What's the Warehouse?
On patience, the Scholastic Book Fair, and how I’m trying to make myself feel better about failing NaNoWriMo.
However people in the 1880s felt when the circus came to town—wonderstruck, restless, gleeful—is how I felt when teachers handed out the thin yellow Scholastic book fair catalogs. Their arrival meant that in a few weeks, the school library would carve space within itself for temporary bookshelves stocked with glossy hardcovers, paperbacks that hadn’t been riffled open yet, glittery pencils and pens that were more feathery than functional. In the car, I’d circle every new title I wanted, and then when we arrived home I’d hand the catalog to my mom and she’d say “Okay,” fold it, and tuck it away in a drawer. And I would go back to school and wander through the book fair and not buy a single thing.
The Scholastic book fair was my mom’s version of the marshmallow test, and though I had moments of weakness (the striped scented erasers! sold for fifty cents!), largely I passed. I waited because months after the book fair moved out of the warm yellow lights of the school library, Mom would drive us to a giant gray warehouse. There, the lights hummed white and sickly, but the books were marked down 50-75%. There was no rhyme or reason to the aisles; you had to wander, occasionally dig through a crate. Sometimes I got sidetracked and sat down on the dusty floor, lost in a book I hadn’t intended to find but which now seemed deliciously alluring.
Lately, my version of the Scholastic book fair catalog is scrolling through Twitter and Goodreads’ Anticipated Releases, where it seems every day somebody cooler and younger than I am announces a book deal. During these moments, a part of me reverts to my fourth-grade self, stomping her foot and asking: why can’t I have the shiny new thing and have it now? Of course, in this case the “shiny thing” is publication, which isn’t something I can just go and buy. Maybe the more apt metaphor here is that every year I feel more like the books in the warehouse: depreciated by time, known to few, exciting only to the very patient.
This month I tried my hand at National Novel Writing Month. In some ways, it was the fault of this substack: once I write a few essays my brain goes those are basically like chapters, we should try a novel, and then a few weeks later I’m cursing my hubris and wondering why I ever set foot outside poetry. Somebody I went to high school with texted me “When you gonna write a book” and I wanted to hold him at gunpoint and then turn said gun on myself, because maybe then I’d meet the deadline. Yesterday, I missed the writing goal I’d set for the third day in a row. Probably I am going to count this essay toward today’s word count just to make myself feel better.
I’m trying to convince my inner voice that giving myself time is not the same thing as giving up. Patience is not a refusal of ambition. In fact, I’d argue that it’s a larger exercise for your ego to believe that your thoughts have no expiration date. To use a catchphrase we love throwing at poetry slams: fuck the time! If it matters, it’ll be just as worth sharing when you’re 40 as when you’re 20. Instead of reading that 30 under 30 list, consider this piece by Devin Kelly instead.
I am also trying to reevaluate which stories matter. During freshman and sophomore year of college, after a string of rejections, I got really insecure about my writing. I started thinking that tackling sadness and suffering were the only ways to be a serious writer, and those topics didn’t feel honest for me to write—not when so much of what inspired me about the world was its ridiculousness, or things that made me gasp and laugh. I wrote a bunch of shitty poems trying to conform to what I thought was “literary” and got nowhere; even worse, I felt like I’d betrayed myself. It wasn’t until I started leaning wholeheartedly into the subjects actually occupying my mind—siblings, parents, the inane yet comforting outlines of a crush—that I began to connect with others again. “I showed my mom your dick appointment poem and she loved it” is not a string of words I ever thought I’d hear, but that was the sentence that emerged from the girl sitting in front of me during a class lecture one day, and suddenly: a window, and light. No one had told me that I could try to be funny. No one had told me that I could find something meaningful in writing toward the guiltiest parts of myself.
The book I am attempting and failing to write—but which I will not give up on, even as November ends and the calendar pages flip—is not the next Great American Novel. It is a romantic comedy and a family drama; it name-drops High School Musical; it is entirely too specific to my experience of being Vietnamese-American and perhaps no one else’s. And just when I thought a story like that couldn’t be meaningful in any big way, Nicola and David Yoon dropped news that they’d be launching an imprint in 2022 devoted entirely to publishing teen love stories about people of color. Katie from two years ago would never have dreamed that a possibility so perfectly catered to her interests could exist, but there it is. That’s my warehouse, y’all—the open space that says look, you can have so much more than you thought you could, if you’re willing to wait for it and keep hoping in the meantime.
The Scholastic book fair is the shiny gloss of hot new bestseller, of up and coming, of someone to watch. And I’d be lying if I said I don’t still dream of prestige, of my mom being able to brag, My daughter has a book deal at 25. The warehouse is the well, maybe someday. And maybe with a little less fanfare. But at the end of the day, what matters are the words. I’ll take them as long as they’ll have me. I’ll keep coming back.
Shoutout to everyone who’s been struggling with NaNoWriMo, and shoutout to those of you who have powered through - you’re all champs in my book!
‘Til next time. <3