Lot of stuff going around about debut author life today. A lot of people talking about despair and hard work. More power to them.
Let me tell you that mine was different, because my ignorance was so vast it very nearly circled around to enlightenment.
I did not know what I was doing and sold a book largely by accident. They gave me more money than I had ever seen in one place. It was cool.
But I was not really plugged into the authorsphere. I didn’t know anything. I took my money and was happy. And I thought if I wrote another book, there might be MORE MONEY!
I did not fret about bestseller lists or critics or my peers or my future career because those seemed as distant as the sun. I had written a weird little book, and they gave me money.
I opened a box of books and it was cool. Stores rarely had it, but occasionally they did. That was also cool.
Honestly, it’s all still weird to me that I can write words and people give me money that I can buy real things with, like sandwiches and dog treats and goldfish. What the hell, people? Do you not realize I’m making this stuff up?! AND THE WORDS TURN INTO SANDWICHES?!
This is not to invalidate anyone’s fear or despair or courage or stubbornness with their first book. I think it may just be to validate other people’s bafflement.
Anyway, my first book didn’t do very well, but I didn’t know it until my second book did great and my agent explained the difference, and that the first one was normal and the second one was doing abnormally well.
There is no moral here, except maybe that you’ll have an easier time if you think of your book as a neat thing happening rather than the gateway to the future.
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So a Weird Fact that I suspect many people aren’t aware of…the passenger pigeon’s vast numbers were probably a wildly unnatural result of the loss of indigenous management of the landscape.
The east coast was an extensively managed landscape when Europeans first showed up, not a massive unbroken forest. In my neck of the woods, it was called the Piedmont Prairie—a fire-controlled oak savannah with an unbelievable ecological carrying capacity.
You had copses of nut trees like the American chestnut, berry bushes, wild game, a couple domesticated crops like goosefoot that we’ve now lost, the lot. But this kind of landscape doesn’t just happen. If you don’t burn it or graze it, trees eat it.
So last night, at 2 AM, the doorbell rang. I staggered out of bed, went downstairs, and found a bedraggled Kevin, in a bathrobe, holding a dead squirrel. He looked at me and said “So I’ve had an adventure!”
Just in case anyone thinks that I’m always the weird one in this relationship.
Apparently Hound wanted to go out, got him up, and then came back to the porch with something that resembled a bundle of leaves. (He wasn’t wearing his glasses.) He tells her to drop it.
Cast your mind back, lo these many years, to the strange world immediately post 9-11, when Americans were convincing themselves that their tiny town was of desperate strategic importance and the next logical target of terrorists. I was visiting my parents in rural Pennsylvania.
They lived near a town called Oil City. We went there looking for antiques. My cousin, my then-boyfriend and I were driving around aimlessly, because Google Maps wasn’t a thing.
It’s D&D night! The party faces off against the Serpent of Ages, an invisible mage, and an increasingly traumatized cultist. Also a trussed-up paladin sacrifice.
GM: The Serpent heaves himself out of the water and looks around with vague interest.
The evil mage drops a fireball! The affected party members are, fortunately, standing in hip-deep water and only take half damage, but that’s still a lot.
WARLOCK: YOU KILL MY CHICKEN AND NOW YOU BURN OFF MY HAIR?!
BARD: I know it took you so long to grow those three hairs…
GM: The Serpent puts its flippers up on the edge of the pool, over top of the sacrifice. You hear a muffled “oh shit” from its armpit. The Serpent appears puzzled.
PARTY: So it’s stupider than the Paladin?
GM: *checks attributes* …sadly, no.
I’ll say it again—ideas are the LEAST important part of a book. The plot of HOGFATHER is that someone assassinates Santa Claus by stealing teeth from the Tooth Fairy, which looks utterly inane when typed out and is also one of the best books of the last hundred years.
MOBY DICK is about some guy the narrator knows being mad at a whale. JURASSIC PARK is just Frankenstein with dinosaurs. PERDIDO STREET STATION is King Kong but with scary butterflies.
I can think of barely a handful of genuinely original “oh, hey, genuinely haven’t seen that before!” ideas that I’ve read in the last decade. (ANCILLARY JUSTICE with the troop ship narrator, and…uh…