About once a year, I write a blog post that is essentially a love letter to my publisher. I do not mean it to be pandering or gushing or annoying. I simply, like many writers, cycle through ups and downs. I can feel good about my situation in one moment, and then, in the next, allow myself to get depressed over not having an agent and a five-book deal with one of the major publishers. I can get bummed out over having to keep a day job and write little pieces like this on my mornings off.
But let's talk about my day job for a moment, shall we? I have spent the past seventeen years working in education. I have taught seventh grade writing, high school English, and college composition. I've worked with special needs students, advanced students, students whose aspiration was to teach English like I had done. Eventually, I moved out of the classroom to train teachers. I worked with magnet grant programs and, finally, moved into the general field of school improvement. As a part of these various jobs, I have been to countless education conferences where countless speakers have given countless lectures on countless ways to improve education, ad nauseam. Of these, one has stuck out. One. I don't remember his name or where I heard it. But I remember the gist. He was an educational expert from China, and he was talking to us about the growing trend of pointing out America's dip in national rankings, especially in math and science. It was an increasing concern at the time. America was steadily slipping from somewhere around ten or eleven to mid-twenties. Several Asian countries, along with some Norwegian ones, populated the top spots. China was among them. In the moment, we expected to hear some advice from a top nation to a middling nation on how to grow our math and science scores. What we heard was very different. He talked to us about Lady Gaga and Prince and Oprah Winfrey and RuPaul and Bill Gates. He told us none of these creative geniuses would exist had they been born, raised, and educated in China. In anywhere but America. Make no mistake, he told us some of our faults, too. The American education system is far from perfect. But he was right. Something we have done for decades in America is, possibly subconsciously, to encourage creative risk taking. A new encouraging trend in education reform is to build risk taking into the culture and curriculum. The idea has been gaining momentum for about ten years now, and is finally starting to reach the outstretched fingers of teaching where it is needed the most.
Risk is one of those concepts we all pretend to embrace. We know it has value, and we appreciate the need for it. We can spout the right words, like failure is the byproduct of risk, and risk is necessary for growth. But do we mean any of it? In attempting to explain Evel Knievel, one of the daredevil's friends once said, "Civilization is a mundane bitch for a lot of people." He was not wrong. Each and every one of us can become a creature of habit, embracing the routine and the dull over the impulsive and exciting. And thank our puckered asses, right? Jumping motorcycles over cliffs is terrifying. I assume.
But as someone without an agent and a five-book deal at a major publisher, I have to ask myself, is the publishing world a mundane bitch for a lot of people? I have zero delusions of grandeur as a writer. I promise. However, I can look at my first book, Juggling Kittens, as compared to a lot of books which came out from major publishers during the same time period and say, with confidence, I could have been that. I wrote a book which is every bit as "good" (whatever the hell that even means) as any number of "major label" books in 2016. I feel like, had the stars aligned, I could have had the agent and the book deal. It would have been for a book which got classified as Southern Grit Lit. And I would have been a Southern Grit Lit writer. I have a very hard time believing my agent, editor, or publisher at large would expect me to do anything other than crank out one gritty y'all-filled book after another. And don't get me wrong, I fully plan to write more like it. I plan to write more with the very same characters. My current work in progress is a return to Ellis Mazer and his gritty southern haunts. But, for my publisher, life is no mundane bitch.
My next book, Graffiti Creek, is due out on August 8th, and it was, for me, a bit of a risk. I wrote a straight, tautly-plotted thriller as an exercise in empathy. I purposefully put marginalized characters into increasingly threatening situations in an effort to draw some level of appreciation in both myself and my readers for situations people like these characters face every day. I took a very normal female protagonist and I put her through almost laughably elaborate action scenes because part of me wanted people to criticize them. I wanted it because I watch very normal male protagonists flip through those hoops in blockbuster movies every summer and no one bats an eye. I made the town nondescript and only vaguely southern because I needed it to be an every town, of sorts, identifiable on some level from each different angle. I worked to start stereotypes and then flip them on their heads. I wrote a book I wanted to read and stretched about as far from the autobiographical content of my first book as possible.
And I am so not done. My next book is a detective comedy. It is practically a cozy mystery about a boozy, foul-mouthed, Southern socialite drug dealer. And recently, I pitched an idea to my publisher about using a horror novella I wrote as a marketing tool. We may or may not run with it, but the point is: I am working in an environment where I feel comfortable pitching such an idea. And writing such material. I can stray away from my Southern Grit, write a action thriller, a cozy mystery, and a paranormal horror story about mummy-hunting preachers; and then I can still stroll back to Ruddy Creek and pick up where Ellis Mazer left off.
Those are the reasons I love my publisher. If things had clicked for me differently early on, maybe I would have been able to quit my day job. But, in hindsight, I'm glad it worked out exactly the way it did. I have been asked a few times what, for me, success looks like as a writer. I think the answer is different for each writer. I know, for some, the idea of writing as a sole living is the only way to feel successful. But, for me, I am much more concerned about finding a relationship with a publisher where I can be happy telling the stories I want to tell. I started this shit way before anyone was paying me to do it. And, odds are, I might be doing it long after anyone stops paying me to do it. When Evel Knievel wanted to jump the Grand Canyon, he wasn't allowed to by the authorities. So he went out and leased land on either side of the Snake Canyon, and he jumped it. He may have lost money on the damn jump. It wasn't about the money or the fame. He wanted to challenge himself, and he sure as fuck didn't want anyone telling him how to go about doing it. I love partnering with a publisher who lets me pick the jumps, and then helps me land them.