And then, one day, while writing about a blasted northern landscape in one of my stories, I started to look at how much plane tickets to Alaska cost. I thought, “Well, which is crazier—booking a one-way plane ticket to Alaska or killing myself?”

  My relationship eventually fell apart. I survived it, despite a lot of screaming and threats.

  A year later, I booked a one-way ticket to Fairbanks, Alaska.

  * * *

  What folks don’t realize, I think, is that very often “good” just means “competent.”

  I got to thinking about “talent” and the need for somebody to acknowledge it recently when I was corresponding with some younger writers. I remember how important it was to me for somebody to tell me I was good when I was slogging on the long road. There are writers far younger than me writing stuff that’s far better even than what I’m writing now. And I look at these writers in their early twenties and think, Oh lord, hang on.

  Because I have to tell you—being good, being talented, is the easiest part of this business. That’s just when things really get started.

  * * *

  Science fiction author Samuel R. Delany once said that to succeed at writing, he had to give up everything else. He sacrificed his health, his relationships, in pursuit of becoming the best at what he did. The people who won worked harder than other people. They were willing to sacrifice more.

  I didn’t date for five years after breaking up with my high school boyfriend.

  Maybe I was being pathological, I thought. But if I was a dude, who would question it? How many times did Hemingway shut the door and demand a room of his own?

  If relationships meant giving up being a writer, fuck relationships.

  When not rip-roaring drunk (and often, even then), I’d spend most nights in my dorm room at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks working on short fiction and collecting more rejection slips. My biggest win during my two years of clattering at the keyboard in college was getting accepted to the Clarion Writers’ Workshop when I was twenty. This is it, I thought. In two years, for sure, I’ll make it. I just need to keep at this. I can do this.

  I hunkered down for the long haul. I decided I’d return to this crazy dream I had as a kid, to live in a rustic cabin in the woods in Alaska with a couple of husky dogs and just write books. I’d just write books until my fingers bled.

  Clearly, I’d never pissed in an outhouse at thirty below.

  After doing that a few times, I figured it was time to move on.

  * * *

  This business is rough on talent. Even folks who magically hit it big, monetarily, with their first effort out often drop off the face of the map within a book or two. Sure, some of this is that these folks only had one book in them. But more often, it’s because the scrutiny is too much. The backend business is tough—sales, marketing, and tons of distribution issues that aren’t anything you can control. And then there are the reviews and online harassment and the constant speculation from strangers.

  If you get wound up too much in that, you forget all about why it was you wanted to write in the first place. Nobody is out here waiting for you, to bask in the glow of your genius. Many more are quite happy to rip you down and shit on you.

  It means you have to work harder. It means you need to be eight times as good as everyone else just to stand out. It sucks. It’s challenging. It can wear you down. But being good is only going to get you so far. Maybe you’ll publish a few books and stories. To build a career you need to be better than just good. And, more importantly, you need to be hardheaded; you need to endure.

  * * *

  Durban, South Africa. Cockroaches. Humidity. Nonsensical Celsius temperatures. No air conditioning. Two bottles of wine. A pack of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes. A master’s thesis and a novel warring for my attention.

  I lived in a one-and-a-half-bedroom flat with a partial view of the Indian Ocean, with nothing more than a bed and some cardboard boxes as furniture. I spent most of my time tap-tapping away in the “half bedroom,” sitting on a rug on the floor, my laptop resting on a cardboard box draped with a sheet. I had books lined up all along the baseboards of the room—perfect hiding place for cockroaches.

  I’d smoke cigarettes and muse that I’d finally achieved poor-writer garret-style living. But like pissing in an outhouse in Alaska at thirty below, the realities weren’t as glamorous as advertised.

  I submitted my first novel to publishers when I was twenty-two, mailing the proposals and chapters out from the university mail room. It was time to be famous.

  Every single house rejected it.

  * * *

  When I lived in Chicago in my midtwenties, I’d sometimes go wander around downtown by myself. I had no real plans. No ambition. I’d just wander around this press of people and pretend my life was on the up-and-up like everybody else’s seemed to be. Chicago is a big, shiny city. Like Oz blooming out of the flat Midwestern prairie.

  One night I came home about ten o’clock at night after spending hours alone wandering downtown. Just … wandering. It was one of those aimless, “What the fuck am I doing with my life?” rambles that left me more confused than when I began.

  I stumbled upstairs to my third-floor walk-up and went through the mail. In it was a self-addressed stamped envelope: me, mailing a letter to myself. You’d include them with paper submissions, back in the day when hardly anybody took e-subs, so the editor could send you your acceptance or rejection without paying for postage.

  I’d put the name of the magazine I’d submitted my story to on the back of the letter. It was one of the biggest magazines in the field at the time.

  I opened the letter with that gloriously giddy half-hope, half-dread feeling building in the pit of my stomach.

  It was a form rejection letter. The fourth or sixth or eighth or tenth or … however many, that month. I could barely keep track. All the stories, and all the rejections, just bled into each other.

  I had no idea what I was doing with my life, except this. I knew I wanted this. Even if “this” was just some big magazine to say yes to something.

