Guest Blogger: Christine Son

I hope that many of you read my review of OFF THE MENU yesterday. It is a wonderful book about female relationships and discovering one's passions. I am so excited that Christine Son agreed to stop by today and tell us a little more about herself. I think you'll agree that her essay shows not only her wonderful sense of humor but also a glimpse of her terrific writing.

How Hard Can It Be?

Some years ago, my husband and I were lounging around in the family room of our first home, which was wood-paneled in a hideous shade of Eighties dirty dirt brown. We’d been living there for over three years and had complained every day about how dated the house was, and that Saturday morning, I suggested that we strip the walls and restain them with a more genteel mahogany (because nothing says warm and inviting like dark, cave-like walls). “How hard can it be?” I asked. “I bet we can knock this baby out in a weekend.” Cheered by my optimism, my husband and I ran to Home Depot, were advised that varnish was the best solution to remove wood stain, bought two gallons of the poison and then went home, excited to renovate the three hundred square foot room. Two hours later, we both had massive headaches and were completely disoriented from the fumes, and this was after we’d opened every window in the house. The varnish didn’t work, and to our dismay, we now had a gaping section of lighter dirty dirt brown wall. We couldn’t restain the wall to the original color because we had no idea what it was, and we couldn’t add another stain over the original hue. So, we decided to paint the entire room a Pottery Barn pale yellow, which was perfect, considering that our family room was page 59 of the catalog (interior design is neither of our fortes). We returned to Home Depot, selected the color, bought five gallons of paint, and then went for Round Two, to which I said, “How hard can this be? I bet we can knock this baby out by the end of the weekend.”

Three weeks later, we were almost finished.

Six weeks later, the room was beautiful.

It took forever to paint because the room was twelve feet high with an obscene amount of wainscoting, picture framing and crown molding. It also took forever because both of us were working thirteen hours a day and were painting whenever we weren’t at the office. One would think that I’d learned my lesson. But several months later, a friend of ours asked us to help him move. And as I am now notoriously known to do, I asked, “How hard can it be? I bet we can knock this out in three hours.” Of course, we didn’t.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had a cheerfully confident—and borderline delusional—outlook on projects and goals. And I’d always harbored a desire to write, even when I majored in Biology and French, when I pursued a medical career, when I went to law school, and then when I worked at a law firm. The one passion that nagged at me constantly, I put aside in favor of “real life.” Then one morning, I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of a Barnes & Noble, reading a book, and I thought, “I’ve wanted to do this for so long. What am I waiting for? I mean, how hard can it be?”

So I did it. Got a laptop and started writing. And discovered that it was damned hard to write a novel. And that it was even harder to become published. I had done my research. I knew how slim my chances of publication were. But I kept at it until I finished my first book. And I kept at it when it didn’t sell. I kept at it when my days had become so long that I couldn’t tell when one ended and the next started. But like the family room, I couldn’t stop writing. For every “I don’t think I can do this anymore” thought I had, I had two of, “but I still love it.” I took a step back and listened to my environment, to the complaints my friends had about their own career trajectories. I discovered that we were all in the same boat, wondering how our lives had turned out the way they had when our passions were elsewhere. We talked about it so much that it became the backbone of OFF THE MENU, that conflict of living up to everyone’s expectations while hiding the love of our existences. And because it was so close to my heart, the subject grew organically into an entire novel.

After several iterations, the book sold to NAL/Penguin. I was nearly manic with joy. I don’t have children, but I imagine that the exuberance I felt is not unlike childbirth, when one forgets the pain and hardship and difficulties and long nights and debilitating self-doubt the very instant her agent says those magic words—“they love it. They want to buy it.”

So that’s the lesson we can all take away from my experience. It wasn’t because I was so awesome that I was able to make it in an insanely difficult industry. It was that I continued writing, even when it seemed like everyone in the world was saying “no.” And now, I feel like I’m living my dream. I’m working on my second novel on nights and weekends and holidays (I still have a day job that takes up a good bit of my time). And as I muddle my way through the manuscript, often wondering if it’s any good, if it even makes any sense, I find myself saying what I’ve always said: “Come on Christine, you can do it. I mean, how hard can it be?”

A big thanks goes out to Christine Son for taking time out of her very busy schedule to stop by!

Christine Son graduated from the University of Texas and Duke University School of Law. She works as corporate counsel for a Fortune 500 company in Dallas, Texas, where she lives with her husband. OFF THE MENU is her first novel.