Hey, COVID is shitty! You already knew that, I assume, but I figured, just in case, I’d remind you. Two weeks ago, COVID colonized my body, and like all colonizers, it’s a real fucking asshole. I took Paxlovid, and it did a very quick job at knocking the thing to the ground, and I thought, yay, I fucking did it, but then a few days ago, I guess Thursday? I started to feel shitty.
And then I learned the joys of the PAXLOVID REBOUND, which is to say, it hit worse than it did before I took the Pax in the first place.
(I do not consider this a knock against the drug, to be clear — the goal with taking it for me was to file the teeth off of COVID and ideally push back the chances of Long COVID. Which, so far, knock on wood, seems to have been the case. And I also am to understand that a COVID rebound is just as likely without taking an antiviral as having taken one. So, shrug. Who knows.)
Got a fever, head-cold, cough. Fever was short-lived, and never scary-high, and the overall effects have probably been less than when I’ve had a flu. That isn’t me saying “oh COVID isn’t bad,” or “oh it’s just a flu,” it’s just me telling you my experience here, which luckily (so far) was not severe, and ultimately fairly mild. My family has it, too — kiddo had almost no illness to speak of (again, knock on wood), wife was a little worse than me all throughout, so fingers crossed this thing is mostly headed out to sea. I expect to have this rough voice and cough for a little while, which should be interesting given that I have to do a virtual talk this weekend and then the following weekend I’m delivering a keynote address at the Writer’s Digest conference in New York! Soooo, fingers crossed I am not hacking up BRONCHIAL GOO while trying to dispense my dubious brand of vigorous-air-quote “writing wisdom.”
Anyway! COVID sucks, it’s definitely surging right now as I know a whole lotta fucking people who caught it suddenly. Mask up, be smart, pray to whatever weird gods you hold dear. Or something.
Before iron helmets and steel swords, when dragons roamed the world, was an age of bronze and stone, when the Gods walked the earth, and people lived in terror.
A scribe, a warlord, a dancer, a mute insect and a child should have no chance against the might of the bickering gods and their cruel games. But the gods themselves are old, addicted to their own games of power, and now their fates may lie in the hands of mere mortals . . .
By divine plan a plague of cannibals has been unleashed across the world, forming an armada which preys on all who cross their path. Meanwhile the people who allied against the gods have been divided, each taking their own path to attack the heavens – if they can survive the tide of war which has been sent against them. All they need is the right distraction, and the right opportunity, to deal a blow against the gods themselves . . .
An original, visceral epic weaving together the mythologies of a dozen pantheons of gods and heroes to create something new and magical, this tale of the revolt against the tyranny which began in Against All Gods is a must read from a master of the fantasy genre.
***
I like to think of myself as a method writer. I come from a family of actors, and the term ‘Method actor’ was around the house throughout my childhood, and in addition, my dad, who was both a playwright and a prolific author of fiction, used to do things like building medieval handgonnes and making Tudor era clothing as part of his writing system. Let me add that this is great fun if you are a young person; everything was exploration and discovery, although I still remember the experiment with urine as a mordaunt for dyes, and my mother put her foot down on experimenting with seventeenth century poisons when dad was writing about the court of Louis the XIV…
Anyway, I learned from them. When I get stuck in to a book idea, long before the first word is typed, there are things I need to know. I’ve now done this often enough that I have a method within my method, so the learning process is structured, which I hope will still be entertaining. When writing fantasy, I get to pick and choose my cultural references, which is fun all by itself, and do. With my ‘Age of Bronze’ books, as the series title might suggest, I was picking and choosing from the Bronze Age, right across the world, from the Pre-Inca South Americans called we call Poche to the Indus Valley Culture in what is now India and Pakistan.
And finally, because I wrote what I call ‘immersive detail’ and may be considered ‘really boring detail’ by some, I want to know about cooking, dance, literature, architecture both grandiose and vernacular, music, trade, politics, religion, and martial arts. Probably other things too, but that gives you an idea of the foundations of my ‘method.’
How Bronze Age combat worked
I teach various forms of historical swordsmanship; sometimes I even compete in tournaments. Years ago, I stood at the display cases in Heraklion, on Crete, looking at the hundreds of bronze swords on display; looking at the damage evident on some of them, trying to imagine how they were used, and whether there was a system I could discern from forensic examination, but only while I was writing Storming Heaven did I finally come into possession of an accurate reproduction of a Mycenaean ‘Type G’ sword. I played with it for weeks, and I learned more than five things just from that one artifact; because I write fight scenes, and because I have some background in swords, perhaps I’ll go into too much detail, but here goes:
First, the grip of the type G is so modern that once a sword person grips one, he or she is likely to smile and comment. I’ve now seen this with a dozen trained people. What look like quillons, or ‘guards’ for the hand on the grip, are really spurs, like modern fencing foils have; a spur for your index finger, to make sure you grasp the sword exactly right each time. The grip also orients you hand; this is a thrusting weapon, and it is now comfortably available for thrusting, although there’s also a nice area to rest your thumb on the widest portion of the blade, for small, controlled slashes, like under a shield.
