Sam

A friend just approached me for advice about publishing poetry with literary magazines. In the midst of that conversation, I tweeted something about remembering being twelve or thirteen and entering poetry contests. There was one particular instance where I distinctly remember that I was trying to convince my parents that I could be a writer for a living, so I entered an online poetry contest.

When the notification that I won arrived three weeks later, I was ecstatic. I ran to my mother and stepfather and showed them the certificate. What I didn't realize was that because I'd "won," I had the opportunity to purchase the printed anthology that would contain my work – for a mere $60 plus shipping.

Getting scammed was crushing. Not only was I not going to be really published, my parents thought I was an idiot and were further convinced that writing should stay a "hobby."

I had no connection with other writers, no way of knowing that there were other people who went through the same thing. No way to get feedback on the things I wrote except the response from my parents, who designated most things I produced "weird." Lots of things were – and remain – "weird." It's a damaging thing, telling your child that everything they enjoy makes them strange and unwantable.

Fast forward four years. I was seventeen then and I'd been through several tumultuous online fandoms, survived, and learned what it was like to have nearly instant feedback on writing. There is no harsher learning environment than an Internet fandom. The Internet obviously has a layer of anonymity, and so anyone can say whatever they want to anyone else. The learning curve is sharp. Many can't take it. But I did, and I figured out that I maybe had some talent buried in there. All I had to do was hone it and remember that whenever someone wanted me to pay them to read my work, it was a bad deal.

At seventeen, I was in my first real life creative writing class. I started straying from fanfiction in favor of original work.

At the same time, I was frontrunning my high school's newspaper, piloting its online version and acting as formatter and editor.

A journalist came to speak to my newspaper class and expressed interest in me. We had lunch.

I won a poetry contest. (A real one.)

Teen Ink published one of my short stories.

All of these things happened, and suddenly my parents no longer looked at my writing as "weird." Suddenly my decision to go for a Bachelor's in journalism was just fine. I passed some secret test. At last, I failed to trip over the hurdle. I'm not sure why writing turned from a useless hobby – the one that drove my stepfather and me apart – to a viable career option, but it did.

Three years later, I have evolved even more career-wise. With my first foothold in the queer romance publishing world, I'm at last where I want to be. Ironically, like my first failed attempt at publishing, my first successful attempt is an anthology.

There should be a meaning-of-life-and-writing-and-all-that-is line here, probably, but I'm tired and my puppy looks extremely warm on my bed.

Happy Valentine's, everyone.

Lately, NaNoWriMo and I have a complicated relationship.

In 2010, I was entrenched in fandom, and when NaNo rolled around, I threw myself into the first original project that I had attempted since I was thirteen or so. I won NaNo – 50k and the solid first draft of a novel that still sits unfinished on my hard drive. But while I was writing that novel, I completely shut myself off. I ignored school, I ignored my job, and I cut myself off from both fandom and my girlfriend – now fiancée – because I had some tragic suffering-for-my-art image, and I was convinced that I could only focus on writing novels. Nothing else.

After my brief bout of insanity, I recovered, and now I happily manage to write books and still participate in fandom and, y'know, real life. Me circa NaNo 2010 was a scary me. I'm a better me now. A me more capable of doing what I want to do with my writing.

Even though my introduction to original fiction was rocky, I never quite let it go after NaNo 2010, and I gradually moved from fanfiction to writing original fiction full-time. So I have NaNo to thank for that. I also have NaNo to thank for finally convincing me that I am capable of writing something longer than 10k.

NaNo 2011 was much more relaxed and much more fun. Why? Because I didn't concentrate on winning. Instead of making my goal 50k, I made my goal a habitual one: I promised myself that I'd sit down and write every day. And I did! I think I finished that year with a little over 30k, most of it miscellaneous bits from stories I was working on at the time.

NaNo 2012 had an entirely different goal. I vowed that I would finish a draft of something and ready it for submission. I waited until the last minute, but I did what I said I would, and managed to double it. On December 1st, I sent out two manuscripts – one to Dreamspinner and one to Torquere. The one for Dreamspinner was rejected because, well. It was terrible, honestly. I didn't care about the characters. There was no reason to. But "Scented" was accepted, and thus NaNo 2012 was successful.

