7 years ago today, I was on the TODAY show. I remember being in hair and make up and thinking, “This is it. I have arrived. Smooth sailing baby.”
Oh, you poor naive child.
Before that, I used to think, “My life will be so much easier if only I was published.”
Once I was the anxiety changed. I had been on national television in front of millions of people. That is archived, 32 yr old Betsy looking pretty damn good. Now I feel like I need to judge myself everyday against that. I actually had someone tell me I looked so much better on TV. I’ve taken to not doing public appearances as I explore my identity and have had health problems.
Aside from looks it also became a race to stay relevant. Meaning, publish or perish. So SPELLED came out. It performed so much past expectations, it sold out its print run in 10 days. No one expected it to be more than a little fun fractured fairytale. I credit the awesome cover by Sourcebooks. Those shoes were killer.
So then I became, “the shoe lady”. I finished that series, the second book taking forever and somewhat disjointed as my daughter was in the hospital for a chunk of it and the deadline came and went. People noticed. My husband had to block Goodreads from our router and my Amazon pages so I couldn’t read reviews. What if people hated it? You are only as good as your last book, so what if my sales suck? Then my career is over.
I took a much needed break after the trilogy and 2 books on finishing. 5 books in 5 year. They had done alright, none as well as Spelled, but still good numbers outselling my advance.
Then it came time to write a new book. The anxiety came back strong as ever. What should I write? What is upmarket? What if my agent hates it an won’t rep it? Well that happened twice. I’ve got them in a file. I’ll revisit them some day.
Finally, I finished a book that I love, but there’s a catch. The climate in 2020 is very different than 7 yrs ago. People are extremely, I’d say some over, sensitive about cultural appropriation, cancel culture, and just slipping and saying something dumb. With my current MS, the cast is diverse. The lead sub character is lgbt. So am I. Check, I have permission to write that character. The world is magic and mythology. I’m a practicing neo-pagan with an emphasis on Qabalah and Pantheons, so being a witch is my culture, so okay to write. My worry is that my MC is biracial. I am not. So that begs the question, why would you write a black character? Not lightly. I waffled a lot. The story is in Baltimore, a city where the majority is black. So I could fairly represent my city (I love in B’more) or I could write another white savior story.
So I took a leap and started reading. (shout out to the folks at Writing with Color, Nisi Shawl, Daniel Older, Octavia Butler, Dark Matter Anthology and more). Then I started talking to people. Offending the first few I’ll be honest. I actually said, “I can write a dragon, so why can’t I write a black person”. (inner cringe) I’m happy to say I learned a lot since then. And I’m grateful to the people in my community that called out my stupid.
Now it’s time to try and sell my book. I’m all, I have an agent… this will be easy. Yeah… universe called and said no. My biggest fan and agent needed to take a break for family reasons, which I totally get because with my special needs kid, I’ve needed to drop everything too at times. Still, that means I’m back querying agents again. I really hate that part. And it’s the same anxiety I had before being published. I have to send cold emails to people who don’t know me with a paragraph about a very complex book. As you can see above, I’m long winded so I don’t condense well.
So here I am. 7 years after my first book and nervous as hell that I’ll never get to publish another one.
As I said at the start, it doesn’t get easier. It changes. We will have to see what happens next