Am I afraid of getting published?

A conversation with myself

The younger and less jaded writer hides behind her pandemic novel,. Trouble the Saints.

My agent emailed me a few weeks ago with a piece of tentatively good news. It’s nothing definite, but it’s the first step in a direction that I’ve wanted to go in for a while but couldn’t for various insider-publishing (i.e. frustrating and boring) reasons. This possibility came out of the blue, more than a year after I’d recalibrated my own writing goals with the understanding that it wasn’t possible. After The Library of Broken Worlds published in 2023, I was out of contract for the first time in nearly a decade. I had no new books on the horizon. In 2023 I hadn’t even written any new short stories. I felt the wind on my face in the way that might be a run through a field of wildflowers, or might be free-fall—it was too early to tell.

My books had not paid me enough to live on for years, but being officially out of contract felt like a phase change. I was still a working writer, sure, but the majority of my income didn’t come from fiction writing any longer. I’d been freelancing as a translator and editor for a while, but that now started to take on more weight. After all, was I going to prioritize writing a novel without even the glimmer of a guarantee of eventual money, or was I going to agree to a new editing client? Unsurprisingly, my writing output dropped like a stone.

I was grateful when the opportunity came to take the visiting professor position at Queens College. At last I would have a job that would give me some time to write as well as free me from the tyranny of hunting down clients and packing my schedule in fear of an unpredictable freelance winter. And so far, it’s been great. I have fully transitioned from the notion of myself as a writer with contracts and a publisher waiting on my work, to a writer whose paychecks are now divorced from her writing output. This has been liberating in a lot of ways that I hadn’t anticipated. For one thing, I’m no longer eying the market like a ravenous beast that wants to eat me. It makes it a lot harder to write that way, let me tell you.

And then I got this email. Things are far from settled. It’s more than likely that nothing will happen and I will remain in my current uncontracted state. But the very possibility of selling something bigger than a short story has made my stomach start jerking around like a rag doll and some ominous cold sweats break out on the subway as I considered my possible re-entry into the market. And that’s when the thought occurred to me:

Am I afraid of getting published?

It’s such a weird thought that I was inclined to dismiss it, but I’ve been doing a lot of work over the last few years to not dismiss my feelings and so I sat with it. And I’ve kept sitting with it and now I’m writing this essay about it because I think it’s entirely possibly…not wrong.

I am a writer. It’s just part of who I am. But being a writer doesn’t necessarily mean being published. I’m honestly glad that I’ve broken my reflexive connection between my creative life and constantly looking to the horizon for my next published book. I decided that instead of being discouraged by the marketplace or publishing trends, I could give myself the gift of not worrying about them for a few years. And now this new prospect has me facing the idea of picking up that burden far earlier than I had mentally prepared myself for. Being published is not bad. I do not want to write my novels in a cave, or on my cerro, and then feed the pages to my dogs (oh, you thought my prose was undigestible before?). I want to share my work with readers who will appreciate it. I want to write books that move people the way that my favorite books have moved me. I write for myself, yes, but I also write to share whatever joy and wisdom that I have found in these worlds with others.

Yet often it can feel as though I have failed. That I’ve connected with nobody and moved no one. That feeling—far more than sales numbers—is so brutal that I think I’m terrified of facing it again. There are moments when I realize that it isn’t true. I’ll never forget having an actual signing line at the National Book Festival in 2022 when I was there as one of the contributors to The Memory Librarian. I figured that everyone would be there for Janelle Monáe (as they should be), but I had actual dozens of people there who had read and enjoyed my books! I was near tears (and I’m tearing up as I write this).

Maybe people don’t realize how rarely writers like me get the chance to interact with fans or even know that our work has reached someone. Just one person who loves my books is enough to keep me writing. If I can help one person feel seen, or move through something difficult, or encompass ideas they’ve never considered before, I feel like I’ve done everything I ever wanted with my life. But shit, I do think I’m scared of getting published again. Because of the silence. Yes, I love reviews and I’d love some big interviews and I’d definitely love big sales. But more than anything I just need to know that my book went into the world and buried itself in someone else’s heart. But I can’t know unless that person tells me, and I think most of the time people don’t.

So I’ll let this little possibility play out. Maybe it will happen (ah, the wind on my face!), or maybe I’ll get a few more years to just write without worrying about packaging and marketing and commercial viability. But one day I will need to find a way to be brave again. To take my imperfect book and declare it finished and wait for you, dear someone I don’t know, to take it inside yourself and use whatever joy it sparked to bring something even better into this world. I think that’s important, despite everything. Or maybe because of everything—as I wrote in the dedication to LoBW, when you are moving through darkness, let a book be a light.

---

• I have a new short story out in Reactor Magazine! It’s called “What I Saw Before the War.” I’m really proud of this one. Here’s the first few lines:

  “It had been a comfortable five years since my husband and I moved to this small town, and a positively bucolic three years since my father’s death. My brother wrote occasionally—about Father’s failing health, then his funeral, then snippy, reproachful missives about his sons’ progress in the military school down south—and I dashed off guilty responses before returning to my preferred state of determined forgetfulness. I was aided in this by my adopted surroundings. In a small town the world is just the world, which is to say the town—what extends beyond its borders might be real in a material sense, but not the metaphysical. I had embraced this worldview with the passion of a convert, but that summer two events occurred in close succession to remind me of the uncomfortable reality outside: I began to lose my sight, and the draft barges took to the river.”

• If you are in the NY area, I will be reading with other fabulous writers this Tuesday February 18 at “Brooklyn Books and Booze” at Barrow’s Intense Tasting Lounge. More info here!

• Are you thinking about doing an MFA program? The Queens College MFA has affordable tuition, a diverse student body, and is one of the only MFA programs with a literary translation track. We’re having our final virtual open house this Wednesday February 19, where I and my colleagues will be there to answer any questions you might have. The application deadline is March 15.

• Are you eligible to vote in the Nebulas or other awards this season? Please consider my short story “The Memorial Tree” which was published last year in The Sunday Morning Transport, as well as my prison abolition/Mexico migration novelette “A Brief History of the El Zopilote Dock” which was published in Clarkesworld (and which I wrote about here).