This is not the first time I have written a book. After high school and before the life of “professional Caryn” was even a possibility, I wrote stories. I read an inordinate number of romance novels. . . and then I started to write some. I could visualize entire stories in my mind as if they were movies and I was playing the leading role.
Some of them were put down on paper—literally. I learned how to type in high school on an old business electric typewriter. I think the best advice my mother gave me in this life was to take typing class. I only took the first one, but it has served me well in the decades since.
But at that time, I was writing everything down on loose leaf paper—the lined paper with holes to go in a three-ring binder. Looking back now, I can see how much more onerous everything was back then. I hand-wrote at least three manuscripts, and my sister, Erica, helped me edit them. It was so frustrating for me, but I can see how it made my writing and the specific manuscript better. Each page had to be rewritten multiple times. We are spoiled now with the ability to cut and paste, but I wonder if my skills would have advanced as quickly if I didn’t have to think through every grammar decision and rewrite the page every time I made more than a couple of changes.
The process of writing was more difficult in the 1990s in every way.
I did have a manual typewriter with an actual ribbon. It was clunky. The keys would always get stuck in each other, and the correction tape didn’t always work well. After I wrote it out by hand to my satisfaction, I would type it out on a typewriter. Over time, it would get more and more difficult to find the typewriter ribbons.
I self-published a book in 2002. I went to the effort of buying my first laptop. It had a floppy disk drive! So, my first manuscript was typed and stored on a floppy disk! It was a Chinese spy romantic suspense. It was meant to be part of a multicultural series of books, but the first one is the only one I wrote. I published it when I was working at a supermarket deli. I had a few friends and family members purchase a copy—I think the total was 13 copies sold. I never saw a dollar of royalties because it didn’t make the minimum $25 that was the publisher’s payout minimum.
I thought it was a sign for me to stop writing when my first book didn’t sell. It didn’t occur to me that it was because I was somewhat isolated and didn’t know many people. I didn’t have the luxury of trying again or the money and time to visit bookstores to try to schedule book signings or speaking engagements. I did do a little event at the local public library. My friend from work came, and we talked. There was a sign, but none of the other library patrons seemed to realize there was an “event” going on and were annoyed that we were being “loud.” I was even interviewed in the local newspaper (I still have the clipping.) but that also did nothing to bring readers to my work. The last nail in the coffin was when my book was given to a mystery reviewer in a romance novel magazine who gave it one star. Who is going to buy a book that only has one review and the main problem with it was that it “wasn’t a mystery”?
This was in the time when the internet barely existed. Amazon was not what it is today. No Google reviews. No Booktok.
There was literally no way for me at that time to succeed in writing.
At that point, I decided that writing was pointless. That it doesn’t help people. That books are frivolous, and I needed to spend my time on things that would support me in the world. I needed to pay bills and the rent and a writing hobby that did not bring in even one dollar wasn’t going to support me financially.
Essentially, I shut off my creativity for over 20 years.
Meanwhile, I did spend a lot of time learning and experiencing healing modalities, yoga, Buddhism, and art. I tried to start multiple businesses, including healing businesses, but none of them felt worth my time or energy. I eventually let them go. At the time I am writing this, I have also just let go about six months ago of the travel business I was attempting to build for over five years.
Ironically, writing was almost exclusively what I’ve been doing for those five years. I didn’t have people lining up to buy travel from me, but throughout the entire time, I was writing weekly newsletters, some of which I turned into blog posts. I also wrote blog posts that weren’t in my newsletter. Toward the end, I would write it for the blog and then share it through the newsletter. When I decided to stop trying to build the travel business, I decided to move my website over to Substack. I took about two months to move over most of the blogs from my website to the new website and have started to grow my following on here.