On the Shared Experience of Being Weird (I.e. an Exploration of Vulnerability)

I’m going to open up to you, dear readers, and it will probably be a little weird, and vulnerable. I’m going to take you on a little journey regarding my headspace since Seraphina’s Lament publication. It’s not pretty, and it’s long, but I’m going to lay my personal experience out there because I think it’s something every author feels to one extent or another. I think this is something we can all commiserate on.

Also, there’s an excerpt from An Elegy for Hope at the end, so if you want to just read that, scroll to the end and skip my angst.

This whole writing thing since Seraphina’s Lament has dropped has been easy in some respects, but absolute agony in others, to the point where I almost wanted to just give up and walk away from it all but I can’t not write, so that’s really not an option. I’ve been writing my whole life. It’s just not in me to suddenly stop the thing I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember. So, let me tell you a bit about why I’ve been in such a funk.

First, let me talk a bit about Seraphina’s Lament. The reviews of this book have been largely positive, and that’s both surprised and thrilled me. It isn’t everyone’s bag of oats, but I knew it wouldn’t be from the start. I knew that that kind of book would polarize my audience. People will either love it or hate it, and that’s pretty much stayed true since publication. I’m okay with that. I’ve been reviewing for long enough to know that not every book pleases every reader and that’s perfectly fine.

Another thing I expected but also didn’t, was how many people would remark on how different the book is. Look, I knew it was weird when I wrote it. I’m a weird person. My brain has always seen the “path” people trod on, and said, “That’s cool but why don’t we turn left and go wandering in the weeds a bit and see what happens. Normal is so… ug.” Rules bore me. The “tried and true” is fine, but… meh. I think sometimes unbalanced things are more interesting. So, I wrote Seraphina’s Lament, and sort of plotted out the path of this trilogy, and thought, “Okay, it’s weird. I know it’s weird, and I’m okay with that.”

You write what you want to read. I love mythology. I love lyrical writing. I love emotions and the power of people that can just tear you apart sometimes. I love how characters can be entire universes, if created well. I love the gray area, the toying with morality, personal transformation, and the fact that almost no one sets out thinking, “I’m going to be a real evil asshole, because I need to be the antagonist.” Most people do what they do because they feel like its right, regardless of how ugly it is, and I love, LOVE toying with that–with belief and transformation.

So I wrote a book about it.

However, I did not expect just about every single review to remark on how different it is (Seriously. Every. Review. If you don’t believe me, go read the reviews on Goodreads). I mean, in my head I knew it was an odd duck, but I didn’t expect it to be SO OUT THERE everyone felt the need to comment on it. From, “There’s nothing out there like this” to “I don’t even know what subgenre to put it in” and everything in between.

And that’s cool, right? It’s really cool. I love being the “only one.” It’s kind of a huge badge of honor. But…

But.

As the reviews started coming in and I saw those sentiments stated over and over again, it started freaking me out. Being “the only one” is fine, but it’s kind of also really… scary? awkward? weird? I’m standing out here all alone and I think it got into my head a bit. Did I miss a memo somewhere? Was I supposed to turn left back there and I just missed the marker? When I started writing An Elegy for Hope, I kept trying to make my weird trilogy, this round peg of mine, fit into the square holes that everyone expects, that most books flourish with.

I saw these comments, and while one side of me is saying “Awesome! Damn the man! Blaze your own trail! Woo!” This other part of me was like, “Okay, so obviously this is too weird, and I really need to adjust my books so they fit more in the neat and tidy boxes people want to put books in and WHY CAN’T I DO ANYTHING NORMAL. I mean, at least people should know what the hell genre this damn series belongs in.”

And here’s the thing, I know you should write for yourself, and I do. Trust me, I do. If I didn’t believe in this story, if it wasn’t burning in my blood to be told, I wouldn’t be writing it. I wouldn’t bother with the headache. But, marketing matters, and being different is cool, but I kept seeing these comments in reviews and thinking, “God, I’m just too f–king weird and it’s cool now, but what happens when it stops being cool? I will start losing people if my books can’t be defined or confined to certain labels. If it doesn’t fit, no one will read it and then is it worth the effort to write it?”

So it all got in my head, and I started trying to write An Elegy for Hope, but sort of trying to lose a lot of what made Seraphina’s Lament so unique, and it just didn’t work. I kept getting about 20k words into it, and then just hating it. The story would die. The characters stopped interesting me. I hated everything about it. It just felt so… stale. I think I’ve wracked up well over 100k words in false starts on An Elegy for Hope while I’ve been trying to normalize my beast and get this trilogy more on the path, more in line.

Eventually, I realized I needed to take some time away from all of it. I stopped looking at my book reviews, relying on friends to tell me when there was a new one I needed to see. I basically completely pulled out of the SPFBO mentally almost right after the contest started because the risk of seeing reviews and etc just freaked me out. I wrote Of Honey and Wildfires, which I think is more mainstream than The Bloodlands trilogy (and is about to hit editors in the next week or so, but also maybe it’s not more mainstream? I feel like I’m a terrible judge.). I just realized I had to completely unplug, and reboot. I either needed to reach a point where I was okay to keep going on the course I began with Seraphina’s Lament, or I had to just be done with it.

