Hope and Ambition as an Author in Impossible Times (Patreon)

There’s a common saying in the writing world: write the kind of book you want to read.

This essay follows the same idea. It’s what I’m thinking about and what I need to say to myself. Over the past thirteen months, I’ve swung between periods of being able to grind out work with much more effort to being totally unable to gather the focus or energy to write. This piece is very self-reflective and at least as much venting as advice or industry analysis, but I hope there’s enough in here that some of you that are writers will see enough of your own experience in it to find it useful.

I know I’m not alone in struggling right now. I’ve heard accounts of scrapped projects, pushed deadlines, and writers of all sorts scraping the bottom barrel to get forward movement on projects since the start of the pandemic. Plus the writers who are facing even greater challenges due to being caretakers cut off from much if not all of their normal support system.

The essay I need to read right now is one that explores the way that the past year has thrown a harsh light on what I learned was always a precarious balance between ambition and health.

It is hard to make a living in the USA. Period. Not just for writers, but for everyone. Generational wealth inequality, wage stagnation, rising costs of living, insufficient social services and caretaking resources, a monstrous healthcare system with out-of-control prices.

And here I am with my keyboard trying to make a difference writing action-adventure novels that go “pew pew smooch jump kaboom” while the world burns. I felt more like I was doing something to help working text banks for People’s Action during the 2020 election even compared to working on my very political novel work-in-progress.

There have been times when the fact that this next novel *is* much more political has made it hard to work on because it felt like sitting on the sidelines calling shots and yelling at the ref rather than being on the field. I wonder if I’d be better off trying to write something more oblique or at least not set in our world.

But the idea of trying to start writing a new novel and write it fast enough to get to market in any amount of time is also daunting. And I still believe in this novel, even if it’s a huge pain to work on right now. And I believe it has a good chance if I can get it to market.

The Market

That thing I’ve spent a decade of my professional life trying to learn, to move within, to catch thermals and good winds and ride trends when they line up with my own work.

I debuted with a weird urban fantasy at a time when Urban Fantasy was “dying” in the traditional SF/F industry. When self-publishing was eating the traditional publishers’ lunch in ebook sales strategy, and here I was with a digital-only work in 3rd person instead of 1stperson, with weird magic systems and a strong vein of cultural criticism.

I can’t predict what the market will do. Not with any kind of certainty. I can call shots, and they may be correct, but the overlap between “what I can predict will sell” and “what I want to write” isn’t a huge sliver of material. I know I could make more money working in other genres, in other fields of writing – technical writing or copywriting.

But that’s not what I want to be doing. I have the liberty of following my interests as a writer because of my economic circumstances. I’m not in a position where I have to quit writing because my last book didn’t make enough to live on.

That freedom is kind of bizarre, due to growing up in a society where being able to sell your labor for ever-greater sums of money was Good and Proper but also totally essential to avoid destitution and homelessness.

I could just quit.

I could decide I’m done with writing and “just” be a stay-at-home dog parent, loving spouse, and supportive friend. I could play RPGs and chill out with video games, pick up sword arts again, and opt-out of the Professional Author Grind. I wouldn’t be a less worthy person. It wouldn’t be a less worthy way of living. I could do a lot of good for the people in my life if I made that effort my primary focus.

And in the last thirteen months, I’ve considered that more than once. But I keep coming back to the keyboard. I’ve got things to say and the ambition to try to say them well enough that dozens or hundreds or more people at a publishing company help me say it as clearly as I can and to be heard/read/seen as broadly as possible.

With the economic privilege to write what I want because I want to do it, what does it mean to write for the market? What kind of legacy do I want to leave behind as a writer, a storyteller, and a person in the world? Annihilation Aria got the best reviews of any of my work to date, and it’s moved very well on a longer-term discount. But the publisher is very small and limited in their resources – economic and social.

The novel I’m working on (tentative title: Between Two Wars) is designed to be enough of a departure to give me a soft-reboot on my career. I’ve yet to have a widely-distributed book from a major publisher. My S&S books were all ebook only, Shield & Crocus was published with an Amazon house that (for understandable reasons) met a lot of resistance from efforts to sell copies out into the retail field, Born to the Blade was ebook + audio focused on subscription sales. Genrenauts started at Tor.com with a focus on ebook and audio, and Annihilation Aria was published by a very small press.

