The Debutante Ball is flinging open the doors and windows today welcoming early spring temperatures and a bright new novel from author Lisa Fellinger.
Serendipity and Success
I distinctly remember when I was in high school reading a quote from someone in the publishing industry along the lines of:
If you want to be a published author badly enough, you will be.
Those words have stuck with me ever since, a little nugget of wisdom and encouragement that’s kept me going on even the hardest days or the longest stretches when writing couldn’t be my focus. To me, that quote meant that if I was dedicated enough to the goal of publishing a novel, one way or another, I would.
Like many writers, it’s been my lifelong dream to become a published author. But, also like many writers, my writing was set aside as I pursued a more “stable” career, going to college for psychology and graduate school for mental health counseling.
While my peers reiterated in a class on career counseling that they wanted to be counselors, I shared that my dream career was to be an author.
Another night in the midst of my graduate work was when I fully realized how important writing was to me. “I’m a writer” and I was struggling with having no time for writing between classes and holding down a job to pay my bills.
And it was actually in a graduate class where a case study sparked a “what if” in my mind and the main characters in my debut novel The Serendipity of Catastrophe were born.
It took a couple more years before I was ready to start drafting Anita and Carrie’s story. Between finishing school and wrapping up work on a previous manuscript, I finally started drafting The Serendipity of Catastrophe as my 2015 NaNoWriMo project.
It started as a very rough draft, but as I learned more about writing, joined the Women’s Fiction Writers Association in 2016, and grew as a person, this story shifted and deepened in so many unexpected ways.
Life Leading to Story
A month-long trip to Europe is the main focus of the story, but when I first started writing, I’d not yet been overseas. A Mediterranean cruise in 2017 and a trip to Paris in 2019 offered me first-hand experiences and some anecdotes and incidents that found their way into the story.
Motherhood and miscarriage are both themes in the story that I had no experience with when I began writing. I sadly had two miscarriages in 2019 and finally the joy of our son in 2020. I related to Anita my main character’s story in a new way. As much as I’d have loved to have published this novel years ago, in so many ways this story grew along with me. My life experiences have made it so much richer.
But even after the hard work of writing the story was done, I found the road to publishing equally challenging. My dream had always been a traditional publishing deal. I queried for some time, then considered why I was so insistent that I had to publish traditionally. After starting my editing and book coaching business in 2020, I’d worked and gotten to know many indie authors who were doing amazing things with their stories that were just as good (and in some cases even better, in my opinion) as traditionally published books. I admired their courage to publish their stories on their own terms. So, why was I resistant to the idea of doing so myself?
Putting Aside My Fears
Ultimately, I forced myself to practice what I preached and to be brutally honest with myself. I’d been chasing a traditional publishing deal because I wanted someone else to validate me and tell me I was a good writer. I wanted the stamp of approval I thought an agent and a publisher would bring.
I knew my story was good. I knew I had the ability to package this book just as well as a traditional publisher could. I was simply afraid of putting my words out there, afraid of others not loving my story the way I do, afraid of being perceived as a failure.
However, those fears would be there even if I had landed an agent. So, I decided to shove my fear aside and summon the courage I admired in my indie author friends. I’m so incredibly thankful I did.
When I read that quote back in high school, I never imagined my path to publication would look like being an independent author. But, like everything else, publishing has changed since I was in high school. As I approach my publication date, I realize that my version of success has always been having my stories out in the world so others can read and enjoy them, and that’s exactly what I’ve achieved even though it looks different than I’d always pictured. The fear is still there—I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t—but the joy and excitement at realizing I’ve achieved a lifelong dream is strong enough to counteract it. And I realize now that this has been the underlying theme of The Serendipity of Catastrophe all along. Just one more way writing this book has shaped me.
Pick up copy of The Serendipity of Catastrophe here https://books2read.com/u/ml6kpq
Connect with Lisa
Lisa Fellinger writes contemporary women’s fiction with lovably flawed, relatable characters. When she’s not writing her own stories, she’s helping others achieve their writing dreams as a book coach and developmental editor. She lives in Buffalo, New York with her husband, son, and fur babies.
Thank you for your inspiring story, Lisa!