From Gestation to Germination

Or, when is a novel ready to share with the world?

I’ve been terrified to write this post, because it makes things real. But it’s time. My first novel, Driving by Starlight, came out in 2018. My next novel, Her Golden Coast, will come out on August 15th. I’m also not much of a screamer in general, which is a bit of a disappointment to everyone to be honest, but if you are, cue the screaming now.

Novels are kind of like grapes–for a long time they are too raw to eat, and there’s only a small window where they are part of contemporary conversation. If they age well, they turn into classics, which can be enjoyed like fine wine. This particular novel is set in the early 2000s, which I thought made it contemporary, but apparently it is already considered Historical Fiction, not Contemporary. Yeah, I had that reaction too. In my mind, Historical Fiction means corsets and chamber pots, not the pre-smart-phone dotcom era. But in terms of timing, I’m already quite late to the party, even if this book has been 4 years in the making.

Every book is hard to write, if it says something honest. Honesty, here, having to do with truth rather than fact. I’m a fiction writer, not a journalist. Even when I kept a journal as a child, I fictionalized it and wrote in third person. When I look at the early draft of a short story that eventually became Driving by Starlight, I realize how much of it is based on my own memories, but the process of writing it has also changed my memories and so I can no longer tell what really happened from what happened in the story.

But this post is about how I know Her Golden Coast is as ready as it will ever be, and why I can’t wait for you to read it.

The seed idea for this novel was a conversation with friends around 2006. I had freshly joined the workforce, making more money than I’d ever dreamed but was still paying off student loans. We were frugal but not overly so. We went out to dinner at fancy restaurants about once a week, went to clubs and paid the $20 cover but complained about it. At one of these jaunts, while talking about dating, a woman at our table said, “I could never date anyone outside my social class. Sex is fine, but I’d never marry someone who made less than me.”

The link between money and marriage was a jolt to my system, and a topic I had ignored in my socialist Canadian Utopia. It would continue to haunt me over the years, as I learned to hide my salary from the men I dated, as the growing gentrification of Silicon Valley priced out everyone who wasn’t in tech so that in the end I had exactly one friend who wasn’t somehow associated with it. I paid off my student loans but was still more frugal than I needed to be, living with an intergenerational immigrant dread of losing everything and needing to start over. 

It made me ask the question: What do we need to feel safe in this world?

I started writing the story from the perspective of a woman like myself, but maybe a little (lot) more adventurous. If Driving by Starlight was about a young woman fighting for a place in the world, any place at all, I wanted to write about what happens when a woman becomes financially secure, when she doesn’t need a husband. Can she ever truly feel as if the world is her oyster? 

This was the original opening of the story in 2021, which is (as far as I know) true to my memory of the underlying experience too.

The guy was a little overeager, but overall not a bad kisser. Still, Malini Kumar wasn’t sure how far she wanted to take this. On the one hand, he hadn’t said anything interesting for the last twenty minutes, as if he expected that a moonlit walk in Rome would do all the work of seduction for him and he would not have to use his words. But the writer in her wanted him to go down on her against the walls of the Pantheon just so she could tell the story, later, of being worshiped outside the hall of all gods.

“I always heard there were women like you but I didn’t believe it.”

“Women like me?”

“Rich. Mysterious.” He punctuated his words with kisses. “Beautiful,” he added as an afterthought.

She smiled at the artlessness with which he had ordered his adjectives. Her younger self might have been offended, but she was thirty-one and not all that beautiful, although it had never stopped her from getting her way.

She leaned back against the wall of the Pantheon, put her hands on his shoulders and pushed down slightly to signal that he should see to her pleasure now. He missed the cue, and leaned back in for another hungry schoolboy kiss, pressing the full length of his body against hers with unmistakable intent. Had he missed it deliberately? Or would the reality of Rome always be so different from its romance, with kisses that tasted like impatience and cigarette ash, and cobblestone streets that were hell on the knees?

But something wasn’t right. I knew it but I kept pushing onward, making sure the plot was right, the dialog sharp, etc. I submitted to agents. One of them requested the full manuscript but later rejected it, saying: “While it is clear you have a great talent and voice, unfortunately I wasn't as captured by the narrative as I'd hoped.”

