Howdy all,
I’m a relatively long time member of the community, and occasional diarist and commentator. I’m also a science fiction and fantasy writer and my second novel, Cybermancy, is out today from Penguin’s Ace division. It’s the sequel to WebMage, though it’s intended to stand on its own.
Like any book, it has a story behind the story. In this case the decision not to quit. Which is, I think, quite relevant to today’s political situation.
Cybermancy is a contemporary fantasy/cyberpunk hybrid available pretty much everywhere and the various details are available down below.
What I want to talk about first is how I got to the place where I’m blogging about a new book coming out and how that matters to the current political struggle. Both involve a lot of not quitting. I frame it that way instead of talking about following a dream because following a dream is the easy part. Dreaming of writing a book is easy. Dreaming of a new Democratic majority and what it can do is easy. Setting out to write or change the world is easy too. Not quitting when the writing becomes difficult or the world won’t change is hard.
In the acknowledgments of Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty and the Midnight Hour there’s a note that says “to Dan Hooker for calling the day after I almost decided to quit.” Every writer who has followed the dream to fruition knows about that day, or those days, as the case may be.
It might be the day you got the rejection letter for that first novel, the letter that finished off the set of major publishers and killed the book for the foreseeable future, the one that meant that if you wanted to be published it would have to be the next book or the one after that. It might be the day your agent called to tell you the 3 book deal that tied all of your work up for the last 2 1/2 years had been killed at the last minute by marketing. Or it might have come earlier, when you realized that after taking three years to write the first book, it was now going to take another one to revise it.
The reason is almost immaterial. The decision not to quit is what really matters.
For me it came in 2005. I had a good agent who believed in my work, more than 20 short stories either in print or forthcoming, 2 novels in the trunk and 5 out with various editors none of which had sold. I also had family stress at levels that damn near broke me. I was depressed, not clinically, but damn close, and I felt like 15 years of hard work had officially gone to hell. But worse, far far worse, I wasn’t enjoying writing. I was doing it–I can’t not–but I wasn’t taking the joy from it that I always had.
When I hit bottom I spent probably three hours staring at the ceiling and doing nothing but thinking about how something I had loved and pursued for years had crashed and burned. I tried to figure out what else I could possibly do with my time–I was writing full time. The answer was nothing. Nothing. There wasn’t anything else that appealed to me. I don’t know what I’d have done if something else had occurred to me but the fact that nothing did was totally bleak at the time. I felt like the only thing I wanted to do was going nowhere and would continue to go nowhere. In retrospect it was a powerful moment. I had come to place where I realized that writing wasn’t just something I did that I could walk away from. It was who I was down in the bedrock.
The next day I got up and wrote, though I didn’t much enjoy it. And the next day. And the day after that. Somewhere in there I started to love the work again, and here I am two years later watching Cybermancy appear in the bookstores and I’ve rarely felt better.
I had another black day, a political one. It was the morning after the election in 2004. I think you’ll all remember it. I had poured three months of time that should have been spent writing books into editorials and door knocking and it had all come to nothing. No matter how annoyed I get with some of the things our current Democratic majorities are doing, I can think back and compare where we are now to the morning after the 2004 election and feel whole lot better.
So, if you have a dream and you’re where I was a few years ago, either artistically or politically….
Don’t quit. It’ll be the best decision you ever made.
Now, on to that book launch stuff:
Since many of the Cybermancy reviews aren’t accessible online yet, I’ve posted transcriptions of several at Wyrdsmiths (my home blog). For WebMage which has been out for a year let me just note: SciFi.Com, Romantic Times, blogcritics.org, and Huntress Reviews (scroll down the page for both Cybermancy and WebMage). Two sequels, CodeSpell and MythOS, are slated for June ’08 and summer ’09.
If you’re interested in buying the book and supporting the liberal blogosphere at the same time, you can pick up a copy at Powells via these Booman links Cybermancy or WebMage.
Another blue option would be Barnes & Noble.
Or, if you’re interested and an Amazon shopper: WebMage, and Cybermancy.
I’ll be happy to talk about not quitting or following the dream, or even that book thing that comes out today in the comments area below, though it may take a little while for me to respond as I’m blogging in about five places today.
Thanks for reading!
Kelly
