Thursday night I was reminded of this when I spoke to a chapter of the League of Utah Writers.  I talked about networking, and people participated by asking questions, sharing stories, and making comments and recommendations.  Like just about every instructional event I do, it was constructive and fun for me, as I hope it was others.  I don’t have to try very hard to hope that, though, because of the expressions of appreciation and gratitude that followed the presentation, that night, here on my blog, and elsewhere.  It’s very easy to convince yourself you’ve done something helpful when other people tell you so.  And I can’t recall a single workshop or panel I’ve ever participated in that people haven’t thanked me for.  I share this not merely to acknowledge the many kind people I get to meet, but to admit I’m just beginning to see how important this all is to my advancement as a writer.  I don’t mean by broadening my name recognition and interest in my writing, though that is certainly true as well; for me, teaching others is a large part of what makes the writer’s life—my life—happy.

There are pitfalls for writers, like any artist, some darker and deeper than others.  Addiction to self-destructive vehicles of distraction is always nearer than we think.  Every good story goes places that no healthy person would ever want to travel emotionally; to get the story there, the writer has to go  as well, if only in their mind.  It’s no wonder that individuals who emotionally confront the darker aspects of human experience rather than retreat from them sometimes cope unhealthily.  But not every pit is so insidious.  Some, like feelings of rejection and loneliness, are common to all humans.  It’s just that, for writers, these pits are so broad it’s incredibly difficult—if not impossible—to avoid them for much of your life. 

Writing is, mostly, a solitary art.  So is the contemplation it involves, the ruminating and daydreaming and asking yourself innumerable questions to which you have no answers.  Success doesn’t change that.  In a way, it only makes it worse.  There is a special kind of loneliness in fame (a supposition of mine, as I’m as far from famous as one can get); in being marked and noted by mobs of people, none of whom know you at all beyond the brand you’ve come to embody.  There is no escape, not completely.  When you decide to become a writer, to do it full-hearted and regardless of cost or condition, you reconcile yourself to being a lonesome kind of person.  Rejection is just as inescapable.  In a flux so great as that of written story, where every person has the potent birthrights of language and narrative affinity; where these potentials tie together into a unique, subjective, and lovely snarl that we call a person;  where mastery is so impossible you may write your whole life and send your skill not a jot higher but only sideways—in such a place, how can any of us expect to write and not be rejected, under appreciated, and misunderstood?  It’s a great and terrible truth that every person is a mystery, even to one’s self.  When we bump against each other in passing there is zero chance that our rough edges will always fit together.  The best work we will ever do—could ever do—will not please all people.  Sometimes when it does not, we will hear about it.  We will hear. 

Agents, editors, those who publish our work to world, they don’t want to reject us.  But they will.  Many, many times, they will.  

We don’t desire to be away from people, alone and apart, to make our stories breathe.  But we will be.  For too much of our lives, we will be.

We can’t help but feel these things.  I certainly can’t.  Which is why, as much as any other reason, I love to teach.  It fills my writer’s life with those things it so desperately lacks: society instead of solitude; mutual edification rather than private refinement; gratitude and immediate returns rather than form letters, criticisms, and the hollow ticking of the clock.  If you are like me, a writer and storyteller for better and worse, then I offer one heartfelt suggestion: share that.  Teach.  Find something you know and do well and help others to know and do it too, still their way, only a little better than before.  I have no doubts that your career, your quality of life, and your entirety of person will all improve if you do.

It’s either great fortune or a merciful kindness that we generally don’t feel ourselves dying (unlike unicorns turned into human princesses).  Barring terrible disease or a horrible accident, we’re able to keep the illusion that because I exist this moment I will certain exist in the next and all following as well.  Doing stuff helps us maintain this illusion.  It doesn’t matter much what stuff we do, as long as it’s distracting and keeps us busy.  Even TV can work (though it speeds up the pace of cerebral death).  In fact, there’s only one thing that makes our own continual passing away tangible: waiting.  Waiting is, by definition, a lack of distracting stuff in the present, and thus makes us aware of our slow degeneration.

This is perhaps the toughest thing about being a writer and seeking to publish.  Even a mediocre writer who’s serious about breaking into print will have to become a master waiter.  And the better you are at waiting, the more aware you become of your own decaying state.  To be blunt, if you want to be a writer, you’d better be okay with the idea that a lot of your life is going to be spent twiddling your thumbs while waiting for something you really want to happen (that probably won’t happen), during which time you’ll become painfully aware of how said life is ticking away with every single twiddle of your digits.    

I hate waiting.  (As does Inigo, right, ForeverTeal?) 

In my case, I am waiting to hear about a proposal I sent out nearly four months ago.  The publisher who is considering it lists a response time of six to eight weeks.  I’m now going on fifteen.  Exceeding a publisher’s response time is good.  It doesn’t take long to send a form rejection or quickly scribble, “This stinks, and we would greatly appreciate not being afflicted by your prose in the future.  We did not relish the dry heaves that accompanied our reading of this catastrophe.”  Not hearing back quickly (assuming they received your manuscript) means, at the least, you’ve earned respect and, likely, legitimate consideration by someone in the house.  The longer the wait, the more respect you’re probably accumulating.  All this is good.

