Fourteen years ago this February, my mother died. I was 29 and utterly unprepared to deal with the eventuality.
See, my mother and I had had a fairly contentious relationship. It was no secret that I was her least favorite child. She once said to my face, "I'm your mother, and I love you. I have to. But I don't like you, and if you were someone else's child, I wouldn't let you around my children." I won't belabor all the ways she made my childhood hell, but suffice to say, we were not very close, and that severely wounded me.
To the woman's credit, she did encourag me to read widely and regularly and never once told me a book was inappropriate or unpermitted. Furthermore, she made me a promise when I was young that she would never stop buying me journals as long as I promised to never stop writing in them. For all our difficulties through the years, we both kept those promises, even after I went off to school.
I had always known that there was nothing in my life I wanted to more than write books. Ever since it dawned on me that authors were just people with great imaginations and a way with words, the single greatest ambition of my life was to join their ranks. I'd tried writing something of length dozens of times, never getting more than a couple pages deep. I finished a couple short stories that I didn't hate, but I just couldn't break through and figure out how to make a book come out of me.
Then my mother died, and I realized she'd never get to see me publish anything and that life is so very much shorter than I thought it was. I needed to write in a way I never had before. I knew I was never going to do it if I stayed in Tucson, so that summer I packed up and moved to Seattle with little more than a dream and a couch to crash on.
When I tried to get an apartment, I didn't know much about the area. I was mostly concerned with getting the cheapest apartment I could find, which is how I ended up missing Seattle altogether and landing in Renton. I lived there for exactly one year, during which time there were thirteen different shootings at my apartment complex, with a back corner of the parking lot featuring a regular rotation of cars that steadily diminished in parts before disappearing.
It was a month or so into the stay that my roommate, who was paying for two rooms, decided to give his extra room to his recently evicted drug dealer. I was, in a word, alarmed. Cautiously, I go to know the guy, having been fairly comfortable with several violent men in my misspent youth. It turned out we got on rather better than he did with my roommate, and we began spending a considerable amount of time together. He introduced me to his circle of associates, regularly running his operations from the apartment.
As this increasingly criminal environment unfolded around me, the story I'd been worrying at for months suddenly unlocked in my mind as the pieces I'd been juggling abruptly fell into place one afternoon when my new friend introduced me to a rather exceptional natural chemical reaction. I saw the whole series unfolding before me, nuances of the magical system and the distinct nature of the protagonist, all of it manifesting in my mind like a gift from the Muses of yore. I desperated scribbled out notes and plot arcs and bullet points all across my wall with chalk markers like some kind of crazy person, but when I came down it was all there, the story I needed to tell.
Now I just needed to figure out how to tell it.
It was at this point that my little sister offhandedly mentioned that she'd written a novel, and I was aghast that she'd just casually accomplished my life's dream. She mentioned National Novel Writing Month, an organized and supportive writing sprint with the goal of producing a novel in a month, something she'd done and enjoyed. (This is before the whole thing went to shit.)
Inspired, I, um, assured I had the appropriate chemical support, then buckled down and dedicated my November to cranking out 1,500 words every day, come hell or high water. I committed to not reading anything I produced. Most critically, I committed to not demanding I write High Art. Just put the damn words on the paper, every day.
And I wrote. I wrote with every free minute I could scavenge. The only computing device I had at the time was the iPad mini my mother had given me, so I got a little bluetooth keboard and started writing everywhere. I soon learned to prefer writing in bars to writing in coffeeshops, most particularly because bars tend to offer free refills of coffee, where coffeeshops are more stingy. I've never been one to turn up my nose at the quality of free coffee.
My life was, however, considerably complicated at this point in time by the fact that I was fighting a daily, desperate battle with suicidal ideation. And I was losing. I knew it was a matter of when, not if.
Then my writing saved my life in a very literal sense.
I don't just mean by filling the hours with something to think about other than how much I wanted to die. I mean specifically that I was laying in bed one day, eyes closed, trying to remind myself that I could always do it tomorrow instead, and I thought about my main character. Particuarly, I considered how his disjunctive inner life serves to actuallize different aspects of his self. I started practicing the visualization exercises I'd learned at a guided meditation retreat. I manifested a safe space and embodied aspects of myself in representations of my Self, having the representations talk to each other about where my disquiet was coming from.
This meditative practice, more than anything else, kept me alive until I got the medication that helped me escape the terrifying spiral.
November came to an end, and I was caught in the middle of a half-told story. I decided to continue my commitment, writing every day until I finished this first story. Shortly after New Years, I had an absolutely dreadful, but finished, first draft that was a little over 200,000 words long.
