On Persistence and the Courage to Lie Down: Under the Cover with Ann Cavlovic

On Persistence and the Courage to Lie Down

by Ann Cavlovic

My debut novel Count on Me will be on bookshelves this October. Virtually every novelist faces challenges getting their work completed and published, but my personal life added some serious curveballs. Overcoming them required persistence, and then complete surrender—for a while anyway.

Let me unpack that, if you will. Spoiler alert: there’s a happy ending! So, I hope anyone, writer or otherwise, in the middle of a seemingly hopeless spot may take some comfort.

Around 2013 I started writing scenes for my novel and had enough by 2018 to apply for a grant from the Canada Council that offered subsistence ($25K over a year) to complete a first draft. Up to that point I’d been financially supporting my partner for several years, and now that his business was finally doing well, he’d agreed to start covering expenses while I took a leave of absence from work. But shortly before I was awarded the grant, he opted, instead, to leave.  

The financial consequences were real. For that year, I was a single mom with full custody and a weekly budget of $330 after tax. My son’s piano lessons alone cost $50. We ate a lot of beans. But when the year was up, I had a complete first draft.

Afterwards, I went back to work and started building back my finances while also working on revisions. Six months later, I was told my novel was ready to submit. It wasn’t. But I lacked the experience or patience to know this. It was early days of the pandemic, and perhaps to make myself feel better, I sent a moonshot submission to the first literary agent on my list. She replied the very next day, asking for the full manuscript and a 30-day exclusive.

I happy danced in my living room! Twenty minutes after I emailed the full manuscript, my doctor called and told me I had breast cancer.

In those early indescribable weeks of trying to get treatment for a life-threatening illness when hospitals were half-closed or overrun with COVID patients, I consoled myself by imagining which chapter the literary agent was currently reading. Forty days later, she politely declined.

Of course, during treatment there were long stretches in which writing was a physical impossibility. But when I could, I made revisions or submitted to another agent or small press.

Rejection, at the best of times, is brutal. Rejection after losing parts of my body to a double mastectomy is next level. I received many. I wanted to plead and whine: But I have cancer. I might die. Please publish my magnum opus. That apparently doesn’t work.

Although I was fortunate to receive disability insurance, cancer treatment was another financial hit. I had a meltdown while online grocery shopping and trying to decide between the 99-cent cans of beans versus the even cheaper dried beans that required pre-soaking and cooking. How did I get here? I wondered. I’d had a well-paying job for over twenty years.

Many months later, just as I was getting stronger and almost ready to return to work, a person I loved was hauled out of my house by ambulance attendants after a misdiagnosis. He would eventually recover but never return to living with me.

Another rejection letter arrived that week.

I hit a very dark place.

Eventually, I transitioned back to work, not infrequently sobbing behind my screen while teleworking. After weeks of this, I tried to return to my trusty writing schedule: weekday mornings from 8-10:30am before starting my part-time day job. But every morning, I sat in my chair and could not write a single thing.

My strict and highly disciplined writing routine was what enabled all my previous publications. It felt like failure to let that go. But it also felt like failure to show up and do nothing.

After months of this, I reached out to Clare Thorbes, a creativity coach, to figure out why I was so stuck. She asked: “What if you took all the energy you spent fighting cancer, and put it into fighting for your novel?”

An uncontrollable wail burst out of me. That was exactly what I could not do.

Clare held space while I sobbed, then reversed course. We talked about “the courage to lie down.” To allow myself a break, of many months. Giving up entirely on my novel would also be an unendurable pain, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t hit pause. Any strength, in excess, becomes a weakness. I could not discipline my way out of this. It was simply too brutally painful to keep connecting with loss, failure, and rejection.

In the meantime, the one area in my life where I wasn’t losing was my day job. And I needed money. So, I leaned-in. After 15 years of working part-time to make space for writing, I went back to full-time. The pay increase felt self-respecting (remember: beans). I was suddenly busy, effective, and lauded for my achievements. As much as it felt super weird to be possibly the only cancer survivor to spend more time at the office, it was also what my brain needed. A wise colleague said I was like a combustion engine car that had been parked in a garage for months, and what it needed most was to be run fast on the highway (thank you, Warren).

In between, when the energy appeared, I tinkered with sections of the novel that popped into my head or sent out a submission. Light touches. I collected more rejections and ghostings. But at least I was distracted.

Almost a year later, a writing contact reached out. She was aware I’d submitted to Guernica Editions the year before and had received what I call a “nice rejection,” i.e. they bothered to tell me I had made it to their top ten, out of hundreds of submissions, but they only publish four fiction titles per year, and I hadn’t made the cut. “I heard in a workshop they don’t mind if you resubmit a year later, as long as you’ve worked on it,” she said. The deadline was the next day. I took 15 minutes to recycle virtually the same cover letter, append the slightly updated manuscript, and click send.

Months later, it was accepted!

The editing process not only got me back into writing but helped me fall back in love with the novel I already wrote. After that, I was able to work on new projects again; smaller ones anyway.

And I’m happy to report that things on the health and relationships front are both much, much better.

It often takes about two years to go from acceptance letter to publication. While penning this essay, boxes of advance copies arrived at my doorstep. Moments rarely unfold how we imagine. So, what was it like to finally hold my novel in my hands?

Totally amazingly fantastically sweet.