for the other eleven months?
Then I saw the roots.
They’d doubled in length, reached up and over the pot lid like little zombie fingers clawing out of a grave. It brought me pause, and it struck me that while the flowers were pretty, the roots were the point, and they were busy, growing, hunting, stretching… still searching for that solid thing to anchor to.
By some miracle, I kept it alive, and the next year, the week that Silence on Cold River turned one, it bloomed again. It blooms every year right around the time that my debut thriller was published. I have an office now, and it sits by the door, in a constant stream of perfect, indirect light. And those roots are still growing.
The morning of the launch event for Golly Molly and the Perfect Pony List, I went to the grocery store to pick up snacks for the display table. There was a stand of orchids near the entrance, and they made me smile. Then stopped, backed up the shopping cart, and looked at them again. I picked out two – one for myself, and one for my illustrator. This book is her first byline as an illustrator. I loved the idea of telling her the story of my first orchid, how you never know what’s going to hit pay dirt, or what’s going to be limited to a quiet, personal milestone and a little futher reach. How maybe it doesn't really matter. About flowers and about roots.
No matter how today goes, I thought to myself, these orchids will bloom again at the same time next year, and I’ll remember to celebrate.
And to hope and hope and hope.
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