Storytellersunplugged

by Justine Musk

I had a conversation at a party in a cute Spanish bungalow in LA. The guy asked me who my publisher was, I told him, and he gave the most dramatic reaction I’ve gotten so far (in my experience, people initially assume you mean some version of self- or vanity publishing, since everybody seems to know someone who ‘published’ a really crappy novel that way).

“Wow!” he said. “Wow, you’re one of the lucky few! You won the lottery!” He went on like this for a minute or so – “You won the lottery!” – as if my manuscript had been pulled out of a giant plastic ball on national television.

On the drive home, my husband commented, “That guy was annoying.”

“This is true.”

“You didn’t win the lottery,” my man said with real loyalty. “You wrote a book that other people want to read. Simple as that.”

Right. Simple.

I started writing young. Young enough to stay cocky for years. Of course publication was in my future! Just a matter of time, perseverance, and work. (Lots of work, I would discover. Lots and lots and lots of work). Luck didn’t really enter into it. I was the stylist of my own fate.

I now know too much about traditional publishing to ever feel that cocky again. I also know too many absurdly talented, experienced, hard-working writers still hunting for their first mainstream break.

So how lucky was I?

(Let me be clear. My humble little paperback original is hardly THE HISTORIAN. But I got to join that club of people who can walk into any Borders or Barnes & Noble in the country and locate their novel on the shelves. It’s very cool.)

I was entering my late twenties when I began seriously thinking about the book that became BLOODANGEL. By that point I had written five novels; the first while I was in my early teens, the fifth while I was graduating university and then teaching ESL in Japan. A couple of those novels I discarded not long after finishing them; they were practice exercises, nothing more. One came close to selling to a Canadian publisher while I was still in high school. I didn’t have my license yet, so my father drove me across southern Ontario to meet with the interested editor (the other editors, alas, proved not so interested).

The fifth novel, the one that preceded BLOODANGEL, landed me my first legitimate agent. She submitted the manuscript (and my photo) to editors at all the big houses and I was rejected, rejected, rejected. The feedback I received – via the letters the agent passed on to me – was brutal and illuminating. These editors thought I wrote well. They liked some of my characters. They were, however, concerned about the plot. The book didn’t seem to have any. The story, as one editor put it kindly, “unfolds awkwardly.”

The agent suggested I revise, but after two attempts it became clear that I didn’t really know what I was doing. As the agent so delicately put it: “The book just isn’t getting any better. Sorry.”

I felt the most burnt out and discouraged I had ever felt, about anything.

If I was going to keep on with this, I realized, I needed to hook back into the fun and joy of storytelling. Because I was writing what I felt I ought to be writing, which, at that time, was literary fiction. I needed to reconnect with what I wanted to be writing…which turned out to be the supernatural thriller, King and Koontz kind of stuff that had thrilled me so much as a teenager. I remembered times when I’d have to stop reading just to walk off the excitement those books had inspired in me.

I needed to be excited again.

I knew, during the unexpectedly long process of writing BLOODANGEL, that I had broken through to a new level in my evolution as a writer. My so-called literary and genre sides had met, hit it off, and eloped. This book felt like mine. It’s not that BLOODANGEL is so stunningly original; it takes its influences from a number of places, some of which are pretty evident and some of which will remain my bemusing little secret. But the way these influences wove into each other – the way they synthesized — felt uniquely mine, and like something I’d been working towards for a long time.

And I loved the story. Even at my most discouraged, I could not abandon it. The protagonist was a woman near my own age, and I felt secure enough with that voice and perspective as the center to experiment with the other POV characters. I took more risks and stretched myself more than I ever had in my literary fiction (one reason why my litfic, I realize now, fell short).

At the same time, I also thought it was a…weird book. In my own mind I was following in the epic multiple-perspective footsteps of King and Koontz (BLOODANGEL was originally intended as a much longer story than its 90,000 words allow it to be, which is why it sets itself up so nicely for a sequel), but the book was female-written with a female protagonist. I wasn’t sure where it fit. It didn’t feel like true horror. It didn’t feel like true fantasy. I identified it as dark urban fantasy – a mix of horror and fantasy set within a contemporary reality– but there didn’t seem to be much, or any of that, kicking around on the bookshelves.

At least not then.

Nobody’s gonna want to publish this, I thought to myself more than once.

Then I finished and submitted it.

And walked into a land of what my editor termed “post-Buffy fiction.”

Laurell K Hamilton was everywhere. So was Kelley Armstrong.

And BLOODANGEL fell neatly into a hot and trendy genre that I didn’t even know existed, or was about to exist, while I was actually developing the manuscript.

It certainly wasn’t any strategy on my part.

But is it so surprising? I am a child of my popular culture. I was born in 1972 and picked up a taste for supernatural thrillers early on – I remember dragging my entire family to see POLTERGUIST — but I wanted heroines. Cool, real-woman heroines, not the busty leather-clad video-game caricatures. I wanted Ripley in ALIENS and Sarah O’Conner in TERMINATOR 2 and Clarice in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. I wanted a female Jedi Knight, dammit. I was frustrated when POINT OF NO RETURN (the American remake of LA FEMME NIKITA) flopped at the box office and Hollywood decreed, with its usual logic, that audiences weren’t ready for kick-ass women. Um, hello? Hello?

I wanted Buffy.

So many of us wanted Buffy.

What I’ve learned is this: like everyone obsessed with books and movies, I have different kinds of hungers for different kinds of stories. Some of that hunger gets satisfied. Some does not, and as a writer I need to stay attuned and alert to that, because it’s those missing stories I need to be writing. I’m not the only reader with an ache in her belly.

So I’ll tell those tales myself, to the best of my ability.

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be lucky.