STORY ONE. That Time My Brain Broke: I’ve already shared a bit about the struggle to get LIARS’ LEGACY written. This book is, without a doubt, the most complex plot I’ve attempted to novelize. So complex, really, that I probably should never have attempted it as a novel.

I just didn’t realize that until I was too far in to back out.

In it we have seven major players, each with competing motivations, each aware of what SOME of the others are up to but NONE aware of what EVERYONE is up to. Each has their own story that needs to be interwoven into the master plot but only four of those seven have their own point of view and none of those four know what the other three are up to. This means there are three major plot-driving characters for which there is no clean way to show who they are or what they did or why they did it. All we know is that stuff keeps happening to characters A, B, and C who don’t even know that character X or X or other X exist and who have no idea about evil plans Z or other Z, and who think that all this stuff is due to something the others in that A, B, and C group are doing.

Confusing?

You don’t know the half of it.

In outline form it looked doable enough. But there’s a big difference between a note to self that says, “Meanwhile, character X wants to use character Y to accomplish evil plan Z,” and actually building out the details of how character X tries to get character Y to accomplish evil plan Z without ever being able to show what's going on in character X's head. 

Writing a book in which you get one invisible X is hard.

Doing it with three invisible Xs was peak what-was-I-thinking stupidity.

Trying to figure out how to show what needed showing, and when to show it, and whose eyes to show it through in a way that avoided tropes and conveniences, AND allowed the plot and character choices to feel like they came together organically, AND fit it within a contract-specified word count, AND render the complexity invisible to the reader so that it all flowed without any sign of that struggle, required a level of mental gymnastics I wasn’t prepared for.

But by the time I realized what I’d gotten myself into, I was in way too far and too deep to go back and restructure or even start over. The only option was forward. And forward was brutal.

I’ve written about how I missed the contract deadline, and how in spite of every best effort I then missed the deadline extension, and then the extension after that, and then another. I touched a bit on how, as each new incremental deadline extension arrived I knew there was no way I was going to make it in time. But the fault was wholly mine, and I was in no position to argue. The only thing I could do was be honest and say I wasn’t going to make it but that I’d do everything I could to get as close as possible, which I did say, but something seemed to get lost in translation and all everyone else seemed to hear was “I can and I will.”

I threw my whole self into the work as if sheer strength of will would be enough to make the impossible happen. Days blended into each other in a cycle of work and sleep broken only by food and the bare minimum that needed doing to stay alive, and my publisher grew more anxious and less forgiving (and rightfully so!) but no matter how hard I worked, or how badly I wanted to deliver on each new deadline, it was never enough.

Over and over and over I failed.

What I haven’t written about was the emotional wreckage that followed each failure.

Even now I struggle to find words to adequately describe it.

There’s always a point in writing a book where the story begins to muddle and threads begin to slip and it all begins to feel too big, too much, and I doubt myself. Sometimes those stretches of doubt go on for months at a time but that’s just part of the process. I’m used to it and used to ignoring it because it’s always met by an equal measure of confidence in my own intelligence and innate ability to figure things out.

I don’t mean that in any IQ sense, I mean it in a tenacious sense.

There’s nothing special about my IQ. I’m not particularly clever. I’m not quick-witted or fast on my feet—quite the opposite, actually—and because I get thrown into sensory overload so easily, my brain often shuts out a lot of detail and it mostly feels as if I experience life through a layer of gauze and I miss really basic things that other people catch right away.

I’m not being self-deprecating here or humble bragging or looking for reassurance.

I’ve had a lot of years of pushing through impossible odds to learn my limitations, and those limitations, I’ve learned, are never about the thing.

I don’t think there’s ever been anything I truly wanted to learn, understand, figure out, build, fix, or do, that I couldn’t, so long as I had time and space to think and tinker and so long as the cost of failure was low. To stretch beyond whatever my current skill level is, I need time—a lot of it—and I need room to fail and return to the problem again and again and look at it twenty different ways until I finally figure it out. The higher the cost of failure, the slower I process, and the more time I need. These limitations—desire, time, and cost of failure—are as real, tangible, and constraining to me as a broken back would be to anyone trying to walk.

But the problem with limitations like these is that they’re completely invisible to others. All anyone else ever sees is the end result, the accomplishments, never the stumbles along the path to reach them.

And, because of that, limitations like these are easy for others to dismiss.

There’s no real fault in that. If you’ve watched someone beat insurmountable odds, and then watched them conquer those odds again and again, it’s easy to think conquering is their natural state and it’s easy to believe they can do anything they set their mind to and that they’ll be okay no matter what because that’s just who they are. But I wasn’t okay.

I was really, really, really not okay.

This thing was far bigger than my existing skill set, the cost of failing to get it right was potentially career-ending, and I knew with the same certainty you know the color of your own eyes that I wouldn’t be able to deliver it by any of the deadline extensions. But every time I tried to convey how bad things were, and how far away from the deadline I was hoping that we might postpone the book release or find some alternative to putting out an unfinished book, nobody heard me.

They looked at the problem, then looked at the past, and said, You can do this and We believe in you and If anyone can figure it out, you can and You’ve totally got this.

I knew then and know now that this came from a place of good intentions, but for me, to express genuine anguish at being trapped in an impossible situation, only to have that anguish met with a universal expectation that of course I could do it because others’ belief made it so, just served to heighten the despair and created a deep sense of isolation.

It felt the same as it would have if, instead, I'd been a long distance runner with a broken back, and everyone just expected me to run again now, as if the broken back was an imaginary issue, as if other people believing I could run was all it took to magic the limitations away.

It didn’t. It couldn’t.

And I’m honestly not sure which is worse: to be treated as if you’re stupid and incapable when you know you aren’t, or to be treated as if you’re smarter and more capable than you are and then having to face the consequences of failing to live up to those expectations.

In this case, failing time and again, and then facing the frustration and irritation of those I’d failed, and having no way to promise when the failure would end and being forced to commit again to what I knew I couldn’t do led from distress to desperation to despondency and at some point my brain responded to this toxic cocktail by giving up and shutting off. 

The breathing and heart-pumping stuff all kept on doing its thing, but the higher order thinking, long and short term memory, access to vocabulary, ability to string coherent sentences together and make logic on the page, or plan more than a day into the future, or deal with regular demands of daily life like paying bills and keeping up with school schedules, that all completely blitzed.

Things that once took five minutes now took thirty.

Simple things like opening my inbox and responding to emails became so overwhelming that mostly I just didn’t. And all of this, as you might imagine, only intensified the distress and exacerbated the fight against time, and in those long months when it seemed like failure was all there’d ever be, there was no part of me I could point to and say “this is okay, this here doesn’t hurt.”

I started slipping into dark places I’d never been before.

I wasn’t okay.

I was really, really, really not okay.

But I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t make it go away. I couldn’t get help. The only thing I could do was continue to show up at the computer day after day after day and work my way to the end on brute force alone. Somehow in that blur, I did get the book finished.

I celebrate that for the triumph it was, but the truth is I’m still not okay.

The thing that broke, whatever it is, is still broken.

It might be broken for a while.

It’s been three months now [I guess four by the time I send this out] and with every day that passes it feels as if a little bit more of my brain comes back online. But I don’t know how long it will take before I get me back again. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to where I was before, and that has to factor into the decision making or else I risk returning to this same story and repeating a new version of it all over again.

There’s a video available where I go into a bit more detail on what this “broken” stuff means in real life practical terms and how I’m dealing with it. I’ll provide an explanation and a link to that further below. But for now we move on to. . .


STORY TWO. The Disappearance of Vanessa Michael Munroe: Once upon a time, a few days after the editorial process for THE MASK (Munroe #5) had finished and the manuscript had moved into production and I was gearing up to begin THE FULCRUM (Munroe #6), I learned that my editor would be moving to a different publishing house.

It was a well-earned and much-deserved career jump and I was really happy for her. For me, though, the timing was awful. I cried over it.

Losing your editor is no small thing.

When most people outside of publishing think “editor” what they’re really thinking of is “copy editor”—the person who fixes all your typos and punctuation and grammar—but those are not the same thing. In reality, the editor is the one who loved your work and believed it in so much they were able to convince their bosses and multiple committees that it needed to be bought and published, and then convince the bean counters to write the author a check. The editor is also the one who guides the manuscript through the publishing process, fighting for it in editorial and marketing meetings, pushing hard for publicity dollars, and otherwise making sure everything that can be done to support the author and the book is being done. Editors typically have a set number of books to publish within a given year so they’re working with any number of authors at the same time, moving multiple books from acquisition to publication and beyond.

When an editor leaves, only in the rarest of rarest circumstances can they take an author with them. So their authors, who are now orphans, get divided out and placed with the remaining editors or they get handed off to someone hired on as a replacement. Either way, the author’s new editor is not the person who bought the book. It’s either someone fresh into the learning curve of a new position, or someone who already has their own books that they love and have been fighting for who just got extra work dumped in their lap.

The author-editor relationship requires a huge measure of trust. So much trust that a good agent will take author and editor working styles and personalities into account when deciding where to submit the author’s manuscript because, as anyone who has ever had to work with anyone else knows, a fraught working relationship has killed many a grand project.

People are people. Editors are people. Authors are people. People rules apply.

Losing just one editor has been enough in and of itself to kill many an author’s career, and this was now the FOURTH editor that I’d lost. She was the only one who’d ever lasted more than one book with me and she was smart and easy to get along with and we had great chemistry and she was gone.

Like I said, I cried.

Within the industry there’s a term known as “the spiral of death.” This algorithmic / sales / marketing phenomenon comes about when something happens that causes a book to sell way fewer copies than the publisher and retailers expected. This thing could be as big as an economic meltdown or a juicy scandal that consumes media attention and drowns out the book’s release, or as small as a poor publishing decision or simply bad timing. Rarely is this thing something the author can control. But, as a result of it, when the author’s next book comes out, retailers, looking at the number of books they expected to sell last time and didn’t, cut way back on the copies they preorder. With the drop in retail orders the publisher sees reduced interest which often results in marketing and publicity teams reallocating time and resources to potentially more profitable titles, which results in even fewer readers becoming aware of the new book’s existence, which results in another sales drop which deepens the cycle for the next book (if there even is one).

The spiral of death probably ranks even higher than losing editors for killing off author careers.

Up to the point of THE MASK I had been lucky as I’d mostly been handed from one good editor to the next, but after the fourth departed, the fifth soon followed and the sixth—deliberately or accidentally, I’ll never know—provided enough drama and stress to fill a standalone novel. Meanwhile, the Munroe series itself, which had already entered the death spiral, no longer had a champion and went plunging head-over-feet.

There’s no room here to go into the torturous details that filled that year of being held in limbo, but if I had to point to my own personal “spiral of death” (though clearly that’s far too melodramatic) it was here, an entire year of wasted work, of not being able to get straight answers for months at a time, and of trying to provide what was asked of me only to be turned around and sent another direction until finally both my agent and I had had enough and we walked. The short of it is within that time frame the publisher declined to continue the Munroe series and, with the sales trajectory being what it was, the odds of finding another publisher to pick it up were pretty much zero.

With that, the Munroe series was effectively dead.

I’ve alluded to this over the years, and have been forthright with anyone who contacted me privately to ask about it, but because publishing is such a small and tightly connected industry, and because there’s always a risk that words and explanations might be taken out of context, writing about it publicly just hasn’t been worth the potential burned bridges and so this is the first time I’ve come right out and stated publicly what happened. There is a far more detailed recounting that includes the gory specifics that, for the same reasons as above, I’m not willing to get into here. I’ll post that link, too, in just a bit.

In any case, by the time I learned that the publisher no longer wished to continue the series I already had an entire outline for THE FULCRUM, as well as the first three chapters and about 25% of the story in rough draft. But if I wanted to keep writing for a living, and if I wanted what I wrote to be available for library patrons and my many readers who eschew eBooks, I had no choice but to start over with something new and to find a new publisher.

That’s why Munroe went missing.

That’s where the Jack and Jill series came from.

That’s why there are two other mostly-written standalone books sitting on my hard drive.

And that’s why I’ve never been able to give a definitive answer on if there will be another Munroe story and/or when it might be finished.


STORY THREE. The Lifeline that Became a Noose: I’ve written in bits and pieces over the years about the rock bottom place I was at when THE INFORMATIONIST sold. Sometimes at events, when there’s enough time, I’ll tell a longer version of what led to that rock bottom place. But there are some parts of that story I’ve just never talked about, mostly because some of the detail is so bizarre that when I hear the words coming out of my own mouth even I think it couldn’t have really been all that bad. I mean, really. But it was.

I’m going to tell it to you now from start to finish because I think it’s the only way to show exactly why I was at such a low place and how desperate and overwhelmed and still new to the “real world” I was, and what an enormous impact selling that book had on my life beyond the obvious big deal of having gotten a book deal in the first place. It goes something like this:

My husband and I were both cult babies. We met and married in the cult and that life was all we knew until we got out. We both entered the real world with the same lack of education and job history and although we really, really needed the dual income from both of us working, we had two babies of our own and it would cost more to put the kids in daycare than either one of us would earn so it made better financial sense for one of us to stay home. That’s how I got the kids and he got the career. I was home with two demanding preschoolers when I began writing THE INFORMATIONIST.

He learned fast, made smart lateral jumps, and we clawed our way upward into the beginning of a more comfortable life. We bought a house, got the kids into a decent school district, and then the youngest started kindergarten and I was finally free enough that I could begin looking into options for myself. I decided then that before I chose between remedial education and an attempt at college, or skipping college entirely and going straight to part time work, I should at least finish this book project I’d been working on. That’s how I was able to complete THE INFORMATIONIST and that’s where I was when I found an agent and she readied to send the manuscript out on submission.

Comparatively speaking, and considering where we were when we started out, life had gotten pretty good. Then everything blew up.

Overnight, it seemed, the economy melted down into what’s since become colloquially known as the “Great Recession,” and my agent, who is very wise, and who had only just sent out the manuscript, advised waiting until things calmed down and pulled it off the market.

Then my husband and I divorced.

By that time he’d carved out a solid career for himself in a somewhat recession-proof industry. But, since I’d been the one to stay home with the kids, I was exactly where I’d been in terms of formal education and work experience as when we got out of the cult. The difference in opportunities and financial security wasn’t lost on him and he was generous in trying to make up for it by ensuring most of our joint assets, including the house and whatever equity we had in it, went with me and the kids. If there had to be a divorce, then this was as smooth a transition as any newly single parent could hope for. But it was still a divorce, and it still made me my children’s custodial parent and primary breadwinner, and having the house meant it was now on me to find a way to pay for it.

That was how I, as a thirty-something-year-old woman, entered the job market for the first time with a nearly blank resume and no formal education during one of the worst economic crisis in recent memory as the unemployment rate just kept climbing.

Months of applying netted a meager two interviews.

Only one called back. They were an internet-based startup looking for someone to handle the customer service side of things. They offered $12 an hour, no benefits, and from the way they described the work my skill set would be overkill, and that was all fine by me. I just needed a foot in the door, a way to prove what I was capable of and if the company grew the way they projected, then this was the beginning of greater things. As luck would have it, the starting date was right as school was letting out for summer, which meant that from the very first paycheck, $8 of every $12 would have to go to a babysitter. But opportunities were so few that I couldn’t afford to let this one go and the hours were flexible enough that once school started again I could work full time and still be home by the time the kids got out, so off I went to work for the startup company from hell.

The owners were a newly married couple in their 40’s. He was top boss of this venture. It was his brains and his money on the line but he still had a day job as a high level exec at a fortune 100 so, attention wise, his priorities went elsewhere. He relied on her exclusively to run and manage the day to day operations. Her background was ex corporate management something-something and she was how I learned it was possible for wealthy educated people with years of work experience to be—forgive me—fucking stupid.

Maybe that’s a little harsh. I’m sure she did really well in a structured hierarchy with clearly defined job responsibilities, but this was a fast-paced, high-demand, every-week-it’s-something-new environment in which constant logistical and technical challenges required ongoing outside-the-box problem solving and her neurons just weren’t capable of handling that. And I guess it was easy for me to see it because I’d basically spent my entire life in that kind of pressure cooker.

Anyway, Mr and Mrs had homed in on an underserved niche market and their strategy was to capitalize on that unmet demand without tying up capital in inventory by selling items they didn’t actually have. It worked like this: They had a retail account with a wholesaler that carried 10,000+ items ranging from right inside this niche to just barely connected to it. They took the wholesaler’s entire 10,000+ item database, rejiggered it, and force fed that information into their own seller accounts on eBay and Amazon to create an equivalent 10,000+ listings of their own. Then they did the one thing they were not supposed to do and listed every single item as “in stock.”

The rules for third party selling on Amazon required sellers who listed items in stock to actually have those items on hand, but Amazon and eBay also gave sellers three business days to get an order shipped out. The arrangement these guys had with the wholesaler meant that any order they placed by a certain cut off would ship out that same day using two-day delivery. So, by their reasoning, if the wholesaler had the item in their inventory and they themselves were able to get it out the door on its way to the customer within three business days, then the whole “in stock” thing was more of a suggestion, really.

So customers would buy stuff from their eBay and Amazon storefronts that they claimed to have but didn’t, then they’d batch all the orders from that day into a buy from the wholesaler, it’d show up three days later, and they’d use that delivery to fill the individual orders in their own packaging and get them out the door that same day before the post office closed.

They still had to front the money to batch buy the day’s orders because, with Amazon at least, payments didn’t reach the sellers for at least 3 weeks or so after the customer paid. But it meant they had very little money tied up in inventory that might not sell. It also allowed them to capture a high volume of sales on less popular items that other sellers also listed, but not as “in stock,” and because Amazon’s algorithms rewarded sellers with in stock listings with higher rankings and higher visibility, it didn’t take long before a fire hose of orders turned in their direction.

It was genius, really, if cheating is considered genius.

Or, at least it would have been if they hadn’t self-sabotaged so badly.

In reality the two day shipping didn’t always arrive in two days, or might arrive too late in the day to get everything repackaged and off in the mail that same day, and sometimes entire boxes went missing because real life is messy. But if they shipped too many orders outside that three-business-day window they would get their accounts suspended, so that was a metric that Mr. was hyper focused on. 

Ultimately it was the two major issues he wasn’t tracking that would kill the company.

The first was that the 10,000+ item database they relied on was in a constant state of change. Items went out of stock or got discontinued fairly regularly, and sometimes the wholesaler had issues with their suppliers which created wait lists and back orders, none of which was reflected in these guys’ online listings because the brute force creation thing had been a one-and-done event based on the database as it had been at that specific moment in time. They had no system for matching their listings against updates or any way to preemptively delete listings as items dropped out of supply. So Mr., not knowing differently, would include those unavailable items in his daily batch order, and the whole system would proceed as if the listings were all accurate all the time.

With that three-day shipping window being such a big deal to Mr., you’d think that once this particular “out of stock” issue became known there’d have been some inventory control procedure put in place to match arriving products against what was supposed to go out that day and flag anything missing as due a refund or something. And if that was just too much work you’d think that at least the shipping department might notice orders that had been pending past a certain date and they’d flag those as needing some kind of proactive communication with the customer. They did neither of those things. Instead, the first hint that something had gone wrong was when, weeks later, the “where’s my stuff” emails began to hit my inbox.

Because I couldn’t see orders, or inventory, or pending shipments, and those who could see them did nothing proactive about these issues, the after-the-fact inquiries triggered a time consuming hunt to track down each item status. If it turned out that the item was delayed or indefinitely out of stock I’d first have to try to talk the customer into accepting a substitute or a discount on any other available item (which would still have to be batched ordered and so it’d mean at least 3 more days before it could ship out) before I could refund. This required multiple email exchanges in addition to the many steps required to trace where in this chain of events things had gone wrong, so these were pretty time intensive issues to resolve.

But the biggest of them all was that, due to the way the listings had been brute force created, sometimes critical information never made it to the shipping room. For example, a listing might be for an eight-pack of playing cards, but unless the quantity of packs was included in the item summary (hint: it usually wasn’t since quantity is typically its own database field) all the shipping room saw was an order for playing cards and assumed that meant one deck.

Now you might also think that once this problem became known there would have been some process put in place to reference the order against the listing or against the original database but by now you’ve probably gotten the idea of how this place ran. Everything was about getting those orders out the door on that third business day and the time frame between when the product arrived and when it had to be gone again was so tight that nobody had time for accuracy.

Thus, in addition to the “where’s my order” inquiries, there were a ton of “you idiots sent me one instead of the eight I paid for” emails, which were also incredibly time consuming to resolve.

All three of these issues were basic enough that anyone with any kind of foresight should have been able to predict and account for the possibilities. At the very least once the issues were discovered there should have been procedures put into place to do right by the customers, but instead the issues were ignored, as if being aware of them and being told to be mindful of them was enough to make them not happen anymore. So as time went on and sales volume grew faster than the shipping room could keep up and the cash outlay started getting bigger, the mistakes got more frequent and the refund policy less friendly and the rate of very unhappy customers leaving scathing reviews started climbing.

Yours Truly was responsible for making the bad stuff go away.

It had been simple enough to keep customers happy when the volume was small and company policy said customers could do no wrong. But since nobody fixed the issues driving customer dissatisfaction, and since every jump in sales brought an equivalent jump in time consuming problems, resolving them all within a single work day got harder and harder, and there were always customers for whom no amount of after-the-fact bribing or sweet-talking would be enough to get them to change a negative rating to a positive one, and so just based on that alone, the satisfaction rate kept dropping.

The Mr. got increasing frustrated about it, yet any attempt to raise these known issues and the impact they were having on work load and customer reviews was like trying to discuss something that’d been erased from collective memory. As far as Mr and Mrs was concerned, the issues were non-issues. I honestly suspect that Mrs., who’d come into the marriage from a much lower economic rung, and to whom Mr. often spoke as if she was also on a lower intellectual rung, was hiding from him the true state of things. Either that or she was just too stupid to see it herself. That’s the only way I can make sense of how two educated and wealthy people with decades of business experience between them could be so ignorant of very basic things affecting the health of their company.

Suffice it to say, since none of this was their fault or had anything to do with their processes or the lack thereof, that left just one person to blame for everything and that person was. . . oh, you’ll never guess.

After a while it all started to feel a lot like being a kid back in the cult where facts didn’t matter and you could follow the rules to the letter and do everything you were supposed to do, but if an adult thought he saw or heard otherwise then what that adult thought he saw or heard became the new reality and anything you said to try to clarify only made things worse for you because his truth was now the truth and now you were also a liar so the least painful option was to suck it up and try to avoid repeating whatever triggered the accusation in the first place.

It was like that, only this time I was a competent adult being treated like a kid and a parent trying to provide for her own kids and I needed this job and needed to do well at it and was truly trying to do right by the company but even if I’d cloned myself and doubled my daily output, it still wouldn’t be enough to match whatever industry metrics they were using as their targets. I finally had to accept that no matter how hard I worked or how much I gave them I was still always going to be the bad guy and I could forget any chance of working my way up as the company grew—assuming it survived—and I was grossing $4 an hour for the privilege.

I knew there had to be something better out there, if not better pay than surely better working conditions or the potential to grow into more, but realistically, to find it I’d have to first quit, and the idea of quitting petrified me because quitting meant starting the job search all over again, and starting over was terrifying. It’d taken me two months to find this one and I kind of felt like I’d lucked into it to begin with. There were thousands of recently unemployed well-educated people with years of experience applying for the same limited number of openings and I’d stumbled across this one on some out-of-the-way bulletin board that only a few other applicants had seen and that had given me a fighting chance. I didn’t know if I’d get that lucky a second time.

I was afraid of losing the house, afraid of failing my kids, afraid of not being able to figure this out before we bled through our savings. Everything that I’d worked so hard for since leaving the cult had vanished. All the years staying home, hustling on the side to supplement our income, all the energy I’d poured into writing a book that had gone nowhere, all the hopes and dreams and plans, every bit of it was gone.

I had a house and a car, both of which I was grateful for, but which I couldn’t afford. I had no prospects. No career. No education. No social circle to draw on. No friends to reach out to for support. No idea what I was going to do long term.

This job, toxic as it had become, was all I had.

I knew I needed to quit and didn’t know how and that fear and uncertainty all came to a head one day on the drive to work and I cried myself the whole way there. That was the day I got the call from my agent that THE INFORMATIONIST had sold.

That was the day everything changed.

The sale came as a complete surprise. My agent may have mentioned being ready to take the book out on submission again but with everything else going on it hadn't registered and I really wasn't counting on anything.

And now I was looking at an offer in the low six figures, split equally between two books. It was a number so far beyond reality I had to keep checking the zeros to make sure I was reading it right. My agent, not knowing the situation at work, advised me not to quit the day job. It might seem like a lot of money, she said, but I wasn’t going to get it in one lump sum and the way it was spread out wouldn’t be enough to live on. 

That night I did the math.

It was true what she said about it being spread out.

The advance was divided into eight installments that would stretch on through  nearly four-years. But after agency commissions that still worked out to roughly $35,000 a year before taxes, and from where I stood, thirty-five grand was an obscene amount of money. If we lived frugally and stuck to a tight budget, and if I could successfully write and deliver a second book, then we could make this work and I knew right then that this was a once-in-a-lifetime get out of jail card.

No, it was more than that.

What I'd been handed was opportunity.

This contract could be the beginning or it could be the end. It was up to me to figure out what to do with it. There were no promises and no guarantees as to how long it’d last, but I was determined to run with it as I could for as long as it would let me. I’ve always viewed each additional book as an extension of that opportunity—a stay of execution, if you will—one more chance to stay in the game, one more day I didn’t have to work at a startup company from hell.

Selling THE INFORMATIONIST altered the trajectory of my life and of my children’s lives and because of I've carried with me a deep sense of gratitude and respect, and it threads through everything. That’s why I’ve always committed myself completely to every book I write, and it’s why I make myself as accessible as possible to fans and readers, because I owe it, because without them—you—I would still have nothing.

The catch was that the same lifeline that saved me from drowning slowly became a noose that wrapped itself around my neck.

The first hint of that showed up in that very first contract.

I’d learned to write while writing THE INFORMATIONIST and I’d only ever had just that one idea, and it wasn’t even so much an idea as a place I wanted to bring to life. I’d never had childhood dreams of becoming an author, had no author heroes, no lifetime love affair with books, no years of working toward the hope of launching a publishing career. I wrote because imagination had been a survival mechanism throughout my childhood, I wrote because I’d been forbidden from it growing up and because now the fiction I read consumed me and I wished I could do THIS, that I could let other people feel what I felt when I read these stories and I didn’t want to get to the end of my life and look back in regret wondering what might have been if I’d tried.

I had one book. One idea. That was all.

I wrote it just to say I’d done it, and decided to find an agent to give publishing a try.

I finished it. Tried to publish it. It didn’t sell. Life came at me fast. I moved on.

And now here I was looking at an offer to buy that book, but it came as a package deal. To get the money and the opportunity that came with the first, I had to commit to giving them a second that could follow in its shoes. And not as a case of, “Give us the first one now and whenever you write the second one we’ll buy it, too.” No, this was, “Sign here and take some money for both right now, then give us the second book by this day next year.”

I needed that money so one way or the other there was going to be a second book.It might even be a decent book.

But I also knew beyond doubt was that it would be impossible to duplicate what I’d done with the first because the setting was so much of what made THE INFORMATIONIST what it was and I didn’t have another two years of living in a different weird off-the-map country to draw on for a follow up. What I mean to say is, I had deliberately and specifically drawn on reality and experience to bring a country to life and I’d used all that real life up in writing that one book.

And in doing that, I unwittingly set the bar for myself really fucking high.

I take that back.

It hasn’t been the chase in and of itself that’s been excruciating, it’s been the pace of the chase: the deadlines, the treadmill, the quick turnarounds while trying to maintain the quality that’s expected of me, every book requiring more mental and emotional energy than the one before it, every book demanding more time and effort for promotion so that readers know it exists, with every book working harder and faster and longer hours and with each book having less and less to show for all that effort.

For that to make any sense I need to explain a little about the publishing landscape.

In the big picture nobody, absolutely nobody, can create a sustainable career out of one or two books. Not even if that first book is Fifty Shades of Fifty Million Dollars. An author might hit a literati jackpot so big they can live off the windfall for the rest of their life, but having a mega, mega bestseller isn’t the same as having a long term sustainable career and even the bestest of bestselling books eventually loses its luster and gives way to the newest hot thing. In my case, although the books have sold well, they haven’t sold THAT kind of well and even my very best windfall has been more of a catch-your-breath breeze.

For someone like me, the only way to turn a couple books into a long term sustainable career is to consistently grow an audience over time, and the only way to do that is to keep writing and publishing new books, and the only way to publish more books the traditional way is if a publisher is willing to offer another contract, and the only way a publisher will offer another contract is if they think they’ll make money off your work. But no matter what you’ve done in the past, you’re ONLY ever as good as however many copies your most recent book sold, and so the only way to prove that your work will make them money is to sell a lot of copies of the one that’s out right now.

The pressure for sales is constant.

And this creates a paradox.

In publishing—well, in any industry, really—visibility, discoverability, is currency.

Readers can’t buy what they don’t know exists.

Over the last ten years publishing has gone through a tremendous shift in how books are promoted and sold. It used to be that publishers relied on trade magazines, print advertising, author tours, and book sellers to spread the word about an upcoming book. Now, nearly everything is done online with a lot of effort put into social media campaigns and giveaways, blog tours, and such. During this same shift, the number of new available books each month has exploded exponentially while the book-buying market, the reading market, has stayed more or less the same. In this scenario there are more and more authors fighting to get their books in front of the same limited number of eyeballs. Also during this same shift, one retailer came out the winner in nearly cornering the book market and currently controls about 70% of book sales traffic.

When one single channel controls that large of a percentage of book traffic, authors and publishers become dependent on that channel for reaching prospective readers. This means a single channel holds immense power over who gets to see what books are available and in practical terms it means that no matter how you choose to publish your books, if you want readers to see your stuff so they can buy it, then you have to pay to play. 

If you don’t pay, you don’t get visibility.

The emails you get alerting you to new books that are coming out? If they’re coming from any major retailer then someone has paid to get a book on that list. Book recommendations that show up on your reading device? Someone has paid to get that recommendation in front of you. Even many indie authors, who just a few years ago were doing quite well for themselves by simply writing fast and publishing frequently, are now discovering that even that’s not enough to stay visible and they, too, are forced to pour money into advertising to keep their books in front of readers and it’s not uncommon for independent authors who earn their living entirely through writing to have to put $5,000 of advertising money into their books to make $8,000 in sales.

That gives you a sense of what the book market can be like.

Publishers have hundreds, if not thousands, of authors to do this for and they’ll only go so far into playing the pay to play game, and they won’t do it for everyone. They can’t.

This means that authors have to find other ways to reach their reading market. [Just to clarify, I didn’t say publishers need to find other ways to create visibility for their authors’ books, I said the authors themselves need to do it. Publishers do continue to do many things—sometimes invisible things behind the scenes—to keep an author relevant and help the sales machine go on—but every year more and more of the visible promotion stuff falls on the author’s shoulders.]

This usually involves writing essays and Q&As and doing blog tours and lots of posting on social media and running giveaways and other promotional gimmicks and trying to get placement in online review channels, and ALL of this takes time and mental energy and feels like standing on a street corner hawking wares while shouting at a tornado. And more often than not there’s little to show for all that effort in terms of actual sales because every other author is doing the same thing. But to not do it means losing the little chance at visibility you might otherwise have.

It is KNOWN within the industry that the absolute best thing any author can do to promote his or her work is publish another book. To publish another book you have to write another book, and the publisher has to agree to publish it, and they’re never going to do that if the one on the market right now isn’t selling well enough and so it becomes an endless cycle of screaming into the tornado trying to get visibility for your work in a saturated monopolistic market and trying to juggle writing the next one—but not just writing it—writing to the chase, trying to get this next one to even come close to touching the bar that’s been set so your faithful readers don’t turn away in disgust, and you never really get a chance to stop and you can’t afford to stop because if you slow down you’ll lose what little momentum you’ve worked so hard to build, and it’s not that you want to stop necessarily because you actually love what you do, but you’re also empty and exhausted, and since you never get a chance to stop every book leaves you a little more empty and a little more exhausted and with every book it gets that much harder to get to the finish line, but the show must go on and bills must be paid and so you do it. You just do it.

And then you burn out, and you keep pushing forward anyway because persistence and pushing past it is the only way you know how to do things, and then you break.

And so here we are.

Wait…. Where is here, exactly?

Well, first, here’s where we are with all the projects that are currently in play:

1: LIARS LEGACY, Jack and Jill 2, is in the production pipeline and this mother of all books is set to publish at the end of December. Lord knows this email is long enough so I shall keep the asking for “the things” short: If you enjoyed LIARS’ PARADOX and would like to see LIARS’ LEGACY go places so that we can one day get LIARS’ BLUFF, the biggest favors you can do to support this baby are: 1. Pre-order, if you haven’t already. 2. Make a request to your local library to be sure they will carry it. (Even if you plan to buy your own copy, this is still super helpful). 3. Talk up the first in series to friends, family, strangers, book lovers, etc. 4. Write a review for LIARS’ PARADOX if you haven’t already. 5. Just keep being the awesome person that you are. 6. Remember that the world is a better place because of you.

2: EVENTS: It’s nearly time for me and my publisher to put heads together and sort out what types of events I’ll be doing for LIARS’ LEGACY. Once I know if they’ll be sending me anywhere and what those dates will be I’ll be sure to share them.

3: THE CAN’T TALK ABOUT IT COLLABORATIVE PROJECT: A few delays have pushed this sucker out longer than expected, but it’s still ongoing and these represent the last of my critical deadlines, after which I am fully free. I imagine that at some point in the next six months publicity for the project will begin and I’ll finally be at liberty to share it with you and I’m really looking forward to that.

4: LIARS’ BLUFF, Jack and Jill #3: Right now this is just a twinkle in my brain. Even though each book in this series carries its own self-contained plot, I’ve always seen it as a three-book story arc. So I do eventually want a third book to bring us full circle and close the loop, but I’m in no condition to write it right now, so for the time being it’s just a place holder.

5: THE FULCRUM, Munroe #6: I’ve always intended to finish this book. But paying the bills and keeping up with what was under contract always had to take priority and so I had to keep pushing it aside. In 2017, as a way to offer something of value to the amazing patrons who’ve been supporting me as an artist, I began writing it again, posting rough draft chapters as I finished them. Sadly, due to everything going on with trying to get LIARS’ LEGACY finished I had to put it on hold again. But in June this year, after LIARS’ LEGACY was finished and I’d had a little time to decompress, I returned to it. It had been so long and patrons had been so patient and I wanted so badly to be able to get this party started but try as I might I kept running right back into the same brick wall. I struggled for a month, every day at the computer, trying to make the words work and they wouldn’t and I knew then that whatever was going on with my brain, it wasn’t something I could push through or push away with a couple weeks of rest.

And so that takes us back full circle to what started this email: decisions.

I have to step off the treadmill.

I have to go away for a while and I don’t know when or if I’ll be back.

That doesn’t mean I’ll stop writing.

I am a storyteller. It’s who I am. It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at.

But I can’t continue doing it the way I have been. Whatever broke is still broke. And though my brain is slowly coming back online, I still struggle with making words on the page work the way they’re supposed to.

The part of me that’s still tied to the industry is pushing me to get a book proposal put together so we can get another Jack and Jill book under contract and that’s exactly what I should do if I want to maintain consistency and keep the books coming at a steady rate and build off the existing momentum. But if I do that, it’ll mean going back to the pressure of deadlines and fighting for sales and screaming into the tornado while trying to chase the quality that’s expected of me and I’m not in any condition to do that. If I do it the way I always have and push through anyway, I’m going to end up right where I was, late on another deadline, failing and failing to meet expectations, and spiraling further darker downward. There is nothing worth putting myself back in that position for. Nothing.

Self-publishing isn’t really an option for me either. The pace at which one has to write to stay relevant as an indie author is even faster than as a traditional author and even at my best, running at full mental capacity, I didn’t have the bandwidth to handle the multitude of details that go into assembling a professional product and also write a book a year much less several books a year. And right now, I am very much not at my best.

So I have to go away.

I have to go to where I can rediscover the joy of storytelling without the pressure to perform. I have to go where I can write what I want to write because I want to write it, a place away from the public eye and all the demands that come from readers who don’t know me the way you know me and for whom I’m more of a product than a human being. I will write and I will share what I write with anyone who is willing to follow along for the journey itself no matter where it takes us or how slow we walk in getting there.

So, until I can get myself back to where I can safely return to the treadmill and publish books the way I once did, I will be moving my writing exclusively to Patreon. This is going to be difficult for many of those who love me and I apologize in advance and want to take a minute to explain why I’m going in this direction.

Patreon is a membership-based website that connects authors, musicians, artists, and content creator with fans who believe in them and their work enough to provide regular financial support. This financial support comes in the form of small (though sometimes very generous) monthly pledges that cumulatively add up to create a consistent income for the creator. Patreon is the intermediary that facilitates the author payouts while providing the platform and the paywall. 

Taking my work behind the Patreon paywall is something I have to do because the only way I’ll be able to continue to write is if there’s some way to pay the bills. If not for the patrons who have been with me for the last two years, I’m not sure I’d be in a position to continue writing at all right now, and so to them--you--I owe the deepest gratitude.

But I also know that there are many receiving this email who love me and my work and genuinely appreciate what I do and who would support me if they could but for whom even a dollar or three a month is more than they have to spare. I’ve been in those shoes. I know what it’s like to live on so little, and if you’re in that situation please know that you’re not forgotten.

The NEWSIES will continue.

The podcasts will continue.

My interaction in the Facebook Fan Club group will continue.

My inbox will continue to remain open.

We will still have LIARS’ LEGACY in December (woot!)

I will likely still be doing a book tour of some kind to support that release.

I will still be attending Bouchercon 2019 in Dallas.

We will still have the collaborative project at some point.

And eventually, I hope to be able to return my work to the public eye.

Earlier, I promised you two links. . .

The first is a video in which I discuss some of the ways this whole “brain broke” thing has affected writing and daily life. There is far too much personal stuff in there for me to feel safe making it public, but what I can do is change its viewable status so that it is open to all patrons from between now and September 30th . What this means is that anyone who has a Patreon account (or gets one between now and September 30th) and who follows me on Patreon between now and then, regardless of whether they make a financial pledge or not, should be able to see it. In times past I have posted other things for all patron followers and it’s my hope (no promises) that as we move forward I’ll be able to do that again. If you create a Patreon account, make sure to make me one of your creators and then go into your settings and select the option to receive posts by email. If you do that, then you’ll automatically receive anything I post “for all” the same way you get these emails now. If you need help with it I will do my best to walk you through the process.

The second link is the most recent draft of THE FULCRUM from where I left off with it in 2018. More specifically, it’s a link to the long PS that shows up at the end of the draft. In that PS I recount the details I couldn’t put here of what happened when the Munroe series was cancelled. I have to keep this link behind the paywall because paid access means that anyone who wants it has to provide the site with a valid credit card (for the record, I never see that information) and even though the pledge level is only $3 that’s still a lot more work than most people who want to copy /paste to the internet are willing to go through for an unfinished work. It’s not a huge privacy fence, but it’s the only one I’ve got.

I plan to return to writing THE FULCRUM, but I have no idea when it will be finished. If I’m to be able to write at all again and move past whatever is keeping the words from working on the page, I have to give myself time, and I have to remove the cost of failure. This means I can’t provide any promises as to when the next chapter will be finished, much less the book.

The only thing I can promise is that, with your support, I will continue to write.

GOODIE GIVEAWAY: Because no update would be complete without a giveaway to go with it, we now resume normal transmission. This month I'm putting eight books in the giveaway pile. If you’d like to be entered to win, simply respond to this email with the subject “GOODIE GIVEAWAY.” If your email program likes to be difficult and won’t let you change the subject, just put GOODIE GIVEAWAY in the reply and I will make sure it gets to the right place.

The 9th, 28th, 47th, 56th, 61st, 75th, 87th, and 98th readers to respond will be prize winners this month. I read every single email that comes in but due to the volume, I’m ONLY able to respond to the 9th, 28th, 47th, 56th, 61st, 75th, 87th, and 98th respondents. If you email and don’t hear back, it’s not because I’m ignoring you, it’s because due to time and volume, I just can’t.

[Standard buzzkill disclaimer for all giveaways and offers of free books: Void where prohibited or restricted by law. Limited to U.S. addresses. I am not responsible for lost or misrouted emails, interrupted or unavailable network or server connections, other computer or technical failures, or post office mishandling.]

Love and hugs,

Taylor