The world’s most depressing teabag

I don’t know who gave me this tea bag, but the tag is officially one of the most depressing things I’ve ever read.

I assume it’s supposed to be funny, but I feel quite confident that no novelist would see it that way. I definitely don’t.

(For those who aren’t familiar with cats: on average, an indoor cat lives fifteen years. My longest-lived cat died a few months shy of her twenty-second birthday, but she was remarkable in any number of ways, and longevity was just one of them.)

Seriously, if you want to be depressed, tell yourself that the project to which you’ve devoted countless hours—hours when the rest of the world was relaxing, having conversations and getting to know one another, folding laundry, going for walks or swims, playing tennis, eating scrumptious meals, making love—in less than fifteen years, that project will be obsolete. If it’s traditionally published, it’ll be out of print. If it’s indie published, sales will have dried up.

So why do we do it? More specifically since I can’t speak for anyone else, why do I do it?

Why am I working so hard to finish this book? Why am I sitting in front of a computer night after night when normal people are asleep? Why does it matter if I finish telling the story of Meg and Ralph and their friends and family?

I don’t know. I only know that it matters, at least to me and to a handful of kind people who read State v. Claus and have told me that they can’t wait to read this sequel. For me, the act of putting the words on the page (or screen) is an act that matters. There’s a fabulous quote from Carl Sagan about the magic that is a book:

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Maybe that’s why it matters: when I write a book, I work magic. Putting words on the page, I can communicate with complete strangers, sharing my strange little fantasy world and the people I’ve created to live there.

Maybe it’s hubris to think anyone would want to know what I was thinking when I wrote about these people who exist only in my brain and on the page, but that’s okay. After all, I’m far from the first to share my weird little ideas in writing. People have been doing this for centuries. According to one website, the world’s first author is widely believed to be Enheduanna, a woman who lived in Mesopotamia in the 23^rd century BCE and who was a princess and a priestess in addition to being a writer and a poet.

I’ve spent countless hours on this book, and I’ll spend a lot more before I hold the finished product in my hand. I’d like to think that in fifteen years, someone will still find it interesting enough to read, but I’m enough of a realist to know it’s unlikely, that I’m investing my time and energy in a project that will probably fade away before I do.

On the other hand, I can’t control how long my books will be read. The only thing I can control is how well I tell the story. In her memoir, Yes, Please, Amy Poehler recounts how they never seemed to know whether her show, Parks and Recreation, was going to be cancelled. She says that rather than fixate on this matter that was so clearly out of their hands, they kept their heads down, did their jobs, and controlled the only thing they could, which was the show.

I love this idea. So that’s what I’m doing. The New Challenge ends tomorrow. On Sunday, I’ll start again. And I’ll keep going until the book is finished, because that’s all I can control. And because just maybe, there are people out there who looking for magic in the form of a piece of a tree with funny dark squiggles.