Here’s the thing. Sometimes you need other people to tell you what you already know. The trouble with the novel was that when a person is financially secure and not desperate to find love or have children, they make for a terrible protagonist. No stakes. No reason to read onward. Yes, the world may be your oyster, but if you aren’t hungry, what’s the point of oysters?

It told me where to focus my attention on the rewrite. And it would in fact be a complete rewrite. The pandemic made editing inescapable; there was nothing else to do. It made me ask myself what I was trying to accomplish and why. I went through old photographs of early-tech hedonism, reminding myself of the time when we had bronzed satyrs as entertainers at holiday parties and night-time cameras gave people red-eye.

(How are my twenties now historical fiction? Waaaah!)

It was around this time that I read Off the Road by Carolyn Cassady, who was married to Neal Cassady and the lover of Jack Kerouac. She stayed home and minded the children while her husband and lover gallivanted off to do drugs and screw Mexican girls. It reminded me of The Great Gatsby, and of how little we know of Zelda Fitzgerald, a writer in her own right, whose marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald both inspired and destroyed her. 

And that’s where I got the one thing I needed to give the tin-story its missing heart: What does it take for a woman to belong in today’s society? It is, almost always, to sacrifice her art, to sublimate her creative side into a more biological function. What if… we didn’t have to?

Two women are at the heart of Her Golden Coast, both of them creative, neither of them interested in procreation. But to be a woman like that is definitionally queer, whether or not they end up together. I wanted Zelda and Carolyn to have their voices heard, the first in the Gatsby-esque decadence of Silicon Valley (now enjoyed by women!) and the second in the search for belonging and safety outside societal norms. I wanted these women to be in conversation with each other. When I gave this draft to Caroline, my editor, she asked me this question (among others): 

Q. What do you want the book to be like when it’s finished, and how do you think that’s different from what it’s like right now?

A. I would like it to read almost in a single breath, since it is meant to be a play on Kerouac’s On the Road, which was initially a single paragraph. I want to convey that same breathlessness and immediacy, except from an unapologetically feminine perspective.

This was in June of 2022. By this point, I knew what the story was about, something I call the Story Why. It’s not the premise or the pitch or the plot, but it’s the fire that keeps you going, that tells you that you have something valuable to communicate to the world. It’s Why the story must be written. 

In 2023 I submitted the finished, edited novel to agents and publishers. Nearly everyone asked for the full manuscript, which meant the writing was compelling as was the premise. But then, they all rejected it, and I didn’t understand why. It took two rejections in quick succession for the pattern to click.

One said: “Though I enjoyed the books very much, they felt a touch too literary for our very commercial readership…” And from another: “personally I loved your book but to really differentiate it from the competition and make it a commercial success would require…”

At this point, the rejections were starting to look like blurbs of praise. There were suggestions, sometimes detailed ones, about what I could do to make the book more commercial, including one hilarious one that just wanted me to add ~20,000 words. What words? Doesn’t matter, but a book can’t sell for $15 unless it has at least 300 pages. (Suppressed rant about capitalism and why books cost as much as they do when they don’t have to). I encountered the same kind of feedback when it came to Driving by Starlight. To fit in the YA genre, it needed to have an element of romance and a hopeful ending.

Changing this book to make it more conventionally commercial would be possible, but would betray the Story Why. Women already spend far too much time trying to to compete, to both fit in and differentiate themselves, to fit on the right shelf but also stand out. Part of the answer of the book—what does it take for a woman to feel safe enough not to compromise?—is knowing when what you have is worth putting out into the world, even if the soil isn’t entirely ready.

Which takes me to the title of this post. Most talk of writing is as a form of procreation. Novels are “born” after they “gestate” with the author. Not only is that inappropriate for a book about a childfree existence, I’d rather think of a story not as a fully-formed being with the author as parent, but as a seed being sown in the world, one that will grow and take on new life as it comes into contact with readers and the environment. The published novel is not the whole story. It is a blueprint for the reader’s imagination. The story is what comes alive in the collective unconscious, in the fan fiction and alternate endings, in the spinoffs and influences. The story “germinates” outside the author’s mind. It’s time for this one to find its place, with you.

Behold the cover for Her Golden Coast below designed by Vanessa Mendozi. Topic for another post: the impossibility of finding stock photos of Indian women with curly hair. Details on where and how to buy it coming soon. In the meantime, I’ll be here biting my nails. Metaphorically.