Nine years into my career, I haven’t had what for many is the “normal” publishing experience of full print + ebook distribution by a Big Five house. Not that the “normal” method is any guarantee of success or that you’ll get adequate support for your work. Your book might be granted lower priority, it might be released the same week as a book that dominates online conversations or shelf placement. Someone critical to the staff-side effort of your book might leave the company right before your book comes out.

There’s so much we can’t control, and that’s before things like political upheaval or a global pandemic.

The Why

This brings me back to the core ambition that keeps me returning to the keyboard.

I believe that stories matter. That I can help make the world a bit brighter, a bit more compassionate, a bit more interesting through telling stories. That a life lived as a storyteller trying to work with systems that can grant me a bigger megaphone means that I have the chance to make a positive impact on the lives of thousands or maybe tens of thousands of people. Or more.

There’s no one right way to be a storyteller. Or an author. Or a human. As I move from the first few years of my writing career toward my second decade as a professional novelist, the chances that I’ll have a stratospheric success of a book are lower. 99+% of writers are not commercial juggernauts like Stephen King or Stephanie Meyer or Suzanne Collins. Most writers aren’t generation-defining luminaries like N.K. Jemisin or Ursula K. Le Guin or Octavia Butler. Most writers work very hard without finding fame or fortune. But if you write with compassion and thoughtfulness and you share your work, there’s a very good chance that you’ve made a difference in someone’s life. It might be a “small” difference, like giving them a chance to unplug from their worries for an afternoon or several evenings over a month. You might become someone’s favorite author, who they follow over years or decades, returning to your work like an old friend. You might write something that helps someone come into a fuller realization of themselves and/or their calling in life.

That idea that writing can change lives is a heady one. It’s a bright lodestar and a hell of a thing to chase.

But this last year has taught me (among other lessons) that it doesn’t have to be all the time. I don’t need to publish a book every single year to matter. I don’t have to grind myself to the bone to make words to be a worthwhile person. I don’t have to just write in one format to be a real writer. I can make my friends’ lives better by running a ttrpg session. I can touch someone’s emotions playing a character in a game streamed to under a dozen people.

This novel can wait. It’s reasonable that I’m having a hard time revising a very difficult and very ambitious novel during the Zeno’s Paradox of endlessly-attenuating final months waiting for my household to be vaccinated while the weather is crappy and my energy is at a low ebb.

The words will still be there. Readers are always hungry for more stories, eager to find new characters and new worlds to fall in love with.

The Industry demands more than any of us can give. The Industry requires too many people to work themselves to the bone for too little pay. It wants an endless parade of conventionally beautiful young debuts who give 100% of themselves all the time and go into debt to promote the work they’ve been paid less than minimum wage to create. It insists that any book’s failure is the failure of the author, because there are an endless parade of other hopefuls ready to take their chances. It demands the Grind, an endless stream of Content and Access. It demands New and Fresh but Not Too Much because then We Don’t Know the Audience For This.

The industry is light-years from fair.  But it does not determine my worth as an author or a person.

Nor does it define yours. We engage with it because the industry has wealth and access and a track record. We make bargains with entities too large to be human, where even individual compassion dissipates as it jumps through hoops and gets molded into best practices and Profit & Loss statements.

I don’t have easy answers. I don’t have Five Tips for How To Make Sure Your Career Thrives Despite a Global Pandemic. The system we’re dealing with is harsh, it asks too much and offers too little. But doing it on your own as a SF/F author requires the author to take on Even More Work and engaging with the Amazon KDP system that is even more unfair and weighted toward the top sellers with even less accountability.

But the work is still worthwhile. Our stories still matter. Storytelling is meaning-making, it’s meaning-sharing, it’s a practice of compassion and creativity. It’s a perfectly valid way to spend a part of your life even if it’s not a reliable primary method for surviving capitalism.

And the worst parts of the pandemic will end. We will get to see our colleagues in person again. We will be able to return to coffee shops and bookstores and conventions. We will get to see our friends and family and get help with caretaker work and travel to have new experiences. In the US, the end is in sight with vaccine distribution ramping up. Every year I remember how much the coming of spring improves my mood and energy level. We live in cycles and while the damage caused by the pandemic will play out over our lifetime, it will not be forever. I will finish revising this book or I will set it aside and write something else. There’s time to write something else, to try again, to find a new way to reach out to others and make meaning.

It’s okay to be struggling. You’re not alone. If you want to keep writing, keep writing. It’s not a waste of time to try to make a difference, even if it’s just for yourself.