  But “this” was just one long road of rejection and disappointment.

  It’s strange, but I don’t remember the name of the actual magazine, because it has since closed up shop.

  But I remember sitting on the kitchen floor, despondent, the rejection slip clutched in my hand.

  * * *

  At twenty-six, I woke up in the ICU after two days in a coma and was diagnosed with a chronic illness. I received a bunch of rejections from agents for a new book not long after. One of them expressed outrage that I’d be so bold as to compare the book I was shopping to the work of Robert Jordan or George R. R. Martin, even though the query book I’d read said to compare your work to other marketable work. I filed away the rejections and wondered if I’d ever sell a book. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe I’d given up everything for nothing.

  I lost my job at the Chicago architectural and engineering firm I worked for a few months later. And a few months after that, my relationship with my best friend, former girlfriend, and roommate imploded.

  I found myself packing up everything I owned into the back of a rental truck with a couple of generous friends and driving my life to Dayton, Ohio.

  It felt like I’d failed at everything. Life was a ruin.

  I found myself living in a spare bedroom at a friend’s house, unemployed, deep in medical debt, and staring at yet another novel, three-quarters of the way finished.

  When I opened my laptop, the sticky note still stared back at me: PERSISTENCE.

  In all things. In writing. In life.

  I finished the book.

  I’d reached a point in my life where I didn’t know how to do anything else but finish the fucking book.

  * * *

  I got my first book deal when I was twenty-eight.

  It came at a time when I’d hit rock bottom, professionally, financially, emotionally. It came just when I needed it. It wasn’t a million dollars. It was $10,000 a book, for three books. It was enough money for me to pay off three of my four credit cards and move out of my friend’s spare room.

  Even when the contract was eventually cancelled, and the book never published at that house, I was still paid for the books. I still walked with the money. Thirty thousand dollars for work I never did, for work that they wouldn’t publish.

  I thought about all that work. About those screaming fights in that shared office with my ex, and the cold, drunk nights in Alaska, and shaking out my bug-infested sheets in South Africa, and thought, Was this it? Was this what it was about?

  That money saved my life. But when the bills were paid and my life was in order again, I asked myself what I was writing for besides money, because after writing with the intent of being a writer for fifteen years, now that I wasn’t dying in poverty, the money alone wasn’t satisfying. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t why I was writing.

  Which made me wonder what the fuck I was doing, then.

  * * *

  Another book deal, this time a keeper, a year after my former deal imploded. Books on shelves. Elation. Joy. End of a long road, right?

  No. Just beginning.

  Arguments with my publisher over whitewashed book covers. Late checks. Money that stops flowing. Then the publisher implodes, sells off its assets—including me and my books.

  Take it or leave it. Fight the bullshit. Rage.

  Sheer, unadulterated rage, that the work I spent a lifetime to see in print is now an “asset,” a “property,” a casualty of shitty business practices.

  I fight the situation. I persist.

  I sign a new contract.

  The spice flows again.

  But I’ve lost my joy for fiction.

  * * *

  I’m at the bar at a science fiction convention. I made $7,000 in fiction income the year before. I’m ordering an overpriced drink that I’ll be writing off as a business expense, because I’ll likely lose 30 percent of that $7,000 to taxes in a few months.

  While I wait, I overhear a successful self-published author talking to a group of folks about how self-publishing can make everyone big money, and how traditional publishing is fucked. I’ve heard this a thousand times. Kickstarter is the key, he says. You can pre-fund all that work ahead of time, and generate income. He boasts about how he gave this advice to many underadvanced authors, folks paid “these seven-thousand, ten-thousand-dollar advances,” who were obviously small, silly fish. He sounds like a self-help guru. He makes writing books sound like a get-rich-quick scheme.

  I take my drink. I don’t pour it on his head.

  I remember this is a long game. I remember that both self-published authors and trad-published authors have the same small handful of breakouts and the same massive, slushy mire of “everyone else” clamoring for signal on the long tail.

  I think I’ve been on the long tail a long time, but the more I talk to other writers the more I realize that that whole slog—the shitty apartment with the shitty boyfriend, the frigid outhouses in Alaska, the cockroach wrangling in South Africa—wasn’t actually the start of it. That wasn’t the part where things got really interesting.

  It was getting the first book. It was after the first book. It was being confronted with the fact that writing is a business, and expectations are very often crushed, and your chances for breaking out are pretty grim.

  It’s persisting in the game after you know what it’s really all about. After the shine wears off. It’s persisting after all your hopes and aspirations bang headfirst into reality.

  That’s when it starts. The rest of your life was just a warm-up.

  Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.

  * * *

  Last night I rolled in from a convention in Detroit at 6:00 p.m. and stayed up until 1:00 a.m. catching up on business emails and preparing blog posts. I still have a day job. I also do a lot of freelance copywriting. Putting all that income together, I’m making close to $90,000 a year. But I’ve only been at that number for two years. Six months ago, half my department was laid off at the day job. I expect the hammer to come down at any time.

