Naivety ain’t such a bad thing.
This was posted as a guestblog here: http://typem4murder.blogspot.com/
First I want to thank Vicki and her generous compatriots for giving me some face time on their blog. Okay introductions are in order here. My name’s Sang Pak and I’m a writer. Eerily similar to an AA meeting, right? Well one thing I’ve discovered with writing and trying to get published, one has to have the tenacity and obsessive nature of an addict to be a viable writer. That and naivety but I’ll get to that later. Now that my first novel is being published August 4th it’s like I’m about to put on a new pair of shoes. I just don’t know what they’ll look like or how they’ll feel. One thing I do know is I’ll be relieved, excited, concerned and generally beside myself.
My book is Wait Until Twilight. A relatively slight tome but stuffed with mystery, grotesques and southern culture. Think J.D. Salinger meets David Lynch meets Flannery O’Connor. Personally that’s my kind of triumvirate. Technically it’s a coming of age/ southern gothic tale with dream-soaked tinge. (Let me add I am officially qualified to write about the south having been raised in Carrollton Georgia.) It took me a year to write the book and five years to get it published. How naïve I was at the beginning. A babe in the woods. A helpless innocent who had no idea the dark forest I was about to enter. But it is that naivety that not only facilitates that first step but allows the writer to continue through the swamp of rejections and false positives.
I had just quit NYU graduate school. First year psychology and moved in with my brother in Irvine, California. That warm Southern California sun was like butter on my skin after months in Manhattan. I’d take these long walks from my brother’s flat just meandering and wondering what the hell I was going to do. My brother, who was middle-management at Disney, was trying to cajole me into starting up a business. Something related to the English as a Second Language domain, which I was familiar with as a former teacher. I’d been doing the legwork in gathering research for such a venture but I found myself walking around the neighborhood more and more. For hours I’d walk in those lazy residential areas with the perfectly manicured lawns and pricey homes with that incessant sunlight on everything.
I found myself going to a nearby park and sitting in the grass. I started going there everyday. I’d get there early afternoon so it would be empty. The first group of people to show would be a line of little girls carrying their backpacks, the luggage kind with the wheels, across the park. They’d be coming from an elementary school across the way. It was strange seeing these children seemingly without a care in the world and there I was a ship without a rudder, no prospects, no desire to enter the workforce or join the corporate world. Everything looked like soul sapping wastes of life. It was while watching this line of girls pulling their backpacks that I decided to make a go of writing. Hey I thought, I’d write a novel in a couple of months and get published soon after. Sure it’ll be easy! I had no idea why I felt that way at the time. But looking back I think it was those little girls without a care in the world walking home after school, a world of possibilities opened to them. I wanted that same feeling. And that kind of naivety allowed me to start an endeavor I otherwise would have never started. Sometimes naivety ain’t such a bad thing.
First I want to thank Vicki and her generous compatriots for giving me some face time on their blog. Okay introductions are in order here. My name’s Sang Pak and I’m a writer. Eerily similar to an AA meeting, right? Well one thing I’ve discovered with writing and trying to get published, one has to have the tenacity and obsessive nature of an addict to be a viable writer. That and naivety but I’ll get to that later. Now that my first novel is being published August 4th it’s like I’m about to put on a new pair of shoes. I just don’t know what they’ll look like or how they’ll feel. One thing I do know is I’ll be relieved, excited, concerned and generally beside myself.
My book is Wait Until Twilight. A relatively slight tome but stuffed with mystery, grotesques and southern culture. Think J.D. Salinger meets David Lynch meets Flannery O’Connor. Personally that’s my kind of triumvirate. Technically it’s a coming of age/ southern gothic tale with dream-soaked tinge. (Let me add I am officially qualified to write about the south having been raised in Carrollton Georgia.) It took me a year to write the book and five years to get it published. How naïve I was at the beginning. A babe in the woods. A helpless innocent who had no idea the dark forest I was about to enter. But it is that naivety that not only facilitates that first step but allows the writer to continue through the swamp of rejections and false positives.
