Reflection on a Decade
My ten-year anniversary as a full-time writer has just passed. Here are my thoughts, for better and worse.
June 1st, 2024 came and went without any fanfare. That seems fitting to me now. I started the day energetic and productive, cruising through my to-do list, which included (among other things) writing this very essay—the essay I’m only now getting to, four days later. Tech issues with my laptop quickly turned the First of June into a mess, and everything I’d planned to accomplish fell by the wayside. I’ve spent the subsequent days scrambling to get caught up. That’s fitting, too.
Ten years ago, when I left my day job to write full-time, Paul and I were living in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment in one of the least-glamorous neighborhoods of Seattle. The view from our living room/kitchen window was a train yard, which I think many people would find disagreeable, but I liked it. I’ve always found trains compelling and majestic; there’s a melancholic romance to their rusty, industrial-decay hugeness that appeals to me on a deep, personal level. The apartment was so small that I couldn’t fit a real desk in it. My “office” was the corner next to the window, where there was just enough space to wedge a small antique secretary desk. Every day, I folded out the secretary’s front and sat in a rolling chair and worked on a tiny tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard while the train cars coupled below with explosive bangs loud enough to scare my friends when they came for a visit. This was all a huge improvement over my previous setup: living in a studio, where I wrote my first six novels sitting on my bed, the only furniture in the place.
It was my income as an author that allowed us to upgrade to that apartment near an industrial train yard. A year after that, it was my income as an author that allowed us to move from Seattle to San Juan Island—an improvement by anyone’s measure. Two years later, it was my income as an author that allowed us to buy our home, a small but beautiful cottage on the island with a stunning view. Eight years into my full-time occupation as an author, it was my success that allowed us to emigrate to Canada, a far safer and saner country than the one we came from.
Why, then, do I still feel as if I’ve achieved nothing in ten years of nonstop work?
Part of me knows this is just my hormones talking. I’m in the throes of perimenopause, and the wild hormonal swings haven’t been great for my mental health, to say the least. Part of me knows it’s because the publishing industry is deliberately constructed and run with the express purpose of crushing writers and keeping us in a state of exploited subjugation so that other people can profit from our labor. Don’t @ me; chances are good that I’ve been around in this industry way longer than you have, I know what I’m talking about, and I’m telling the truth right now, even if you don’t want to hear it.
But mostly, it’s because “write for a living” was never the final goal for me. My goal was always to be someone, to be known for my writing, to be respected and appreciated. My goal was and is to be loved—something I’ve never felt as if I’ve experienced elsewhere in my life. My husband and I make great partners. We support one another unfailingly, we help one another with our problems, and we are agreeable company for one another. I believe that’s what a successful marriage should be about: a strong partnership of mutual support. That is a kind of love, yes, but it’s not the kind of love I’m talking about—the kind of love that’s about admiration and longing and awe. All my life, I’ve been desperate to know what it feels like to be loved in that way. I knew I would never find it on my own—as a general rule in this misogynistic society, women don’t get to experience that unless they’re beautiful, and I am far from beautiful—but I figured if I could make beautiful things, then I could finally know what it feels like to be loved.
That I would one day write for a living was a given, from my earliest memories. I’ve always known I was going to be a writer someday—always known that, come Hell or high water, I would make it happen. On June 1st, 2014, when I folded out the secretary desk and sat at my rolling chair, I didn’t think, “I finally made it. I’ve reached my goal.” I thought, “This is the first step. I’m finally on the road to my goal. Someday, I’ll get there.”
And here I am, ten years later, no closer than I was back then.
The things I’ve had to do in order to keep working at this job have, in some ways, pushed me farther from my goal.
