Sara Gran: The Saga of Coming Closer

New Orleans writer Sara Gran has done a great series of posts about her second book, Come Closer, which recently came out in paperback.

Things were not good. I was, again, broke and miserable. To top it off, I felt like I had let down all the good people who had worked so hard to try to help me. Book number one, hey, it was 9/11, it was a first novel, a first literary novel, these things happen. No such excuses now. My failure now seemed inexorable and permanent. I had, in my life, put all of my eggs into one basket, and dropped it. The eggs were broken. Now I was in my thirties, broke, and unfit for a better job because I had foolishly put everything I had into writing. I saw that I was going to have to start my life from scratch. I started a small business selling used & rare books online, which made me a hundred or so dollars a month, in addition to my day job. I looked into graduate schools for a few different things, because continuing my life like this was out of the question. I knew I would always write, that’s never been an issue. But as for trying to make a living at it—that had brought me nothing, really, but pain and humiliation. I was through.

The way Gran flirts with labelling herself a failure reminded me of a quotation from Neil Fiore's book The Now Habit:

People who consider themselves failures have failed once and stay there. A "failure" wants a guarantee before starting a project that everything will go perfectly, without any problems. A successful person is willing to take reasonable risks, knowing that there are no guarantees except Murphy's Law that "if something can go wrong, it will." Successful people fail many times and bounce back, refusing to let any one failure define their worth.

My takeaway from Gran's story: don't give up. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Someday you may be looking back on a crazy lucky story like the saga of Come Closer.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 3.5
Part 4
Part 5