I had just quit NYU graduate school. First year psychology and moved in with my brother in Irvine, California. That warm Southern California sun was like butter on my skin after months in Manhattan. I’d take these long walks from my brother’s flat just meandering and wondering what the hell I was going to do. My brother, who was middle-management at Disney, was trying to cajole me into starting up a business. Something related to the English as a Second Language domain, which I was familiar with as a former teacher. I’d been doing the legwork in gathering research for such a venture but I found myself walking around the neighborhood more and more. For hours I’d walk in those lazy residential areas with the perfectly manicured lawns and pricey homes with that incessant sunlight on everything.
I found myself going to a nearby park and sitting in the grass. I started going there everyday. I’d get there early afternoon so it would be empty. The first group of people to show would be a line of little girls carrying their backpacks, the luggage kind with the wheels, across the park. They’d be coming from an elementary school across the way. It was strange seeing these children seemingly without a care in the world and there I was a ship without a rudder, no prospects, no desire to enter the workforce or join the corporate world. Everything looked like soul sapping wastes of life. It was while watching this line of girls pulling their backpacks that I decided to make a go of writing. Hey I thought, I’d write a novel in a couple of months and get published soon after. Sure it’ll be easy! I had no idea why I felt that way at the time. But looking back I think it was those little girls without a care in the world walking home after school, a world of possibilities opened to them. I wanted that same feeling. And that kind of naivety allowed me to start an endeavor I otherwise would have never started. Sometimes naivety ain’t such a bad thing.
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Awesome comment Gabriel. Glad to see you made it through the dark forest alive and well and writing...
I left home and went to an Art School in Atlanta. By my last year, everyone at the school, and all the professors and even the den considered me the best student there. One of my professors pulled me off to the side, and told me whatever ‘IT’ is, I have an abundance of it. When I graduated I thought I would write a great novel that everyone would love, get a book deal, and start my life as a professional writer.
The real world had other ideas for me. I got rejection letter after rejection letter. I wrote more than one book, and each book got even more rejections. I finally got a real job, but had to leave it after a year to take care of my mother. I moved in with my bother also, but after my mother got even sicker I had to move back home with my mother and my grandmother. So there I sat, the guy with IT, sleeping on his grandmother’s couch unemployed and getting rejection letters.
It got to a point that I started doubting myself. I had one of those days you talked about, where I went for a walk thinking what in the hell am I going to do. I couldn’t see myself working a 9 to 5, and I was tired of writing. Actually, I couldn’t write anymore. I used to sit in front of my computer and effortlessly flow from one medium to another. I’d write a little on an Urban fantasy novel, then jump into a YA novel, then dive into a screenplay, knock out a few poems, and just before going to sleep, write a few scenes in my TV pilot. All of that went away.
I couldn’t write for a long time. My mom got better, but I drifted deeper into depression. All I’ve wanted to do was create stories. All I’d heard my entire life was how talented I am. And yet there I was on my grandmother’s couch.
I spent a few years trying to figure out what was I going to do with my life. And then I fell back in love with the first true passion of my life… vampires. I read Touch the Dark by Karen Chance and the spark was re-ignited. I needed to tell a story. I needed to write. So, I sat in front of my computer for the first time in years, with Untitled Word Document staring back at me, and began to type.
When I finished, I had a manuscript called Fallen Rose. I sent out queries, and got more rejections. Then one day I went over to my cousin’s house, and he introduced me to a TV show called Carnivàle. I went home, and Fallen Rose changed from being about vampires, to beings I came up with during the car ride home. Fallen Rose… became Three Seeds. And I guess the rest I shall see.
A part of me feels it might be for the best that Three Seeds didn’t get picked up by a major publishing company. I lost all my confidence during those years after school. Working with a small press publishing house is helping me find that guy I used to be, but grounded in reality.