FINDING YOUR PEOPLE: THE AUTHOR VERSION

Five Author Friends, A Stupid Pandemic, and That Time I Never Did Learn to Knit

In July of 2020, five of us decided to meet up once a week on Zoom. We are all long-time writer friends, retreat partners and workshop presenter partners at one event or another. We’d been in author trenches together for awhile, had successes and failures and the stuff that comes in between. We had publishing stories—the kind you build over a career, some funny, some thrilling, some that you just shake your head at, laugh like maniacs, and move forward.

When you take on a creative career, you need more than yourself, and I’m not talking just about agents and editors and the like, or even about your non-writer friends or your family. Yes, of course those individuals also support you and cheer for you in many crucial ways. I treasure my friends and family, and I work hard keep them all active parts of my life.

But you also need your pack of fellow creatives, your people who are walking the same walk, working to write whatever they write that let the world know something about the journey of humans in this crazy world.

But in July of 2020, like pretty much everyone in the world, the five us author friends were struggling. The pandemic was raging with no indication of when things would truly let up. The things authors need to promote books were still larger shut down or gone totally virtual, meaning no in-person events, no in-person touring, a more limited ability for us or our publishers to promote any new books. The reality had sunk in hard that even selling another manuscript was at this point, a crap shoot, and that the seasonal lists were being truncated and delayed, bookstores still re-tooling for how to help us let the world know about our stories. (Yes, I was working in a bookstore then, but not even that was much help!)

So we decided to meet once a week on Zoom, just the five of us. We could have added others, but I think we sensed that right then, we were the ones with most ongoing conversations, the ones who had certain common sensibilities about not just writing but about life.

Maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe we just decided to try it.

That first meeting we took stock. How often would we meet? What was our purpose besides chatting and touching base and seeing humans that we still couldn’t easily see in person? (We don’t all live in close proximity anyway, but now it was even harder to get to together face to face. Even our summer retreat, this time that always felt sacred, was cancelled)

I don’t remember much of that first meeting except our decision to set goals for ourselves: writing goals, obviously, but also career and financial, health and relationships, home/family, and more. We quickly realized that we needed to be flexible about all this, but what we collectively needed was more than just a few minutes of chat time.

At one point we added hobbies to our goal lists. You know how at that point in the pandemic everyone was baking sour dough bread digging out crafting projects? This was our version of that, and yes, my hobby list included learning how to knit and expanding my bread baking, which to be honest was like 3 loaves of bread in my entire life time. Someone else in our group decided she’d learn to play the violin. (Update: She has absolutely not done this)

3 years later, and the closest I’ve come to knitting is looking at yarn one time in Michaels when I passed a bin of it on my way to the picture framing counter.  I baked challah for Rosh Hashana this year and last, but by then I’d forgotten about the ‘hobby’ list until I started writing this post.

But the rest of what has happened, is truly remarkable. Did we expect it? I really don’t think so.

We have continued to meet, still on Zoom, once a week for the past three years. We have cheered each other, calmed each other, commiserated and encouraged. Collectively, we have sold numerous books to traditional publishing and published books non-traditionally. We have taken new non-writing jobs, and quit others that were no longer a good fit. We have set financial goals for earning and for purchasing, and we’ve met a good deal of those as well, and they are equal cause for celebration. (Yes, I am celebrating my new double ovens!) We learned the difference between ‘maybe someday’ and ‘I’m going to do this now.’  We have spoken up to editors and agents when needed. We have felt the power of knowing our own worth. We have taken care of health and nagged each other about those things when needed.

We’ve taken risks we might not have taken, and planned and dreamed. I said yes to a trip to Paris that I’d previously planned and cancelled more than once, and this time, I went. We have stuck with each other through a large variety of the bad stuff, too – divorces and some major family illness and other serious drama, publishing rejections and slowdowns and more. W

e have worked consciously at our lives and careers and it has made a huge and long-lasting difference, far more than I think any of us expected.

We have been brave. Living your fullest life does require bravery, and living a creative life requires fearlessness as well. It’s hard. We have encouraged each other to do it anyway.

The current list of things I’ve tried and accomplished and kept at is a long one, and in very large part it is because of these women who are my people, who hold each other accountable for living the lives we’re supposed to live.

Have you found your people yet? Your ride or die crew? The ones who applauded when you bought that new double oven and got rid of the one that only worked ‘good enough.’

I hope you have.

Til next week.