Page 9 of A Storybook Wedding

I chose her piece to go first because I thought it would cause the least amount of drama. I know we’re not supposed to quantifiably judge art, but between us, it was the best submission of the four. By a lot. Yes, she’s obviously writing commercial genre stuff, but so what? Good, effective storytelling isn’t only bound to literary fiction. I thought Cecily was digging into a story with tons of potential. And it just so happened her last name starts with A, so I was able to make like it was an alphabetical order thing.

Get it together, dude. She’s a grown-up. She’ll be fine.

I splash some water on my face and grab a paper towel to dry myself off.

This was supposed to be my easy distraction. Not another heavy lift. I’ll tell you what though. When I interviewed for the job, Dillon didn’t mention anything about students crying in workshop on the first day. Or about the fact that I would have to keep a straight face around the absolutely ludicrous dress code in the room. No one said anything about grown men wearing cloaks to class as if we were all going to some Dungeons and Dragons convention instead of sitting at a table talking about writing.

I check the time. Gotta keep it moving. I take a breath and head back into the room. With a flip chart and my notes, I manage to get through my lecture pretty smoothly. Cecily acts fine, like nothing ever happened, God bless her. I teach them how to draw a map of their scene, and she draws the cafeteria where her conflict is set. It’s good. They all stay engaged, minus a couple of asinine comments from Tim and a solitary eye roll from Andrea. I give them a standard read-and-respond assignment for homework, and then we disperse, and I head to the dining room to grab something for lunch. It’s a sad attempt at pizza—small, round thin-crust concoctions of sauce and cheese on what feels like a burned-up burrito skin. Worlds apart from Ray’s on Columbus and West 82nd, but hey, we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

At least I don’t have to give my seminar today. That’s tomorrow’s albatross. It weighs heavy though, burrowing under my skin all through lunch and through the seminars of my colleagues, which I attend in the afternoon because that is the expectation. I try to remain focused, but my brain is like scrambled eggs. This happens now, whenever I feel pressure, and I can’t figure out how to make it stop.

You’d think all this salt air would help. The open space and isolation. I tried that at Yaddo too though, to no avail.

What’s Yaddo, you ask? Sorry. I just assume everyone knows. Yaddo is an artists’ retreat house in upstate New York. It’s beautiful and peaceful and pretty exclusive. Big application process to get in, and if you do get accepted, they sponsor the cost of you being there.

I thought going there for four weeks would help me write my second book.

I was wrong then, so it’s no surprise that I should be wrong now—assuming that being here to dance around other people’s writing like some kind of great literary shepherd would be of any real use to me. Nope, instead, I’m just the moderator who made the overprepared student with the giant binder cry on day one.

Jesus.

I know what you’re thinking. He’s a has-been. A one-hit wonder. Well, who knows? You might be right. My debut novel, Work, came out of my own personal Tuesdays with Morrie kind of situation. My grandfather was in an assisted-living facility in Midtown, overlooking the East River. He had been diagnosed with dementia so my parents set him up there, only they live in Florida and couldn’t visit him often, so I went to see him twice a week, every week, for almost a year. He was a lifelong employee of the New York State Department of Labor in his former life, and as he started to deteriorate, I recorded our conversations. He talked about the declining state of work in our country, and I wove some of his ramblings into a story. Before I knew it, I was writing a full-length novel, my first ever. He passed away, and I finished the novel as an homage to him.

It only took me three months.

I queried ten agents. Got seven full requests. Four offers of rep. They all said the same thing. Genre-bending. A story that lives at the crossroads where speculative and literary fiction meet. I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. I just wrote a story about a man living in New York City who works for the State Department of Labor when a pandemic shuts down the country.

In 2018.

My agent sold the book for a decent advance to a Big Five house in the first round of submissions. No huge hoopla or anything. They thought it was an interesting premise. High concept, they said.

It released the first week of January 2020.

Who fucking knew, right?

People magazine called me the “Literary Nostradamus,” a nickname that took off with the same speed as the toilet paper flying off the shelves at Costco.

You can imagine what happened next. The rights all sold—and fast—as the world basically crumbled around us. My editor suggested we submit the book for a PEN America Award. It won. I quit my day job as a copy editor for Men’s Health. I had money coming in. Surprising amounts of money.

Game-changing money.

And so, fast forward. My publisher wants to continue riding the “Nate Ellis wave of predictions,” my agent is excited about another big fat paycheck, and like an idiot, I’m like, “Sure. I’ll write another book.”

As if it’s just that easy. No pressure, right? The whole world is watching. They all want to hear what you have to say, Nate.

My agent sells the new book, an untitled void of emptiness with exactly zero pages written, to my publisher for a lot of money.

They set up a schedule for me.

I try to write. I really do. I start a few different stories, but I can’t quite figure out what I even want to write. I figure that I’ll practice by composing short stories in an attempt to test the waters in a few different genres. I write a thriller-esque thing that’s basically unreadable, a nonfiction essay about my time as a copy editor (boring as hell), and finally, a sci-fi story about humankind struggling to survive after global warming all but destroys our planet. This one, I think, has chops, but it’s in a different wheelhouse than the first book, so I submit it to a variety of magazines under a pseudonym to see if it garners the same kind of excitement.

It gets no takers.

The New Yorker and the Atlantic don’t even bother to respond. The Kenyon Review says thanks but no thanks, and McSweeney’s says it’s not for them. Harper’s and Zoetrope offer comments in response, but they’re all negative. One even goes so far as to suggest several titles of books I should read to improve my craft. I’m tempted to write back, I’m Nate Ellis, goddammit! but all that would do is make me feel even more like an idiot. Everything just feels, I don’t know, wrong. Like, who the hell am I? I had one story, and it wasn’t even really mine. I ask my agent for help, but I’m dismissed. “You’re the creative genius,” I’m told. “Just breathe, and let it flow.”

I try. I even sign up for a yoga class, once I realize that “just breathing” is evidently something I am not very good at.

Eventually, the first deadline comes. I request an extension. Granted.