Flexibility by Jenn McKinlay

JENN McKINLAY: It’s been quite a week. Instead of living large in NYC at a writer’s conference as planned, meeting with author friends and my publisher while celebrating my giant step into women’s fiction, I’ve been hunkered down at my brother and sister-in-law’s house in MA while recovering from Shingles. Yes, Shingles, in all of its swollen nerve ending, blistered agony. It was also completely unexpected at my age -- at least to me.

Nervous system - where the varicella zoster virus sits after a person
has chicken pox until it decides to come back as Shingles!

     This was one of those moments where life punched me so hard in the chest, I had to rock back on my heels and figure out what the universe was trying to tell me. As I said to a friend of mine, after days of trying to figure out how to make what I wanted to happen happen when it was clearly an absolute impossibility, “I think the lesson here is that I need to be more flexible.” Why the lesson had to be so painful, I don’t know. I suspect so it would stick.

     PSA: Shingles suck! Like, for real. There is a vaccination now available to people over fifty. Shingrix. I urge you to get it or get on the waiting list for it!

     Here's the thing, I like to think that I’m flexible. Being a writer, you have to be as you flit from creating to editing to promoting, sometimes all in the same hour. But upon closer scrutiny -- brought on by my cheek, hip, and ear full of blisters no doubt -- I realized, I’m not really flexible at all. In fact, I’m a bit of a toddler as in, I want what I want when I want it. I’m also the sort of person who when committed to a plan has a very difficult time changing the plan, or the plot, or dare I say, the title.

     Yes, this leads us back to the world of writing. In the course of five months, I thought of a book in a new genre, wrote the book, sold the book, and then rewrote the book from third person to first person but was then informed that the title was a no go. Huh. I did not receive this news well, in fact, some might say I was rather inflexible about it. But I’m a team player so I started conjuring up new title ideas. I asked everyone, including the Reds, for suggestions. In the end, over one hundred titles were offered and rejected. My stress level was higher than ever before because, frankly, I still wanted my original title. Side note: I’m pretty sure all of this title drama -- along with my skin cancer treatments, rearing of hooligans, and other life incidents -- is what brought on my Shingles but…whatever. 

     Finally, a new title was decided upon and met with approval by the powers that be. In case you thought authors have any say in their titles, cover art, and occasionally their plot points, let me disabuse you of that notion here. We don’t. We can fight for what we want but it doesn’t generally (read very rarely) go our way.

     Back to life lessons. While pondering my blisters and my apparent need to be more flexible, I decided, with a pep talk from the Reds and others, to embrace the new title to the book. So, now I’ll share it with you. The book formerly known as The Gap Year is to be called Paris Is Always a Good Idea, coming out in July 2020. Despite the weeks of angst, I am very excited and I’ll bore you with more information on the book as the release date gets closer. To reward myself for my acquiescence, I'm planning a trip to Paris, for  more boots on the ground research, of course.

     In the meantime, I am trying to incorporate a new level of flexibility into my life. Traffic on the highway? It’s cool. I’ll get there when I get there. Hooligans not texting me back in a timely fashion? It’s all good. They’ll get to it when they get to it. Deadline fast approaching? No worries. The world will not actually implode if I turn in a book a few weeks late…um, I’m pretty sure. See? I’m getting there. Totally, working this whole flexibility thing!

How about you, Reds and Readers? How flexible are you with changes of plan? Any other gut punches from the universe telling you what you have to work on?