Kelly McCullough: Cybermancy

September 25th 2007 at 6:27 pm

I have a second book for you to take a look at. Kelly McCullough’s Cybermancy is a contemporary fantasy that launches today, and Kelly blogs about how this came to be over at SF Novelists:

I want to talk about how I got to the place where I’m blogging about my new book on this very spiffy website for science fiction and fantasy novelists. It involved a lot of not quitting. I frame it that way instead of talking about following the dream because following the dream is the easy part. Dreaming of writing a book is easy. Setting out to write is easy too. Not quitting when the writing becomes difficult or the world dumps on you is hard.

Amen.

The decision not to quit is what really matters.

For me it came in 2005. I had a good agent who believed in my work, more than 20 short stories either in print or forthcoming, 2 novels in the trunk and 5 out with various editors none of which had sold. I also had family stress at levels that damn near broke me. I was depressed, not clinically, but damn close, and I felt like 15 years of hard work had officially gone to hell. But worse, far far worse, I wasn’t enjoying writing. I was doing it—I can’t not—but I wasn’t taking the joy from it that I always had.

When I hit bottom I spent probably three hours staring at the ceiling and doing nothing but thinking about how something I had loved and pursued for years had crashed and burned. I tried to figure out what else I could possibly do with my time—I was writing full time. The answer was nothing. Nothing. There wasn’t anything else that appealed to me. I don’t know what I’d have done if something else had occurred to me but the fact that nothing did was totally bleak at the time.

I could talk about long bleak moments as I wrote Ragamuffin, facing joblessness on the horizon, sleeping four hours a night, while trying to jump start a freelance career in anything.

Perseverance is a powerful tool to actually achieving your dreams.

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