NaNo, up until NaNo 2012, was kind of a shining thing for me. I've met so many wonderful, amazing, creative people through NaNo. My regional group is awesome, and I love my MLs. We're a tight-knit bunch, all of us, and they make me want to come back every year.

During NaNo 2012, one of my friends linked me to a Tumblr that found the most ridiculous things from the NaNo forums and collected them. To my surprise, there was an entire section of the forums called "Dirty Tricks to Get to 50k."

I wish I'd never found that section.

The people in my region are like me: they do NaNo to create something. But the people in that section of the forums suggested things like, "Add all the adjectives you can," and, "Write arbitrary scenes," and, "Write a flashback every other scene," and, "Write chapter headers that are long, like Fall Out Boy song titles."

I'm not highbrow. I think anyone who wants to write should write, and they should do it however they want to. That forum blew me away. It made me wonder how many people do NaNo just for the chance to say that they won, rather than to learn something about writing or to expand their abilities. Or even purely for the sake of doing something! Instead of teaching themselves a thing or two by doing a challenging event and coming out of it bettered, all they wanted was to say, "I wrote 50,000 words in a month." I guess it doesn't matter to them that those words won't matter at all – and by matter, I don't mean that they don't matter in the sense that they won't be published. I mean that they don't matter in the sense that they'll be worthless. No writer will learn anything by writing shit that they know is shit, or by writing word count-padding scenes that are purely for later deletion.

I dunno, you guys. Knowing that that thread exists actually takes away from my own enjoyment of NaNoWriMo. For me, the point of NaNo is creation. When you're writing sentences like, "The petite blond girl rolled her emerald eyes and stomped her booted foot in heated anger," just to increase your word count, that's not creation – it's cheating yourself.

I went to a funeral today. A close friend of mine died a week ago yesterday, and the service was provided through donations gathered at my university, where he was a tutor. It was... good, I think. It was closure. I don't have many memories of funerals I've been to before this. I remember my mother touching my dead grandfather in his casket, and I remember freaking out because I thought he would grab her. Being six at a funeral is a bit different than being 20 at a funeral.

The pastor could have used some work. Call me a heathen, but I don't think a funeral is the proper place to give a sermon damning abortion. :\

I also told my mother I'm engaged. I kept telling myself that when I was 20, I would do it, and now that Alex and I have been engaged for a little over a year, I decided it was about damn time to spill.

She told me that she's known for months. Mothers.

Anyway, it's back to the words for me. I've been in a slump for the past week after having a 12k weekend, and I need to start pounding it out again.

So tomorrow is my 20th birthday. I made a blog post a while back (blog has since been deleted; I'm really quite terrible at keeping blogs, but I'm going to pay money for this one, so it's sticking around) about how a goal of mine was to be published before I was 20, and how, oh well, I wasn't going to make it. I convinced myself that I didn't want it because I thought I wouldn't have it.

Then I sat myself down early in December and wrote a story about a detective and a vampire. The entire story was based off a single gif from the American version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo -- the scene where Salander is sitting on the sink, eating breakfast, with only a shirt on. I paused that scene, looked at it, and said, I want to write that character. It wasn't so much about Salander as it was about that feeling, that image: a character who would sit bare-legged and unselfconscious on a sink in a house that wasn't theirs.

I wanted it, so I did it. I went in at around seven p.m. and when I emerged five hours later, I'd written 5,500 words. And they were words that I liked. I sent them in.

Torquere contacted me a month later.

I guess it's still surreal to me. My editor sent me the cover art today, and I had to look at the W-9 I signed to double-check my SSN for an application to another college (yeah, also a thing that's happening: I'm moving to Ohio University next semester, woosh). It doesn't feel like it's true. The night I received the acceptance email, I taped a note to the back of my door, so when I woke up in the morning I would know that it was still true.

Getting a 5,000-word story published probably doesn't seem like a lot to most people, but it was enough to kick start my career. It was enough to assure me that writing is my career, and that I won't let it go for anything.

So hey, 16-year-old me: you're gonna do it. Congrats. Also, you live to be 20 without spontaneously combusting or getting hit by a Budweiser semi. Good job!

Here's the cover art for MASKS OFF TOO!:



I can't wait to hold a paperback copy of that. hnngh.