The Middle
Hey, don't write yourself off yet
It's only in your head, you feel left out (feel left out)
Or looked down on
There are things that are really, really difficult for me: taxes, resisting the urge to buy everything in a bookstore, and writing. The first two are things are ones that I can handle.
Taxes? I can hire a CPA and just shove all my 1099s at him.
The book problem? Just get more bookcases. IKEA has decorated half of my house, after all.
Writing, on the other hand, is a little more complicated.
Just do your best (just do your best)
Do everything you can (do everything you can)
After this year, I’ll be eleven (well, thirteen) books into this career, and I can say with absolute certainty that it never—ever—gets any easier. It just becomes… different. Writing changes. Different books take on different problems and different ways to ooze out onto a page.
As I write this, I’m sitting on my goldenrod yellow sectional, staring at a whiteboard full of plot points and edit suggestions for a book due sometime in the middle of July. (Well, the edits are due, because I’ve already done the somewhat hard part of drafting the gosh darn thing.) Drafting is always the part that feels the most daunting, but for me, it’s the editing that really feels like the middle.
You’ve dug yourself the hole; you’re sitting in it. Now you gotta figure out how to make it look like you meant to dig it.
I can remember one time in my career when I wasn’t on a deadline. It was April 2020, when the world was—very loudly—imploding. I’d turned in my final pass pages for Among the Beasts & Briars, and I was still thinking (a little naively) that I had to start gearing up for a book tour for Bookish and the Beast in June.
And because the world was imploding, I can’t remember that month at all.
I can’t remember if it was nice, not feeling the sort of pressure I’d felt my entire writing career up until then, or if I gave it any thought at all.
I don’t think I did, because that was also the time when I, and my agent, were tweaking The Dead Romantics to go out on submission to editors in the summer. (We ended up subbing to editors in mid-June, and by mid-July it sold, and I was off to the races again.)
For those of you wondering, being on deadline feels like perpetually having homework you have to turn in. Will I get a good grade? Will my editor like it? Will I need to rewrite it again? Will I even turn it in on time, and if not, how many points will my editor deduct for tardiness?
And if you don’t like having homework perpetually due, I would suggest literally any other career.
(I’m the kind of person who makes homework for herself if she doesn’t have any, so it suits me just fine.)
Thirteen novels later, here I am. We’re here in 2023. I have three books out this year. Three!!
The Seven Year Slip. (June 27th.)
The Bewitching Hour, a Tara Prequel; Buffy the Vampire Slayer Novel. (August 1st)
Hawkeye: Bishop Takes King. (October 3rd)
I am so incredibly lucky to have these opportunities, and I’m so thankful for them. And I’ve worked my ass off to get here. I know that!
But still.
Some days, I still feel like…
Phew. It’s hard in the middle.
And don't you worry what their bitter hearts (bitter hearts)
Are gonna say
I remember my first story. It was about an octopus who went into a shoe store to buy a pair of shoes. I think it was one of those writing prompts from a state standardized test, to see if we comprehended how to use onomatopoeia in a story. Well, ding ding ding! I did.
But to be quite honest, the first actual story I remember writing was a fanfic. A Yu-Gi-Oh! fanfic at that. I was in sixth grade.
It was the first time I actually felt like I had control over something. It was just me, and my notebook, and a thousand possibilities in my head. I was a quiet kid, mostly because I couldn’t say my R’s and I stuttered. I stuttered so badly that my bullies didn’t even have to make fun of the Sailor Moon print-outs on my binder because they already had enough fodder with my voice.
But when I wrote? I didn’t stutter. Every word came out exactly how I wanted it to, and if it didn’t I could just erase it and write a new one, and it was such a novel power to me—I fell in love.
I started collecting unique words like other people collected bottle caps and baseball cards.
Quixotic. Saudade. Susurrus. Hiraeth. Kilig.
And I wrote.
I can tell you everything about the fanfic—the OC1’s name, the plot, who I shipped her with—but the one thing I can’t remember is if I ever finished the story.
Strangely, I don’t think I ever did.
It just takes some time
Little girl, you're in the middle of the ride
However, I do remember the first novel I ever finished.
It was a few years later. I was in high school. Fifteen and carrying around a three-ring binder with a printout of my story so I could edit it between classes. (Neeeeeerd, I was a neerrrrd and I loved every second of it.) I was the kind of kid who always knew she wanted to write. I looked at authors like Christopher Paolini and I thought —
Why not me?
(The short answer is: don’t compare yourself to other people. Stop it! )
This book will never be perfect. It’ll never be everyone’s favorite book. None of my books will. Some people like my writing, others think I’m too purply—
Hell, there was a Kirkus reviewer back in the day who called Heart of Iron “deeply regrettable prose” and you know what?
I embroidered that shit on a pillow.
Not everyone will love my work, but not everyone will hate it, either.
But I assure you that the person who will hate my writing—my books—the most is myself when I am in the middle of every. freaking. novel.
Everything, everything'll be just fine
Everything, everything'll be alright, alright
I’ve been through the middle thirteen times.
(1. The Sound of Us, 2. We Own the Night, 3. Geekerella, 4. Heart of Iron, 5. The Princess and the Fangirl, 6. Soul of Stars, 7. Bookish and the Beast, 8. Among the Beasts and Briars, 9. Battle of the Bands, 10. The Dead Romantics, 11. The Seven Year Slip, 12. The Bewitching Hour, 13. Hawkeye: Bishop Takes King)
Thirteen! And I’m still considering whether it might be easier to run off into the woods to grow mushrooms.
In the middle of this draft—in the middle of every draft ever, actually—I feel like a hamster on a wheel, running and running and running, and getting nowhere at all. Staring at this whiteboard, there’s this suffocating feeling in my chest—like being trapped in a box.
It’s the strangest sensation.
Maybe after I finish this novel, I’ll book a vacation somewhere I’ve never been before. I have my passport renewed. I can go anywhere—just like Clementine in The Seven Year Slip. The world is open, ready for an adventure, and that’s just as frightening, to be honest.
Like starting a new story. Number fifteen.
Oh, how time flies.