I got to this point about two weeks ago where I told a writer friend of mine, “I don’t think I’m going to continue with The Bloodlands series. It’s just too weird, I think. Everyone focuses on how different it is and I’m pretty sure that it’ll narrow the readers down and not make the continued effort to finish the series worth it.”

I was going to make an announcement in January saying that Seraphina’s Lament is now a standalone.

And then it happened.

I’m a firm believer that sometimes the right thing happens at the right time and all you have to do is be open to it when it happens. Right around Thanksgiving last week, I was playing Uno with my family when my phone pinged with an email. I opened it up expecting to see spam. Instead, I got an email with the subject of, “Seraphina’s Lament: many awed thoughts.”

It was written to me by someone who read my book. She was born in Kharkiv, a city in Ukraine that was one of the most heavily impacted by the Holodomor. The author explained to me how her family survived the Holodomor, and how my book impacted her, and what it meant to her, and thanking me, essentially, for bringing the story of the Holodomor to western audiences. It was long, and it reduced me to tears. I’ve never read anything like it, but it was also exactly what I needed to see. It really got me out of this funk, out of this spiral of “Great job, Sarah, you’re book is known for being the weird one” cycle that I was stuck in.

That email refocused me. It forced me to sit back and examine this headspace I’d gotten myself into. It made me poke at whether being on “the path” is really where I want to be, and it made me realize that the entire reason I’ve had so many false starts with An Elegy for Hope was because it just refuses to play by the rules. I refuse to play by the rules. I never have in my life, so why would I start now? This is a story that needs to be told a certain way, and I either need to be willing to continue on the way I’m going, or I need to just bag the entire effort, because trying to paint my zebra to look like a horse won’t make it a horse. Should I really give words other people have said that much weight toward my own personal trajectory?

No. God, no. Why did I waste so much time worrying about what other people think?

But I got that email, and it really cut through all my intimidation (yes, intimidation. It is kind of scary to keep seeing “I’ve never read a book like this before” over and over again). It unfroze me. It made me look at why I’m doing this. Why I’m writing. Why I’m publishing. Why I’m doing what I’m doing, and it’s not so I can walk on a path that others have walked on before. I’m doing it because I’ve got a story to tell, and it’s apparently just as weird as I am, and THAT IS OKAY.

It’s okay, because if it impacts one person, ONE PERSON, who writes me an email to tell me that I’ve profoundly touched her with what I’ve created, it’s worth it. It’s okay, because sometimes stories refuse to be categorized. Sometimes things just can’t be defined. Sometimes life is messy and there aren’t clear protagonists and antagonists, and hope is subtle and fleeting and I really love lyrical writing so let’s throw that in as well.

It’s okay to be different. It’s also okay to not read reviews (which I think I’m not going to do anymore because good god they get into my head something fierce, as evidenced by this post.)

Writing is such a solitary endeavor. It’s a thing we do alone, in our houses, by ourselves, in our own heads and I think I had to get to that point where I felt like I could stand up and say, “Yep, my book is weird, and my trilogy is going to continue to be weird, and hey, that’s fine because normal is boring.” It took me a while to thaw out my Bloodlands creativity, and feel it coursing through me again.

Ultimately, I’m not different. I think these thoughts hit every author to one extent or another when they publish, whether traditionally or indie. It’s an exercise in vulnerability, and I think, for a time, my vulnerability kind of kicked my ass. The reason books are so wonderful is because they are all so different. Every one of us is weird, and isn’t that great? We’re all telling stories about people as seen through the prism of our experience, and since no two experiences are the same, no two books will be, either. I tell my editing clients all the time, “I want to read YOUR book with YOUR voice. If I wanted to read someone else’s book, I’d read their book.” I think I had to get to a point where I had to internalize that, and feel it in my bones as applicable to me as well as everyone else.

So we publish, and we write, and we love, and we worry, and sometimes the worry overwhelms the love, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it takes a very beautiful, very heartfelt email to remind us why this vulnerability of ours is necessary. Sometimes we have to remember why we’re doing this. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that going out on a limb is worth it. After all, that’s where all the fruit is.

And to end this really long diatribe, I’ve started writing An Elegy for Hope again and I’m in love with it. The prologue is told from the perspective of the moon, so if you’re all, “I wonder if it’ll be just as different as Seraphina’s Lament“, I believe you’ve got your answer.

I’m going to post a snippet of the prologue here. It’s unedited. Wording will inevitably alter before publication, and I don’t look at grammar until after I’ve got my first draft down, so it’s not perfect, but it’s proof that things are happening, and I’m hoping for an early summer publication date.

To the person who wrote me that email, I owe you a reply, and you will get it this week. But, from the bottom of my heart, thanks for thawing the ice, and reminding me why I’m telling this story.

To be an artist is to be vulnerable. We all have to make our own journeys and learn to be okay with our differences, and with those things that make us feel vulnerable. There are a lot of us out here in the weeds talking to butterflies and pondering our navels. Being different is what makes your work shine, so don’t tame the wild in your soul.

It took me most of this year to really internalize that message. I hope, maybe, by laying out my headspace, it’ll make someone else who has/is experiencing similar thoughts not feel so alone.