I Built Too Much

For three years I built a publishing house with three imprints. Special education guides. Homeschool compliance packages for all fifty states. Advocacy packets. Wellness books. A memoir. Research on parental alienation. Twenty-two disability guides, each in two versions. A course. A journal.

It was a lot of work. Most of it is finished and sitting in files.

Last week I looked at the whole catalog and understood that I could not carry it. Not because the work is bad. Because a house with three audiences is three houses, and I am one person with a full-time job and a novel that keeps not getting written.

So I am narrowing.

Sage Lotus Press is now the whole thing. Not an imprint under a larger house. The house itself. Books for the second half of a life: midlife, loss, chronic illness, caregiving, starting over, becoming someone new after the first version of your life ends.

The special education catalog stays where it is, still available, no longer growing. Some of it will come across eventually, the parts about families rather than about paperwork. The parental alienation research stays too. That thread is not finished and I am not finished with it.

I want to say something about what narrowing actually feels like, because it is not what I expected.

I expected relief. What I got first was grief, and then something closer to embarrassment. Three years is a long time to spend building a structure you then take apart. There is a voice that says you wasted it. That you should have known. That a person who was serious would have picked correctly the first time.

That voice is wrong, and I know it is wrong, and it took me a week to stop listening to it anyway.

Here is what is actually true. I could not have known which work was mine until I built all of it. The catalog I am setting down taught me the production process I am now using for the catalog I am keeping. The years were not a detour. They were how I found out.

I think this is the thing nobody tells you about reinvention in your fifties. It does not arrive as a clean pivot. It arrives as a pile of things you made, and the slow uncomfortable work of deciding which ones are still yours.

Some of what you built was for a person you used to be. That does not make it a mistake. It makes it evidence that you were paying attention, right up until the moment you noticed you had changed.

I'm in my sixties. I have a daughter in college, a novel at ninety-nine thousand words, and a catalog that is finally the right size.

The new site is at sagelotuspress.com. The old address still works and will keep working. Everything launches on August 19.