Some research led me to believe that was probably too much for a debut effort, so I reconsidered what I had, then decided that it would work as a trilogy. I spent considerably longer than two months breaking the thing into three books and then fleshing out distinct and coherent conflict arcs. When I had finished rewriting a first book, I set out to query for the first time. It didn't go well. I went back to work. When I felt like I had a better manuscript, I went to a Pitching Conference in New York City. An acquiring editor for Penguin Random House loved my pitch and gave me her card, telling me to send her the manuscript when it was ready.
This was still before my medication, so being in NYC for the first time, all alone, pitching this deeply personal work while wildly, horrifically uncomfortable, I was a house of glass cards. When she said she wanted my book, I literally broke down crying in the room. I went home and worked on the book more. And more. And I never felt like it was ready. And I never sent her the manuscript. I was so afraid of rejection that I didn't even try.
I put the book to the side. I felt like I wasn't ready to tackle something of that magnitude. I wrote other books. Books I cared about less. A nonfiction book. A couple one-off books exploring ideas I found interesting, but not compelling. I read a lot of books about story structure and scene building and copy editing. I came back to that first book and I finished out the trilogy, reworking the first book along the way, then giving the lot another revision before I queried again.
I didn't send the manuscript to the acquiring editor who'd asked for it. It had been years at this point. I didn't imagine she would still be interested.
The querying didn't go well, so I put the now-trilogy aside to work on something else, something I wanted to publish. I tried something bigger than my little one-offs, but considerably lesser than the trilogy I'd put aside. It was a little four book series about a group of friends at an Academy of Magic and Advanced Technology called the Lakeside Adventures. I published it. Some people bought it. Some people said nice things about it. I wasn't terrifically enthused by the work, so eventually I shut down the sales page.
Having felt like I'd learned a lot during the process of writing all those other books, and particularly things about how to build a series, I went back to work on the trilogy. I plotted out the details of the rest of the series, realizing that I needed four total trilogies, not the three I'd been planning. More sketching out of plot points happened in some of those notebooks at the top of the post. I set myself to single-mindedly plowing through the production and refinement of the rest of this series with the same unwavering dedication with which I'd initially poured out those first 200,000 words.
I developed a process: plot by hand, sprint through a draft, read once without editing at all, initial revision, read again, repeat revision if necessary, then start plotting the next book. I worked through all of them, ignoring practically every other form of recreational diversion except for semi-regular dinners with my siblings and the very occasional beer with a friend. When the series was done, I did a full read through the entire thing, then went through another revision from start to finish, and again.
Then it was time for readers. I was nervous. I sent out applications on social media, getting a few bites. Some of my friends offered to give me feedback on the first book. I had few who read through the whole series, but their feedback made the series stronger, in my opinion, at least. Armed with the feedback, I did another revision pass over the entire series, then one last editorial readthrough to make sure all the consistencies were aligned across the thirteen books.
And it was done.
Over fourteen years, off and on, through countless interruptions, distractions, and breakdowns, I am ready to stop working on the most ambitious thing I've ever done in my life. Thirteen books. Four trilogies and a spinoff. Nearly 1.7 MILLION words.
The magnitude of the scope of the project isn't the only reason this series is the most ambitious thing I've ever done. Another part is the deeply personal way I represent some aspects of autism. Another part is the risk I'm taking in how explicitly I describe some criminal activities, which could definitely give youth ideas.
The biggest factor in my ambition though, is that I have something that I urgently need to say about humanity, and this series is my effort to say it as loudly and broadly as I can.
I devoutly believe in the awesome potential of humanity. I think we are nothing short of astonishing. I think the only limit to what we are capable of accomplishing together is our imagination and the systems keeping us from actually working together. But the potential is there, and it's incredible. More than anything else, I want to infect youth with that belief, that humanity can be amazing, if we choose to be. The solution to literally all of our problems lies in embracing our rich and diverse humanity, and the very stars await us if we choose.
Of course, none of that is ever going to matter unless I actually publish the books. I have exported the final files to go to print. Having been scarred by my first experience seeking out cover art, I put considerably more research into finding an experienced professional with a portfolio that spoke to me. Before the end of the year, I am going to publish this book that I first began plotting shortly after my mother passed fourteen years ago, and I'm terrified. Mom would have absolutely hated this series, which isn't a surprise, as there is so very much of me in it. But she would have been very satisfied that all her journals didn't go to waste.
Comments