I’m gonna get real with you for a minute.
Writing is difficult. It’s stressful. It’s time consuming.
And there is nothing else I would rather do.
I’ve been writing stories since before I knew my ABCs. I remember scribbling on pieces of paper when I was a wee little thing. They were gibberish, written in an alphabet that didn’t exist, but they were stories.
As I grew up, I continued writing. This time in standard English. (Mostly.) I wrote short stories. Poetry. Epic sagas. Screenplays. I filled notebooks and floppy disks and thumb drives with stories.
One day, I got it in my head that I wanted to get published, so I wrote a novel.
We’ve all heard stories of breakout authors who penned their first book on their lunch break, got solicited by an agent, sold the book a week later, then rode the accolades to the best seller lists, got a movie deal, and retired to a castle on a private island on the royalties.
That’s not my story.
My first novel didn’t attract an agent. I kept writing—5 more books in that series—but eventually came to the realization that it wasn’t going to happen for that project. So I shelved it and started over in a completely different genre. I wrote a book that got me an agent. I wrote another book that was so weird that no-one understood it. I wrote yet another book that almost sold. I mean, we were so close before I got the difficult news that they had to pass.
The book was too quirky. It was too unconventional. It bent too many rules. It was like nothing else on the market. They didn’t think it would sell.
Friends, I’ll admit, things were looking bleak.
At the same time, my agent was talking to an editor that was looking for something quirky. Unconventional. Something that bent the rules. Something like nothing else on the market.
See where this is going?
I wrote a new book, set in Brooklyn, and Odessa was born.
That book became my debut novel, KILLER CONTENT (Feb, 2021) Following on its heels is the next book in the series (NO MEMES OF ESCAPE, Oct 2021). Fingers crossed, if people love Odessa and her friends as much as I do, there will be more books in this series.
KILLER CONTENT has some great buzz. The reviews are spectacular. Strangers are talking about it. I had a lot of help and support getting here, and the absolute best team behind me. And best of all, I have a lot more stories to tell.
It would be easy to envy that author who found overnight success. I see some books getting ridiculous advances doing the talk show circuit, while other authors that are struggling to finish their WIP or find an agent. I see people finding great success and others who have amazing books that fall flat for no discernable reason. There will always be books with more reviews than mine or bigger hype than mine. It’s tempting to compare myself to other authors that have more newsletter subscribers or more adds on Goodreads, while forgetting that not so long ago, I would have killed to be where I am now. In the meantime, I can’t forget how many authors are in the trenches still struggling to finish their novel, find an agent, out on sub, or doing it all on their own.
I constantly remind myself that comparison is the thief of joy. I’m literally out here living my dream. I’ve come so far from that little girl scribbling gibberish on scrap paper. My book, my story, will soon be on bookshelves. But this isn’t the finish line, not by far. It’s barely even the start. Because I have a whole lot of stories to tell, and I’m going to keep writing.
Note: My story isn’t unique, but it is uniquely mine. Whether you’re drafting your first novel or publishing your hundredth, keep telling your story. The world’s a better place with books in it!
