Here

After a lifetime of wanting a seat at this table, the published author table, I'm now sitting here, humbled and proud, surrounded by insanely talented authors and wondering how I got here. Only I know how I got here. I never gave up the dream. I wrote whenever I could. I forgave myself when I allowed life to get in the way of my writing. And then I used those hard, derailing life moments in my writing when I got back to it. I worked hard, I sacrificed, I shunned distraction (well, mostly). And I tried to keep the stack of hopeful moments and blind faith piled up higher than the heap of self-doubt. But even though I'm here now, finally, and I can go down to the bookstore and see The Art of Adapting on a shelf there, like a real, actual novel (!), sometimes I still wonder if this is all real.

A very bright, intuitive friend looked at me recently and said, "It's like you're worried this might not happen, even though it's already happening." And that sums it up pretty well. Because when you've spent your whole life butting up against self-doubt and the skepticism of others, when you've heard endless unsolicited advice on the "real" jobs you should have, when you've watched other artist friends rise into their well-deserved stratospheres and longed to find your own arc upward, it's hard to let go of all of that. The self-doubt isn't just humility. It's a shield. It's a way of keeping everyone else's opinions outside yourself where they can't hurt you. You can't tell me I can't do it. Because I've already told myself that a thousand times.

But here's the secret. Although I'm a very quiet, calm, grounded, polite person who never makes public scenes or throws things in private tantrums, at my core I'm the most stubborn person I know. (Well, I was, until I had my daughter, but that competition is ongoing and I might still win.)

And that's what it really comes down to. Dreams are fantastic. Hopes are great. Plans are necessary. Surrounding yourself with the kind of people you want to emulate is brilliant. But it won't get you far if you aren't determined to see it through.

You'll encounter a lot of people who don't understand why you want to do whatever it is you want to do. They'll advise you against it. They'll cite examples of all the failures that have ever occurred. They'll open their hands and show you their own fears and try to convince you to carry them as yours. Don't. Instead, use it. When someone tells you you're wasting your time or energy, tuck that away and use it as fuel. I work just a little harder when I'm trying to prove someone else wrong. Maybe that's just me.

But that's not the point. The point is those people with the armloads of fears of your failure, who want you to pick something less risky, less interesting, less passionate? Who seem to want to hold you back and hold you down? They don't want to live in fear any more than you do. They have had a lifetime of doubts piled on them, too. They can't see their way clear of them. They're not asking you to get down in the dirt with them, even if it sounds that way. They're really asking you to lead the way out.

Maybe that's just what I want to believe. But it works for me. Because the alternative is succeeding to spite someone, which taints the success. Or succeeding alone, which is hard. But succeeding and also lighting the way for someone else, that would double the prize.

It's an honor, to have a seat at the big kids' author table, to look around at authors I've long admired. They have been nothing but welcoming. And equally awesome is looking around at the empty seats  at the table, ready and waiting for the next one to dream, persist, work and sacrifice and shun distraction (mostly) until they're ready to join the crowd.

So where is "here" for me? It's an in-between place. I thought once I had a book deal from a major publisher I'd feel some sense of solid ground under me. I'd feel like I'd done something. Seen it through to the end. And now I see that the path goes on forever, for as long as I can stay on my feet and keep moving forward, and there's so much more to write, and new fears to shove aside, and friends to meet, and newcomers to gather along the way. And it's okay to not feel a sense of finally having arrived. To keep asking if it's really okay if I sit at the table. To feel like I still need to keep dreaming, working, sacrificing, as much as ever. Because that is what success actually feels like. It's not the end of a dream. It's the choice, every day, to keep actively living it.

Dream-Chasers

This whole crazy journey I'm on started when I was about my daughter's age, and had no idea I was even on a journey. I wrote my first short story when I was 8 or 9, and never looked back. I wrote from then on, without even thinking about why. At first I just wrote stories for my sister and step-sister, made them characters in adventures, because while they were hogging the Atari controls, I had nothing better to do. They were experts at Pong and Combat, and I was figuring out the art of storytelling. It was no big deal. Except that it got into my bones somehow, the need to write, to make up stories, to move people with words. By high school I knew that I wanted to be a writer, without having any idea what that meant. Did writing even count as a job? I had plenty of naysayers to inform me that, no, it did not. Writing was a skill all adults needed. It was a fine hobby. It didn't count as a career. But one thing about me: I'm ridiculously stubborn. I mean, most of the time I'm easy-going. I don't care where we go for dinner or what movie you want to see. I'm flexible on that stuff. But when someone tells me I can't do something that I really want to do, that easy-going nature disappears. Give me something to prove or disprove, and you get a whole different girl.

So I went to college and got a degree in creative writing. I loved my program, my professors, my fellow aspiring-writer students. I loved everything except the way everyone kept saying "Yes, but what will you do for a living? A writing degree won't get you a job." So I got stubborn about that, too, and only applied for writing-related jobs. And got one. I started out as an assistant editor just after graduating college. By the time I decided to go to grad school to earn yet another writing degree I was an editor. By the time I finished my master's degree, I was a senior editor. A senior editor with an MFA in creative writing and a head full of epic dreams of publishing novels. But no idea how to make that dream come true.

I started with short stories. I wrote one after another until I felt like they weren't grappling with me for ultimate control anymore. I started sending them out, and got some award recognition, and then I started getting published. I crafted and recrafted them until I'd published almost all of them. I tried my hand at novels, fighting the unyielding beast until I'd figured out the form, the arc, the pacing, the character development, the heart. The first novel I ever dared show the world was a semi-finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. I figured I was on the right track. But as I sent that book out to literary agents, I knew something about it wasn't right yet. I started a new novel, with a better understanding of what worked and what didn't. I finished it in a few months, quickly revised it with the help of awesome beta readers, and sent it out to a handful of literary agents. And one of them loved it. A huge agent. One of the big dogs.

So here I am. We're in the revision stage now, where my agent, the amazing Harvey Klinger, sends me challenges for each section of the novel, to make it stronger, deeper, more compelling. He is helping me find the heart of this story, and he is an amazing mentor. I wake up in the middle of the night so excited to wake up and write that I can't go back to sleep. I get up each morning so thrilled with my life that it's ridiculous.

And then I get my girls up, make their breakfast and school lunches, drive them to school, volunteer in their classes, all before getting to tackle those pages that have been calling to me since the moment I woke up. And that is perfect. Because being a writer is my passion, no doubt. But being a mother is just as important. And my joy at being this close to seeing my lifelong dream come true is twice as meaningful because of my daughters. I want them to see this happen for me. I want them to remember back when I got my first story published and we celebrated with sparking cider and cookies. I want them to remember the early versions of my short stories that I read aloud as I worked out the kinks. I want them to remember a mom who had a ridiculously huge dream, the kind that is so big that it shouldn't be possible, and I want them to remember the moment when it came true. I want them to dream their own big, huge, ridiculously impossible dreams, and to know in their bones that with passion, persistence, discipline, and focus they can have it, whatever it is. I want them to be unaffected by naysayers, because they know better. I want this dream for myself, as I have always wanted it. But I want it even more for my daughters.