The year is 2020, and in the copious free time I've found myself to have in the wake of losing two jobs (one guess why), I begin going through the notebooks that I wrote in throughout middle and high school. I used to get in trouble for this, when a more astute teacher figured me out. I wouldn't take notes; I was writing a story. At times, in the early 2000s, I did not have a personal computer. We had a family computer shared by six people, and we were allowed to use it for an hour at a time.
This, obviously, did not lend itself to writing for extended periods of time, so I kept dozens to hundreds of notebooks of stories. I decide one night to crack open one of the notebooks I recognized as belonging to 13-year-old me, expecting to have something to laugh at. Don't get me wrong -- I do find this. But in the notebook, a story entitled The Tale of the Guy Across the Street filled the pages, and in those pages I find the pain and rage of a teenager who wouldn't be listened to. I find a reflection on mental illness and the system, of how adults are just as capable of being bullies as other kids are.
The writing was the writing of a child, and the thoughts were too. Kids have complex thoughts, and I remembered the pain of feeling like adults didn't understand that. As an adult myself, I now recognize that I was tragically right. There are so many adults that don't understand the kind of pain that kids can be in. The problems kids have, whether they are real enough problems to adults are not, are real for them. That's pain.
That same day, in another notebook, I read a poem I wrote at fifteen. That poem is about pain, too, and in it my younger self cites suicide statistics with a cry for help that begs adults to understand not to trivialize what kids are going through.
I decide, that day, that I am going to write a new version of The Tale of the Guy Across the Street. I change a little bit: what text was written by a queer kid who didn't know she was queer yet, I made blatantly queer. I change some names, but not most of them. I keep the heart of the story: a girl in foster care who feels hopelessly alone, and a boy across the street, enduring the abuse of his father. This story was originally and is now a story about found family.
When I finish writing this book, I don't think I am going to do anything with it, except that my sister Abby says that she thinks this is it. This is the book that is going to break me into the publishing world. In a sense, she was right. I send the manuscript of this book, renamed We Are the Nobodies, to several literary agents and receive eleven manuscript requests. I sign a contract with one of them, and I am impossibly hopeful for the future.
I tell the authors in the writing group that I now lead that at this point comes one of the catches of mainstream publishing: patience. From the time that you complete a manuscript to the time that you see it on the shelves, years will have passed. In YA novels, which is what I write, you can often see the effects of this in the way that the authors try to remain current. Years ago, I read a book that overall intends to be wholesome, but in one scene, refers to the main characters as listening to "the latest Cardi B song." At the time of publication, this song is WAP.
So I find myself writing books set in the future, unsure of what year I will finally see my books in the hands of readers. Meanwhile, none of the submissions that my literary agent has given to editors has come to fruition, but he tells me they were complimentary.
Here is the criticism I received regarding We Are the Nobodies: not enough external conflict. I say that I prefer to read books about internal conflict myself, and I know they exist, because I have bought them from bookstores and checked them out from libraries. My agent tells me that in order to sell the book, I'm going to have to wedge external conflict into the book, because it's not marketable otherwise. He says that what we have to do is make the manuscript into the most marketable version of itself. I agree. I make changes. I think that they are silly changes, but I make them anyway.
This does not make a difference, other than making me feel like my book isn't quite what I meant it to be anymore. I understand intellectually that this is the sacrifice one makes to see their books on shelves. Emotionally, I am struggling with feeling that my book isn't what it was supposed to be.
I am now going to give you a montage. I give a few other manuscripts to my agent, but none of them pass muster for submission to editors. I feel discouraged, because I know the beta readers I have had on these pieces are not the kind to beat around the bush. They tell me what they think, regardless of whether this is positive or negative. I get excited about these projects, then shot down, then my belief in myself begins to waver.
Maybe I just overestimated my ability to write? I have thousands of readers for my fanfiction, but few of those translate to original writing. Still, they like what I've created within fandom spaces. I think a lot about this, feeling worse and worse and worse, until one night I have a new idea. My only concept at first is simple: what if a protagonist is attempting suicide, only to be foiled by the other protagonist?
This idea grows. I write it in my phone, rather than on a computer, like it's a secret. The story becomes about a shameless, neurodivergent queer kid who doesn't know how to be anything but himself, and a reserved, terrified queer kid, who's tired of being alive when he can't be himself. I name them Evergreen Cutler and Garrett Spelling, and eventually, I call their book Train Track Princes.
