There’s an odd culture of silence surrounding publishing. This silence is beginning to erode (at least in the circle of people I follow online), but there’s still an unspoken pressure to keep up the face of “Everything is fine!” online, especially when that presence is in any way connected to a business platform. And, no matter how creative and artistic writing is, when it’s how you make a living, it’s a business. Because of this, there are aspects of my professional life I haven’t talked about online, but I’m starting to think I should. So I am.
I almost quit writing in 2015.
Surviving as an author can feel like sailing through a storm. Sometimes a wave lifts you up, carrying you above the chaos of the dangerous seas, but you can drop just as quickly, plunging downward until you’re not sure how to find the surface anymore.
In the first half of 2015, I turned in a contracted draft and was told the book might not be published.
In the first half of 2015, my second book was pushed back. For a third and then fourth time.
In the first half of 2015, my agent and I gave up on the submission of two different series, pulling them back from editors after a year and a half trying to find them homes.
In the first half of 2015, my agent and I parted ways.
I fell fast from the high of seeing my first book in print with a gorgeous cover and more good reviews than bad. At the time, it didn’t seem as though there was any way to recover from something like this. No one was interested in my concepts. My only contract was in major flux. The one book I’d released wasn’t selling well. I’d been working on my one contracted series and my two submission series for so long that I didn’t have any other finished projects to offer an agent or editor. Thinking about starting a new series only to have it end up like my others exhausted me before I even opened a blank word document. Quitting–or at least taking a very long break–seemed like the only option I had. For the sake of my emotional and mental health.
Often we’re told not to look for external validation. It doesn’t matter what other people think, right? In a lot of instances, this is true. It’s better for us to believe this most of the time. Unfortunately, humans aren’t built to operate in isolation, and we do need some sort of encouragement to keep moving forward.
This always makes me think of a poem by Pablo Neruda called If You Forget Me.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.If You Forget Me – Pablo Neruda
The poem taken as a whole is kind of a threat to his wife (or his mistress or his home country of Chile–no one is quite clear on who “you” is), but the concept behind it is so true. Some sort of reciprocation is necessary to feed human emotion and creativity. Without the right kind of encouragement and validation, whether it comes from the world at large or from family and friends or from some other self-fed source, it’s hard to keep fighting.
However, I couldn’t just walk away. Before the fall, I’d signed up for RT Convention. The month before RT, I happened to be driving through Wisconsin and had the chance to have a well-timed coffee date with my friend Liza. We talked quite literally for hours, and Liza gave me the push (and the hope) I needed to approach the conference with something better than resigned despair.
During the course of the five-day conference, I was included on a couple of panels, attended as many others as I could, and had the opportunity to meet so many amazing authors and editors. Some magic must have been in the air, because by the end of the event I had two different editors at two different houses requesting material from me. It was a hint of change for the better, but I was leery of trusting it. I’d been let down–hard–before.
Liza had been right. By the end of the September 2015, I had five new books contracted with two publishers. I hadn’t found a new agent yet, and I wouldn’t in 2015 at all, but I two different companies had promised my career would continue. I had an affirmation that the work I was capable of producing was worth someone else’s time, energy, and money. None of those projects I’d signed on for would appear in the world for a year or more, but I had them lined up. I had hope and encouragement.
Whether it was because of those contracts, coincidental timing, or just fate, other things began turning around, too. My first publisher decided to finish out my contract and publish books three and four of their series. When my new publishers began asking, “So what’s next?” and I reached out to agents for help, I was able to connect with Eric Smith through the wonderful Tristina Wright. He signed me and helped me sell another series, a sci-fi trilogy I can’t wait to get started on.
Now, with the Assassins duology closed out and the Ryogan Chronicles about to begin, I hope I can remember the past two years. The lows are so hard to get through because they feel never-ending. Sometimes they only last a few weeks or months, and sometimes the cycle of storms lasts for years. What can help get us through the lows is to remember the turning points in our lives, the moment when the storm finally broke and the seas began to calm.
It will rarely happen the same way twice, but remembering that it happened at all is sometimes enough reassurance and encouragement when no one and nothing else is offering what we need, when it seems as though, like Neruda says, they’ve all decided to leave us at the shore where we have roots. I’ll be holding on to the memory of the slow rise after RT in 2015, and I hope everyone else has a moment of their own to carry them through the storm.