The waiting itself is not good, unless you find dying nice and slow good.  I do not.  As I sit around twiddling my thumbs and fighting the urge to bite them off, I remind myself, “Yes, you’re waiting, and yes, you’re dying, and yes, you feel it…but it means they like your book!” 

If they like it enough to publish it, the waiting (and dying) will be worth it.  If not, my wait is over and I’ll submit it to new places, petitioning once more for the privilege of waiting.

Life bites.

Sorry for the morbid post.  You have to do these things occasionally as a professional author.  Contractual obligations, you understand.

Tomorrow, something constructive: an answer to Scarlet Knight’s question.

Life, the Universe, and Everything (LTUE) is a speculative fiction conference held every February at BYU in Provo, Utah. It’s a great conference (in which I participate yearly) so you should make plans to go if you’re in the area. (Did I mention it’s free?) Stacy Whitman, then the editor for Mirrorstone in charge of the Codices, was one of the guests at the conference that year. The Dragon Codices were just getting started with the first book in the line, the Red entry, still eleven months away from release. It just so happened that Rebecca Shelley, a good friend now and pleasant acquaintance then, was the author of said Red Codex. She was also a contributing guest at LTUE. When I learned Rebecca and Stacy would both be at the conference, I knew it was too good a chance to pass up and asked Rebecca to introduce me.

It all made sense. Rebecca knew me from local writers groups and circles and had seen me win several statewide awards from the League of Utah Writers, including a first place for full-length novel. She knew I could write and that I was serious about the business. Stacy was her editor, so to make a pitch to Ms. Whitman there was no better contact than the foundational author of the first book in the Codices line. It was all perfectly logical.

Except I had never written a children’s book. Yeah, that part I didn’t tell Rebecca. At that point I had already completed six novels, but they were all for adults (with a kind of YA thrown in). None were shorter than 150,000 words. The Dragon Codices were middle grade books with a target of no more than 50,000 words. I’ll do the math for you: that’s 1/3 the length of the shortest thing I’d ever written that wasn’t a short form, like short story or essay. Without knowing if I could even write for kids (or produce a book that wouldn’t demand a wad of paper thick enough with which to beat seals to death), I brazenly asked Rebecca to introduce me to Stacy, and if she felt it appropriate, maybe put in a good word or two.

Rebecca agreed very cheerfully, and was good as her word and better than gold. She recommended me to Stacy after a panel and Stacy invited me to send her a pitch. I then proceeded to write my first ever children’s novel. Now, to clarify: I didn’t write the whole novel, just three sample chapters, a synopsis (two, actually, one short and one more detailed, as is my method), and a cover letter. And it may surprise some people to know that I didn’t actually make a pitch for any of the Codices. Originally, I proposed a trilogy of my own. Still in the Dragonlance shared-world, but beyond that my own creation. At this point I wasn’t even aware that they were looking for authors for further Codices in the future.

So, I sent out my package and a few months later got an email from Stacy. She told me she didn’t have a spot for my trilogy (rend hair and clothing) but that she liked my sample chapters so much she wondered if I could adapt them for the Green Dragon Codex (as my original story involved a green dragon). So I did. I took my original three books and turned them into one book incorporating editorial suggestions Stacy had given me, wrote a synopsis of that, and submitted it.

Then I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Hint: If you intend to publish, get some training into the virtue of patience. It will serve you well in the absence of a really great stress reliever, such as rugby or free climbing or, if you wait too long and turn away from the constructive, some type of dramatic spree of violence that will earn you both five minutes of the evening news and a shiny new headstone. However you cope, if you write to publish, you will spend a great deal of your life waiting for something you really, really want but suspect you probably won’t get. How to deal with this? To each her own, but I have a modest suggestion: try writing something new.

Anyway, a lifetime later (in this case being six or seven months), I get an email from Stacy saying they are offering me a contract. She’d tried to call me, but, honestly, I’m glad we never connected. I wouldn’t have wanted to ruin my ultra-manly reputation by bursting into tears over the phone.

Um, yes, I cried. Sobbed like a baby. In my defense, you should realize that the very fact that I write for a living is a strange mix of cosmic joke and divine mercy. Whatever the mix, it became a kind of salvation. I never wrote growing up and never wanted to (though I loved reading from fourth grade on). Never enjoyed it as a boy or teen, never enjoyed it at school. By the time I turned twenty I had never written anything longer than five pages in my life, and cannot remember a single written piece in which I invested myself. What I had done was endure a number of difficult experiences as a teen that resulted in my leaving school and work and, in a peculiar way, the world of the living (I might share more on this if someone asks, but probably not otherwise). My writing, to be completely honest, was a desperate outlet from a really dark time and place in my life, and to this day I don’t understand how it all happened or why. What I do know is that separated from school and all my friends, apart from the vibrancy of society, and unable to see any possible future distinctive from my purposeless present, I started writing. No training or education, no acquired skill, not even a genuine desire or understanding of why I started. But I did.

Some five years and more than a million words later I was offered my first contract. It was a wonderful moment that grew directly out of that darkest time in my life when I couldn’t imagine wonderful moments coming again. The five years in between I had nothing to encourage me but what I taught myself, my love of story, and my desire to achieve something, and with every rejection letter I received that seemed less and less likely.

So maybe you’ll forgive me my tears.

Tomorrow: The difference between getting GDC accepted for publication and publishing it. Oh, yeah, there’s a difference.