Susan Senator

My agent has begun to negotiate with my publisher about my second autism book. This book has been a torturous process, with one proposal submitted a year ago, which Shambhala had accepted, but which I then scrapped. A large reason I scrapped the project was that I have been inhabiting my own sinister amusement park for some time now, riding the old Emotional Roller Coaster and also the Crisis in a Coffee Cup until I get sick. I joke about it now, but it is a real problem, and I have been doing a lot to manage it but nothing happens overnight. Thank God for Ned, who literally always presents me with a shoulder to cry on. He lies down on the bed and silently extends his left arm, inviting me to come over and cling. He has had many wet, eye-liner stained shirts, my poor darling.

The other reason I passed on that project was more mundane: it wasn’t exactly the right one. It was too broad a topic (all special needs) and yet, too narrow (could have been all parents). In publishing, you have to get the niche just right or the marketing team balks or you find you are either overwhelmed or bored.

So I worked on my novel, Dirt: A Story of Gardening, Mothering, and a Midlife Crisis, and got that just right in the mean time. (I love Dirt! It is one of my all-time favorite books, right up there with Women About Town, A Curious Incident, and War and Peace.) A different agent is shopping Dirt around right now, so any day… Then I found, a few months ago, just the right focus for the second autism book, as well as some resolution for my own poor head, and now the newest version of Autism Book II is coming to be. I wanted to call it Notes from the (Autism) Underground, but they don’t like that so once again I will be Making Peace with editors. Believe me, that is a far better place to be than without a project at all.