Did You Come This Far To Only Come This Far?

Did You Come This Far To Only Come This Far?

By Rachel Stone

It’s often said we shouldn’t dwell in the past. That we need to let it go. To live in the now, and focus on the future. Well, I’m just going to put it out there: sometimes that rear-view mirror is the only way forward.

It’s no secret it took me 6 years to get The Blue Iris (my debut novel) into the world. A lesser-known fun fact is I’d given myself a deadline of ONE year to pull it off (or at least have a firm timeline for doing so).

A year felt like loads of time at the outset. By the end, a 420-page manuscript had flooded my consciousness, injected my veins with glitter—and needed a TON more work just to make it readable (never mind the impossibility that it might someday be publishable).

So, what to do next? Time was up on my little experiment. Reality was calling (actually, it was my boss, from the office tower on Bay Street in downtown Toronto, in need of an answer regarding my FTE).

I kept flashing back to an economics class I’d once taken on the fallacy of sunk costs, the human tendency to continue pursuing a course of action that’s no longer in our best interest because we’ve made an emotional and/or monetary investment in it. We don’t want our investment to have been a waste, so we keep investing—and thereby wasting—even more.

I didn’t know if my manuscript was finished, if it made sense, if it was embarrassingly awful. Research told me there would be many, many more steps in getting it to publication, and the odds were staggeringly in favour of failure.

To top it off, I already had a stable career (one that paid, and I was objectively qualified for), and it wasn’t going to wait much longer for me to finish playing around.

Setting the dream aside now was the rational thing to do.

And yet, sitting down to write a book is no rational act to begin with. Reason, I realized, had left the conversation before it even began.

I wasn’t blind to the facts (or the fallacies), but the idea of folding that manuscript into a drawer was excruciating to a highly inconvenient degree. Back-burnering those characters—people I built, then broke, and was only just figuring out how to put back together—was enough, I kid you not, to set me privately sobbing.

Had it all been for nothing? Was this transformative journey meant to just . . . end here? With this crappy beast of a first draft that had my heart?

Or was it meant to end here, six months (and thousands in editor’s fees) later, with a completely restructured draft light years closer to where it was meant to be—and, as the editor clearly warned, infinitely harder to pitch as a result?

Or perhaps the logical stopping point was two years past that, having painstakingly cut 45 pages without deleting anything, rebuilt the opening ten (twenty?) more times, worked with two more developmental editors (just to be sure), spent countless hours in publishing/querying/synopsis writing webinars, followed by weeks, then months, researching agents?

Surely it was time to throw in the towel some months beyond that, after pitching the book 50, 100, 150 times and getting ZERO traction?

I was living the fallacy I’d been so vigilant about (funded by the corporate pension I’d divested with a sour gulp). The more savings I spent and soul I sank into this quicksand dream, the more unbearable the idea of stopping. The harder it became to draw that line of “no more,” to declare myself through having my butt handed to me.

New Year’s Eve came to represent yet another year where I’d failed to make my dream happen. January after January only served to underscore that for every hurdle I cleared, there were still SO MANY left in front of me.

All the while, one question would not let go of me: did you really come this far to only come this far?  

Today, that’s my favourite line from The Blue Iris. In hindsight, it was my mantra the whole way, constantly pushing me forward.

So, as we stand at the foot of a new year filled with tall demands, this is my plea to my writer friends in the query trenches, fellow creatives, anyone attempting their own much-too-big something that goes against all reason:

Do not listen to all that talk, so loud around now, about leaving the past behind and looking to the future and squishing down our dreams to fit in a calendar. If the road ahead is a near-vertical climb, the destination fuzzy at best, and the here-and-now finds you hopelessly tapped out, would you please just humour me for a moment and turn the heck around?

Forget pinning your (doubt-riddled, claustrophobia-inducing, soul-dragging?) goals to the numbers “2024,” and look over your shoulder at the goal instead.

Take stock—then, for the love of God, celebrate—every step you’ve already taken towards it, no matter the year, even if it’s just that you STARTED. How many people never do that?

It’s easy to lose track of all you’ve accomplished when there’s still so far to go. To fall into those rabbit-hole questions of am I wasting my time? Is this path headed anywhere? Am I on the wrong one altogether?

In any given moment, all those questions can be boiled down to one:

Did you come this far to only come this far?

Your answer to that is all you really need to know.

—

Rachel Stone writes stories of hope and redemption, often set against vibrant Canadian backdrops. Her writing placed first in the 2022 OBOA Writing Contest and has appeared in international literary and visual arts magazines, journals and blogs. Rachel holds degrees in psychology and industrial relations, and once worked seven summers at a flower market. She lives near Toronto with her family, and on weekends you’ll find her along the shore of Georgian Bay, belting nineties pop rock from her paddleboard. THE BLUE IRIS is her first novel.

Social Links:

LinkTree (website & buy links):  https://linktr.ee/rachelstoneauthor

Twitter / X: https://twitter.com/rachestone

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100030081772132

Instagram: instagram.com/racheystone

THE BLUE IRIS

Sometimes, uprooting the thorn-filled past is the only way we bloom. . .

Tessa Lewis is set to embark on a Big-Time Career and marry Toronto’s fastest-rising lawyer, who loves her to pieces. But when a visit to a flower market from her childhood sparks memories of the mother she lost too soon, Tessa puts her bright future on hold to work there, determined to come to terms with her past.

At the Blue Iris Flower Market, everything is blossoming except the rag-tag crew, each hiding deep scars of their own. When Sam, the beloved but troubled man in charge, takes off and leaves the market reeling, Tessa and her unlikely new friends come face-to-face with their most uncomfortable truths, uprooting lives carefully cultivated-and just maybe, unearthing everything they’ve ever wanted.

Told from multiple perspectives, The Blue Iris is an intricately woven exploration of love tested beyond its limits, chosen family, and the beauty that grows in letting go.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing