How did you write
your first book? Was it easier to write
later books?
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For me, it was most definitely harder to write the first
book—not in the sense that it was hard to write, but in the sense of getting
published. I started my first published
book, Night of the Solstice in high
school. I don’t remember what
grade. Probably around 10th
grade, because I was still babysitting and I sure wasn’t babysitting by 11th
grade.
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Writing it felt easy and natural (WARNING! WARNING!
This does not mean other people will like it!). I loved the material, which was four
children, sisters and a brother, who go through magical mirrors to find an
imprisoned sorceress, their only ally, the sorceress Morgana Shee’s faithful
(usually) familiar vixen, who doesn’t have a name. She’s “the vixen” throughout both this book
and it’s sequel, Heart of Valour. I named Morgana knowing that the correct way
to pronounce Sidhe (or Sith, the fairies of the Celtic legends) was “Shee.”
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So, anyway, it felt easy to write, I enjoyed doing it
tremendously. . . and the book grew, by the time I was in college to, well,
let’s give it a round number and say 550 pages.
I usually say 500, but the truth is it could have been closer to 600. I didn’t know any better. Because my parents thought (knew) that
writers couldn’t support themselves by writing, they insisted I have another
career. That’s how I got to San
Francisco State U, by way of psychology and ....Berkeley.... (too much torture of lab animals)
and ended up teaching special education.
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This at first seemed an ideal solution; I could teach during
the day and write at night. But I soon
learned a number of things. 1. It’s not easy to teach when you are given 40
kids and about ten of them are special ed. children. 2.
It’s not easy to teach in a sort of outbuilding where the heat is
building up to 95 degrees plus (and that’s inside). 3.
It’s impossible to teach, make your own teaching materials (budget
crisis) do your best to be a good teacher
(I left with my school’s nomination of best teacher in the district), and
attend to every student’s special need . . . and then get energy to write.
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I don’t know how Heart
of Valor got written. I was
miserable with writing anyway. I had no
time, the world seemed bleak, and Night
of the Solstice had gotten sterling reviews and then fallen into a big
black hole. I was told outright by one
librarian who gave it a glowing review and invited me to join her club, which
met to discuss the works of C.S. Lewis, J.RR. Tolkien, and such (my writing
heroes then) was that the cover was the ugliest on a hardback she’d ever
seen. That may have affected future sales.
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But I was trying to answer which book is hardest to write
and I skipped all the grief I went through getting Solstice published. My mom
knew somebody who knew a ....Cannes....
award winner and my friend knew somebody who knew the secretary of the fellow
who wrote Audrey Rose (a supernatural
thriller), and so I sent it off to get reviews, which were mixed. The ....Cannes....’
film guy adored it and wanted to become my agent, even though he knew that he
knew nothing about agenting. The Audrey
Rose guy just said, “Sod off.” (for
non-Brits, a rude reply).
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So I was in a dilemma about what to do with Solstice until all the revisions were
typed and my typist suddenly revealed that her friend was an agent, and that
she, my typist (I’ll call her Karen) could be my agent if I liked.
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Did I like it? It
seemed like a miracle dropped into my lap.
I signed her on as my agent and she began to send the manuscript out,
and it was quite different from when I was sending it out into the “slush pile”
(books that have no agent but get sent from hopeful readers directly to the
publishing house).
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So “Karen” sent it to two or three or four places and they
all said the same thing: too long (I’m kinda long-winded or couldn’t you
tell?), and needed to have more action (violence).
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Well, the great thing about the fourth reply, the one from
Macmillan, was that they also said that if these faults were remedied, they
would probably publish it. Hurray! I’d started writing a book at 15 and it had
only taken ten years to get it published!
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Anyway, I’ve already gone over what happened when it
had. It got such good reviews that the
editor (who had a reputation, I was told for disliking fantasy) published Heart of Valor right away. But it fell into the big black pit, too . . .
you see for one thing, in my own defense, I was writing for YA (young adults,
12 and up) and they were selling them as middle grade books (8-12 years
old). So obviously, it was a bit of a
stretch for a fourth or fifth grader to even understand what I was saying. I don’t write down to my readers, to put it
mildly.
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But now, I finally feel totally vindicated. Solstice
and Valor were bestselling paperbacks
back in the 90s—I wrote a lovely note with a signed book to “Karen”—but oddly,
she never got back to me—and now, through the magic of e-mail, I’ve found that
they have a niche all their own of intelligent, articulate, wonderful fans. I’m going to make a real effort to write to
them, even if it’s just a line or two, to tell them how happy they’ve made me
with their stories of loving the word-play in Solstice and Valor,
loving the characters, loving the plot, even loving the vixen. To these fans, I dedicate all those years,
carefully cutting the manuscript line by line, until a third of it was
gone. Those years were for you guys,
hear? And I wouldn’t have it any other
way.
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And, yes, it was MUCH easier to write later books! But that’s another story!