My publisher picked me up while I was writing under a pen name. This was a deliberate strategy on my part—the pen name, not the part where a publisher picked me up. In fact, after having a series of negative experiences with various characters in the publishing industry, I turned my back on all of that and self-published my work instead. (That was how I got all that money, by the way—quitting my day job, upgrading to a marginally better apartment, moving to the San Juan Islands, and buying a house were all achieved via self-publishing, not traditional publishing.) Phase One of my plan was always to write commercial stuff under my pen name so I could earn enough money to write full-time, which in turn would allow me to dedicate every hour of every day to honing my craft. Then, when that craft reached a level I felt proud of—an artistic capacity on which I could build a strong reputation as a Good Writer—it would be time to activate Phase Two, in which I would “debut” under my real name and knock everybody’s socks off with my skill.
My publisher was on board with my doing more upmarket work under a different name. But they didn’t want myname. Instead, they wanted me to do it under… just a different pen name. Still not me.
I did it, because it was the only door open to me, because it was the only path that might get me a little closer to my goal. But even though that pen name has become very successful by anyone’s standards—a multiple bestseller, a finalist for several awards, and the source of a solid, six-figure annual income—I am left feeling thoroughly dissatisfied. Because, you see, it isn’t me. This all might feel very different to me if it were my idea to write under this pen name, but writing “my best work” under a pen name was the opposite of what I’d dreamed of and planned on. I didn’t even get to choose the name. The result is that I’ve spent the past seven years of my life feeling like I’m a ghost writer for someone who doesn’t even exist.
Five years back, I took a manuscript my publisher passed on, got an agent (yes, I achieved everything I’ve achieved unagented!) and sold it to the Big Five under my real name. It was and is still the best book I’ve ever written. I poured my very best into that manuscript for seven years; I’d begun working on it before I’d even gone full-time. I was saving it for a special moment, the moment when I would strike out as myself to achieve my dream—not writing full-time, but being an author who’s admired for her artistry and skill. The whole experience was an unmitigated disaster. I’ll spare you all the details, but suffice to say that the publisher did not live up to their end of the bargain—not in the least detail—and, in fact, was (and still is) in breach of contract, but with an agent who was unwilling to back me up or advocate for me, there was (and still is) nothing I can do about it.
It was a crushing experience. I spent an entire year in a dangerous, suicidal depression, a twelve-month blur of despair and disassociation which I barely remember now. I could hardly muster the willpower to write during that time, either. Somehow, I managed to finish a contracted manuscript for my other publisher (the good one) during that dark year. It was the only thing I wrote throughout 2022. I remember almost nothing about writing that book. I had no idea, when I turned it in, whether my publisher would even accept it; it might have been total crap, for all I could tell. But cheers to my long experience of ghost-writing for myself: the book has done very well with readers, and in fact it earned out its advance in five months. It’s nice to know I can crank out a good book on auto-pilot when necessary, even while I’m mired in a year-long depression that probably would have been better handled with a stay in a mental health facility than with sobbing every day in my bathtub.
2023 wasn’t a whole lot better for me. I dedicated the year to pulling myself out of my hellish depression, if I could, by proving to myself that I am still a good writer. I spent the whole year forcing myself to write a novel of transcendent beauty and timely appeal—not with the hope that a publisher might pick it up (I have lost all faith in publishers), but to prove to myself that I can. To prove to myself that, even if I am still exactly as invisible, anonymous, unacknowledged, unknown, unloved as I have always been, goddammit, at least I know that I can make real art.
I am currently using that same novel to try to get a better agent. Again. Yes, I am venturing back into the world of big publishing, this time with a new ten-year plan that’s much more favorable to me and my real goals—a plan that I won’t talk about much publicly, but which I should be able to leverage into something that feels genuinely satisfying and mitigates the down sides of working with a publisher.
The day after my ten-year anniversary, I woke to an email from an agent I’d queried. “I think there’s something extraordinary here,” she’d written.
She referred my manuscript to a colleague, who represents some of the biggest names in literary fiction. As it turned out, that colleague didn’t even have time to read it, so it was an automatic pass from her. But that one sentence—I think there’s something extraordinary here—stuck with me and went a long way towards cheering me up.
For the first time in a decade, I felt like I might actually have taken the first small step toward my goal.