The entire conflict in this book is internal. I do not share it with my literary agent, afraid that he will hate it, so I keep it to myself, but I love this book so much. I think that maybe I should share it. I don't. I build elaborate playlists and love this book all by myself.
Slowly, I am realizing that what I love to read may not be something that I can sell, even if I've been able to find this kind of book on shelves already.
I will give you another montage that ends in this: my agent and I have a conversation, and we decide to part ways. I am discouraged, crushed, and aimless. Everything I've believed myself to be good at seems as though it isn't as true as I thought it was. Then, a few other things happen. My beloved dog Stanley dies suddenly one night. I say goodbye to a job that I loved very much. I am untethered, lost, and purposeless.
Fuck it, I think. I'd always believed that self-publishing was not the way for me, but why not see what happens? Why not put something into the world and see where it lands? Why not toss something into the universe and find what it sticks to?
I decide, out of everything I have written (I am sitting on around six other unpublished manuscripts as I type this), that the beloved little thing I wrote in my phone on breaks at work is what I want to see the light of day first. I am going to self-publish Train Track Princes, a book I believed that no one wanted to read, so it couldn't hurt to kick it out anyway. This is a choice I make mid-December. I want to publish it on January 1st, the shared birthday of Evergreen and Garrett.
This seems easy in my head. I've already done professional copyediting and developmental editing. I have the artistic capability to create a cover. And hey! I can put illustrations on the inside, too! Who's gonna stop me? No one. Not one person can stop me.
Of course, there are more intricacies than I realize. One must format their manuscript in specific ways in order for it to work in eBook and paperback formats (Amazon had not yet introduced hardcover options for self-publishing), which I didn't know how to do. Covers are also slightly trickier than I expected, but doable. There are guidelines, steps for resizing PDFs, and cover templates. I could make a cover with Amazon's stock images, but I want to draw my own. I am fortunate in that I already have many friends in the book industry in many directions, and a friend offers to format my book in exchange for illustrations she'll cash in later. I figure out the cover.
Train Track Princes goes on sale on January 1, 2023.
It does well enough that I get calls from marketers that want me to pay them hundreds of dollars to do marketing that I already know how to do myself. I am contacted by a woman who says she is a part of a committee for the In the Margins awards -- although I don't hear anything about that again. I receive messages on social media from people who liked it. These do not come in a high volume. They trickle in bit by bit.
"This book changed my brain chemistry."
"I think a switch turned on and this book helped me realize not to give a fuck about what people think anymore."
"Reading it felt like I was wrapping myself up in a cozy blanket on a snowy day."
"A book that makes you realize it's okay to be you, to be true to who you are, and not care how others perceive you, because it's out of your control."
This is exactly what I want. I want to write something that would reach people who need to read it. I want to reassure people that they should be themselves. I want to honor my younger self, who knew how to express that adults can be bullies, that kids experience problems that are life and death just as anyone else might, that systems are broken and people go forgotten. I want to reach out and ask if people feel just as I do.
And I did. This didn't come with fame, but I realize that fame isn't something I'm aspiring toward. All I want is connection, and I have it, and I did it on my terms.
I have published another book since then, Common Strange Behavior, and Train Track Princes is slated to have its sequel published this April, a book called This Dissonant Princess that follows Garrett's younger sister Gemma. Sometimes I receive notifications that somebody has bought Common Strange Behavior merch. Yesterday, I receive an email that somebody has bought a hoodie with the Heartland Home glitch emblem on it.
Somebody likes my book enough that they want to wear something from it. It's not 10,000 somebodies, but it's somebody.
The path I always believed I wanted to take, traditional publishing, is not the path that ended up being the one that was meant for me. Self-publishing, in which I can make all my own illustrations, market the way I want to exactly, and say how the story goes entirely, is what has become my calling. Trad pub works for many. There are incredible books that managed to make it through the hoops and onto shelves. I am proud of those authors and happy that they made it.
I'm also proud of me.
Let me reassure some authors here...
I was not sold on self-publishing. I didn't think it was meant for me.
B U T
The world of traditional publishing is and always has been limited by many factors.
In the 2020s, none of us really have to abide by those limits anymore. We choose the way we want our stories to be heard. Perhaps that is finding a literary agent and tearing your way upward. Perhaps it is slapping a book onto Amazon in the span of two weeks and waiting to see what happens.
It's up to us which way we want to go.
(And of course, you can always change your mind.)
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