I’m still here, but I am tired

First, a truth that makes me feel like I want to scream-cry:

I haven’t sold a new project in two years.

This fact is obscured by the truth that publishing a book takes about two years from sale to publication. So my latest book–And the Trees Stare Back–is less than a year old in everyone else’s minds.

Behind the scenes, though, I’ve been trying to sell more projects (and stalling out).

I wrote a proposal years ago now that’s eerily similar to the recent Netflix show about teen boot camps.

I have another proposal about the Middle Ages’ most powerful lady con artist, a book I hoped would be a follow up for fans of The Lioness.

I wrote a (full) novel I love about a real group of queer artists whose underground ID ring and bombing plot saved many from the Nazis. It is, in my opinion, the greatest love story I’ve ever written (The Empress cannot compare), but it’s been sitting in editor inboxes, largely ignored. Another personal favorite book-of-my-heart project that could take years upon years to sell despite constant feedback that it’s fantastic.

If someone bought it when it first went out as a proposal, it would have been published this year–an extremely appropriate timing for that kind of story, when we all need stories about the impacts a handful of people can have against authoritarian regimes.

After that, I wrote a proposal about two desperate young women in a West Virginia mine town trying to unionize in 1920. Facing threats of sexual assault, eviction, and even death, they summon a forest god to save them–and discover the god might be danger, not savior.

I could have sold that one, but the editor asked for my soul in the bargain. I would have to strip out the real history that makes that story powerful to me. Place it in an alternate universe so that we could focus on the gods and monsters instead of weaving it with the real historical horrors of unchecked corporate greed.

Another editor asked for an exclusive look at that one. So we kept it just for her for a few weeks, at the end of which she didn’t even have the courtesy to respond.

There’s a special kind of exhaustion that comes from this kind of journey.

Writing, writing, writing, loving what you write, knowing your stories could find an audience if the gatekeepers let them pass – yet finding no publishing home for them.

Being told that you just haven’t “broken out yet,” as if that’s something within your control, when we already have the data that shows that publishers have control over book sales, not authors.

Being told that once you have several books under your belt, you can start selling books on proposal, which means you write maybe 1/3 of the book (plus a full synopsis of the story) and publishers buy before you finish. (This is where the concept of an “advance” comes from – paying the author to live while they write.) And finding out this simply isn’t true anymore. Even your New York Times bestselling friends are having to write full novels in order to sell anything new. Having five novels published hasn’t saved me from this. My Netflix connection hasn’t. My award nominations haven’t. Publishing’s latest set of demands are that authors – already hugely underpaid and typically surviving on spousal income or other jobs – must write full novels with no guarantees until and unless they become Stephen King or Terry Prachett (ironically: the success level wherein they may no longer need the advance).

I’m stopping by to say that I am tired. That for the last few months, I’ve taken a break from fiction. That I want to write, but for me writing has always been about wanting other people to read my work – and so stalling out on project after project leeches the motivation. Not because I need the commercial success, but because I need the access to readers.

Some of the aforementioned projects might sell any moment. That was the truth for my projects before, too. And the Trees Stare Back – the book closest to my heart – took multiple years and multiple agents to find its home. Perhaps Pansies (the queer WWI heist book) or I Owe My Soul (the story of unions and forest gods) will sell tomorrow. And in two years, another book (or both) will slip into being.

I suppose with Pansies I still feel some resentment because it could be out now. And I think we need it now.

(And yes, I understand that self-publishing is an option. I have done it before; I’m sure I’ll do it again. But if reach is my goal and I don’t have the energy or money to market it myself, trad pub is a better choice, despite it’s MANY many failings.)

There’s no point this post. No call to action. I just wanted to share that it’s hard. And even being grateful for the success I’ve had getting so many books of mine into the world, I am tired.

And more than that: the system is broken.

Authors should be able to support themselves.

Publishers should not be earning 75 – 90% of the profits on a book while the author lives off ramen.

So I guess there is a call to action. But it isn’t about me.

The call to action is this: join a union. Start a union. Do whatever you can, whenever you can, to push back against all the corporate systems feeding money into a handful of people at the top while destroying those whose work the whole thing is built on.

And if you are an editor, your call to action to buy my heist book. That one should have been in the world yesterday.