  I expect that sometime soon, everything will burn down, and I’ll have to start over.

  I’m working on another trilogy. Two of them, actually. I try not to squint too much at my prior sales numbers. It might affect my game.

  I’m working all the time.

  In my first novel, God’s War, my protagonist has a final showdown with the book’s antagonist, who tells her, “There are no happy endings, Nyxnissa.” And Nyx says, “I know. Life keeps going.”

  I know.

  * * *

  I’m packing up my stuff after a panel where I’ve spoken about all sorts of things to other writers, aspiring writers, and fans alike. I’m feeling drained and exhausted. An audience member comes up to me and thanks me for talking about my day job. “You just seem so successful,” he says, “you’ve got multiple books published and you go to cons.”

  Later, somebody at the bar tells me it seems that every time he clicked on a link these days it linked back to one of my blog posts.

  I don’t feel successful.

  But it got me thinking again—what’s my measure of success? Is it money? Copies sold? Or is it the act of persistence itself, the act of continuing to write when everybody tells you it’s a bad deal, and you should just suck it up and stop?

  Persistence, I realized, was not the end goal. It was the actual game.

  I had all the chances in the world to quit this game. Any rational person probably would have. Poverty, unemployment, crazy relationships, chronic illness, an imploding publisher … I could have quit. I could have said, “Fuck this noise.”

  But after raging around on the internet or drinking a bottle of wine or taking a long bike ride, I came back to the keyboard. Always. I always came back.

  Most people don’t.

  I don’t blame them.

  So when people ask me now—at panels, online, at the bar—“What does it take to be a successful writer?” I know the answer, now. Now, more than ever, because I know what it actually means. I know it’s not just a word. It’s a way of life.

  I know what success looks like.

  “Persistence,” I say.

  And take another drink.

  I’ll Make the Pancakes: On Opting In—and Out—of the Writing Game

  Welcome to living loudly in public spaces—online, in print, even on billboards, if you’re lucky. Welcome to being a woman with opinions navigating the court of public opinion. For my part, I’ve been loudly asserting my opinion on the internet and in print for fifteen years, and it never gets any better when the battle trolls ooze up from the bubbling cesspit of the internet and threaten death and sexual assault. No, it never gets easier, but at a certain point, for me, it became easier to endure.

  I realized I wasn’t out here on my own. I was part of something much bigger, and much more important, than myself.

  There will always be trolls—the people telling you to kill yourself, the folks saying they’ll come to your house and rape you in the same breath that they tell you you’re too disgusting for anyone to want to fuck. They will demand your sources and copious evidence to back up your expertise. There will be men, yes, endless reams of men, who assume you write genres you don’t, as if vampires and werewolves make up the sum total of women’s writing; fewer opportunities for you, as a woman, for reviews; colleagues on panels who start conversations with “I don’t want to be sexist but…”; and covers for your gritty science fiction book that come out looking like a Tampax ad. Those things are going to be there for some time, to some extent. And every few years, you’ll fight for respectability and a voice from a new generation of folks who don’t know your work or credentials and thus judge you exclusively on gender and appearance as determined by whatever the media machine says you are. And you’ll have to prove yourself all over again.

  It sucks. It’s hard. If you stay in the game, though, I promise you’ll get very good at it. You’ll get pretty good at writing, too. And business. Those are the parts that get better. You get tougher, and more jaded, and angrier as you become a better, more vocal, and more respected writer.

  But you’ll also get pretty tired.

  I don’t judge women who leave this game. I knew a lot of feminist bloggers from the early days of blogging who closed up shop after wave after wave of abuse, stalkers, threats, and real-life incidents where “internet threat” became “in-your-fucking-face threat.” I know women who wrote hard SF or epic fantasy who threw in the towel, or went to genres like urban fantasy or romance that were far more welcoming to women authors. I know women who shrugged and just went through buckets of male and gender-neutral pseudonyms, and then snickered at everyone behind their hands.

  So I’m not going to tell you to stay in this game.

  Instead, I’m going to tell you I know it’s hard.

  And I’m going to tell you why, despite that bullshit, I’m still here.

  * * *

  I was at WisCon, a big feminist SF convention, in May 2006 when Joanna Russ did what I believe was her last public interview. Russ was in ill health, so she did the interview over the phone with Samuel R. Delany. By this time, Russ was one of my heroes. I found her to be the most angry and vehement of the feminist SF writers I’d read; compared to Russ, Le Guin was boringly conservative.

  Russ expressed the white-hot rage I felt at realizing the game was rigged against me from the start, and that no matter how equal I believed I was, the world was going to treat me like a woman, whether I liked it or not. Her book The Female Man is so ragingly, teeth-gnashingly nuts that I couldn’t get through it the first couple of times I tried. The title also gave voice to something I felt all the time—that I was a human, a man—not in the sense that I felt disassociated from my female body, but in the sense that I, too, had bought that women were somehow “other” and I wasn’t “other” so I must be a man, a real human too, right? I’d internalized an astonishing amount of misogyny growing up that I didn’t even recognize until my early twenties.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24