Storytellersunplugged

There’s a moment before the curtain goes up, when the conductor holds the baton like a headsman’s axe and the heat of the lights melts you like wax. It’s the moment when you’re convinced you’ve forgotten all of the words, you don’t remember any of the notes, your Shakespeare has fled and left behind Bugs Bunny, and you’re absolutely certain your fly is unzipped. No amount of reassurance, of practice, of checking to make sure you are in fact appropriately zipped will reassure you. The terror of anticipation – and the dead certainty that the curtain will in fact go up while you’re in mid-zipper verification procedure – is all.

The moment of waiting for your book to come out is something like that.

I should be inured to this. After all, I’ve had four novels published. I’ve had over a hundred roleplaying game supplements hit the shelves. I’ve had video games I’ve worked on cause international incidents. I’ve had projects I eagerly anticipated seeing in stores or in my hands. I’ve had projects where I didn’t realize they’d been released until friends mentioned they’d been playing them for a month. I’ve bought one project I worked on in a back-street market in Shanghai, two weeks before its street date, for twenty-five yuan. Oddly enough, it came with a full manual – written in Chinese.

This one’s different, though.

On January 8^th – roughly two weeks from when I sit down to write this – Firefly Rain will hit the shelves. It is the lead title for Wizards of the Coast’s new imprint, a gorgeous-looking hardcover. Friends who’ve read it have liked it; reviewers who’ve reviewed it thus far (knock on wood) have said nice things about it, the whole thing is out of my hands anyway.

And yet, the nerves, they’re there and set all a-jangle.

Firefly Rain is my first original novel. I’ve published four others, all of which were media tie-ins, but this is the first one that is all mine. All the video games I’ve worked on have been part of a large and intensely collaborative team effort; all of the RPGs I’ve developed and designed and scribbled for have been someone else’s IP. There’s good and there’s bad in that. Good, in that there already was an audience for things I’ve worked on, good in the strength of those collaborations. But it also left a little nagging feeling after each wandered out into the marketplace. None of them were exactly, entirely mine. Any failure I could share the blame, any success was allocated and shared as well. If they did well, it was because of the property or the graphics or the physics engine. If they didn’t, in my darkest hours I could bitch about the too-short schedules or a million other things, which coincidentally let me reassure myself that it was not, in fact, my fault.

Which, I suppose, is another way of saying that if folks don’t like this one, it’s all on me. If it’s not good, then it’s me that’s not good, or at least my writing. And since writing is what I do, and what I want to do, well, then, that way lieth all sorts of emo-kid shoe-gazing behavior. Of course, if folks do like it – and did I mention that it was a BookSense pick for January? – then I get to bask in all that, all by myself, too. I get to confirm for myself that, yeah, something I did was pretty good.

But I’m a depressed writer-type. I generally don’t anticipate basking. It doesn’t go with the image, or with the wardrobe.

Two weeks. Two weeks left to fret.

Originally, it was a 3000 word short story, 2500 words of setup and then a quick, jagged payoff. I wrote it, and thought about it, and realized that most of what was interesting about the setup was unsaid. So, it seemed logical that if the most important stuff was unsaid, I’d better get busy saying it.

When I looked up, the manuscript was at 20K words, and I was doomed.

There was an outline at one point, which the various characters looked at, laughed at, and ran tauntingly away from about 55K words in. There were false starts, and whole sections chopped out or erased, and all of the other vagaries of the writing process that seem so momentous to the person wading through them, and so utterly standard to everyone else.

But it’s done. It’s almost here. And I sat down to read it again the other night, just to get a sense of what I was unleashing on the unsuspecting reading public, to see if it stood up now that I wasn’t neck-deep in it 24/7 and dreaming dreams of glowing fireflies soundtracked by the Drive-By Truckers.

I won’t tell you what I thought of it, reading it instead of writing it. That, hopefully, is for you to discover on your own, and frankly, anything I say at this point is liable to be a little suspect anyway.

I will say, however, that no matter what happens with it, I find I’m satisfied. It’s the best book I could have written, the best way I could have told that story. And while it’s not the story of my life or my relationship with my parents or anything else, it’s my story, and I’m pleased and proud to have written it, pleased and proud that the fine folks at Professional Media Services and Wizards of the Coast thought enough of it to help me share it with the world.

Look around at my fellow Storytellers and you see some impressive resumes. They’ve written award-winning novels. They’ve written international bestsellers. They’ve gone to see the elephant of publishing in all its many terrible and alluring guises, and kept coming back for more. I’ve seen little bits of it, from odd angles. This is the first time I’ve been asked to face it head-on, eyes wide open.

I think I’m ready.

Two weeks.

I know all the words. I can handle the notes. The zipper, I’m not worried about.

I’m ready.