Birth.

It’s my birthday, which feels like as good a time as any to pry the door back open on this blog.

Those of you who have been around me for a long time already know that birthdays are complicated for me (and Complicated is the polite word). Every year I wonder what version of the day I’m going to get. Rarely, I can enjoy it. Most years, old horrors crawl out from the depths and sit beside me all day. This year, apparently, I’m not only thinking about the horrors. I’m thinking about writing.

It’s probably because I’ve been pretty disheartened by it lately.

Being an indie author is strange. You spend so much time building characters out of nothing. You stay awake because you finally figured out where a scene should go. You rewrite a paragraph twenty times and end up going with the first version. You carry your characters around while grocery shopping and showering and trying to fall asleep.

Then the book comes out, and it feels like you screamed into an enormous dark room and the echo never even came.

I know that isn’t fair. I have readers who have been with me since I wrote fan fiction. I have people who buy my books because my name is on them. People have written to me about the self-indulgent monologues (that I can’t help but include in each novel) that stayed with them. They’ve told me they saw themselves in my stories. There are people out there who know Willet’s Rest almost as well as I do.

I forget that really, really easily. One person becomes disappointing. Ten people becomes “only ten.” Fifty people becomes “only fifty.” 

But put them in a room. Give them chairs. Let me look at them. It would blow my fucking mind.

I would have a much harder time looking at a room full of actual people who spent their money on something I made, gave me hours of their lives, carried my characters around in their heads afterward, and calling that small. The race of marketing your books make it easy to forget there are bodies attached to the numbers on the screen.

Still, comparison gets me. I wish it didn’t. I wish I had reached the enlightened stage of being an author where I can smile serenely at everybody else’s success and never wonder what I did wrong.

I’m not there. I’m a mentally ill goblin. I obsess over my failures.

I see other indie authors doing things I have tried to do and succeeding. I see books finding enormous audiences. I see launches that seem to go perfectly. I see people exploding TikTok or whatever piece of the machine I’m still trying to figure out how to use. I’m happy for them, and then I start measuring everything I have done against what somebody else managed to accomplish.

Which is funny, because I genuinely do NOT know what I’m doing.

But when I was a kid, one of my favorite things in the teacher supply store was the blank books: actual little white, bound books with empty pages inside. I begged for them, and got SO MANY of them. I wrote stories by hand and illustrated them.

I wasn’t thinking about publishing. I wasn’t building a brand. I wanted a book about a little man who went on sewer adventures, and the book didn’t exist yet, so I made one.

When I got older, I posted stories online. Short fiction, fan fiction, whatever I felt like. I wrote because it was physically uncomfortable leaving the stories in my head. I didn’t worry about what comments I’d receive. I just worried about getting my stories out there for my loyal readers.

Somewhere along the way, I got scared. I stopped posting my short stories. I even stopped posting fan fiction. I stopped posting blogs. There are novels of mine that spent close to a decade hidden away because the thought of letting another person read them made me sick.

It is still hard, except I look around at the world now and I have less patience for letting myself be afraid.

People who hate people like me are increasingly comfortable saying so. They say it while discussing what healthcare people should be allowed to have, what histories children should be allowed to learn, which bodies are acceptable in public.

The news lately has been crushing. There are mornings when I make the mistake of looking at it before I have properly entered my own day, and within seconds I am reading about another politician discovering there are votes available in making somebody’s life worse. Another dead person turned into an argument. Another community being told that the suffering happening in front of everyone somehow isn’t happening.

I am Disabled. I am Native. I am Trans.

Who currently thinks I should have access to healthcare? Who thinks my history should be taught? Who thinks my identity is pornography? Who thinks indigenous people belong exclusively in history books? I have to watch people debate my life as though I’m not sitting right here. That wears on a person.

There is no version of me quiet enough to satisfy everybody who wants people like me gone. I could make myself harmless. I could take every ounce of queerness out of my books. I could never publish my books at all, keep them hiding away in the closet I used to live in. I could stop talking about trans people and disabled people and mental illness and and dysphoria and racism and shitty families and all of the other things that keep turning up in my work because they keep turning up in my life.

Somebody would still hate me, so I may as well be hated while saying something meaningful. I may as well write the weird book. I may as well write the trans character who is angry and frightened and a complete asshole. I may as well put people like me into haunted houses and impossible kingdoms and terrible little South Carolina towns.

I may as well give somebody else the experience I spent years searching for: that jolt of recognition when you find a book that makes you think, “Oh. I’m not alone after all.”

I need to remember that my readers exist somewhere beyond the counters on my screen. They are reading in bedrooms and break rooms and waiting rooms and living rooms. They are messaging me because something reminded them of one of my characters. They are seeing themselves represented after a long day of being crushed by a news cycle that says people like them don’t deserve to breathe.

They are real people.

That seems worth acknowledging on my birthday.

This blog is just as rambling as all of my old ones. I haven’t unlocked some special birthday wisdom. Today is still difficult. I’m still worried about my writing. I will almost certainly compare myself to another author again sometime before dinner.

I still have stories, though. God help everybody, I have so many stories.