I also cut a bunch of things with my bronze sword, and I thrust at others. Let me say that I do know a little about the metallurgy of bronze; bronze can be complex, and most modern bronzes aren’t very much like ancient bronze in their alloy. Regardless, what I learned was that with work hardening the edges, I could get the sword very sharp indeed; but that the edge was, compared to steel, somewhat fragile, and that I needed to keep my cuts very straight; I needed to deliver them (in mechanical terms) with my edge aligned with my arm and body structure, so that I didn’t bend the blade when I cut. That suggests to me that first, they didn’t make Hollywoodesque, round-house blows against each other’s shields, and second, that they were well-trained to use these weapons, because in this case, training could overcome most of the apparent fragility.
From the artifact, then, I was able to move a long way towards reconstruction of the martial art that it was produced to support. And that was fun. Speculative, resting on some questionable evidence, but luckily, I’m writing fantasy.
There’s always new inspiration to be found, even in places you’ve been before
I love to travel to see the hard evidence of the past, and so the second thing came to me at the so-called ‘Treasury of Atreus.’ If you haven’t been, it’s a magnificent, enormous beehive tomb constructed of stone blocks, some of them so huge that even though I’ve been there five times I’m literally awed each time. The Lion Gate of the fortress town is impressive, but the tomb is… incredible.
I was just about to start writing Storming Heaven last year, and I had just completed a reenactment in Greece (the Battle of Plataea, and you can see some of our pictures at www.plataea2022.com) and I’d promised my daughter and her friend a few days on beaches. I had no pans to visit Mycenae again, but that’s how it worked out; a rushed visit on a Tuesday morning. There’s a great deal to see at Mycenae, but I found myself standing in front of the Treasury of Atreus, just looking at the lintel and the entrance way. I’ve read articles on how it was built, or how it might have been built. Then I walked inside, still in a state of awe, wondering to myself as to why this one monument had such impact; I peeked in the side chamber, and there was a smell…
I can’t say it was the smell of death, or mortality. But it was more than the smell of slightly damp earth; it was very evocative. Smell is, for me, one of the most important senses; maybe it is for everyone, but the smell of the side chamber wasn’t something I’d encountered before, and in that moment, the structure and narrative of Storming Heaven changed. I needed the ‘Treasury of Atreus’ in my book, and I needed… death. More than death. A grandiose God of Death. Someone who might live in something like the ‘Treasury of Atreus.’ And I knew how he should smell.
To be fair, I also learned that the beehive tomb at Mycenae was the largest arched vault in the world for over fifteen hundred years; I learned that no one knows for whom it was built; I learned that its construction was unique among the hundreds of beehive tombs in Bronze Age Greece. I also stared in wonder at the artifacts in the museum; there’s something about Linear B tablets, which are quite small and were only preserved because everything ended in flames, routine documents of a modestly efficient bureaucracy; something very real. People really lived then. They really paid taxes. They really had babies. The gold artifacts don’t bring that to me like the linear B tablets do.
Practical and sensory experiences can add to your understanding
I’ve already mentioned that I was at a reenactment of the Battle of Plataea. Now, Plataea happened in 479BCE according to our best evidence, and that’s long after the collapse of the Bronze Age, which is set variously in the eleventh or tenth centuries BCE. Nonetheless I learned something there, in my bronze panoply and my wool chiton in forty-degree Greek heat. I learned that light wool is very comfortable in high heat; I learned that it doesn’t seem to pick up sweat like cotton or even linen, and I learned that a big, but light, wool ‘gown’ made an excellent layer under bronze armour. All of that was interesting, but what I really learned was, again, olfactory.
I learned that bronze armour has a smell. It’s not a good smell; its coppery, and it resembles the scent you get in your nose when you break it or have a nosebleed. Interesting? To me it was fascinating, because is my ‘style’ is immersion, the more scents I can include, the better, and the idea that bronze armour smells like spilled blood was virtually thematic. I’m pretty sure I amused my tent mate, Giannis, standing in the evening light, with half my thorakes in my hands, smelling it.
Violence isn’t always the answer
Very early in the research for Storming Heaven I discovered the ‘Indus Valley Culture,’ one of the most interesting of all the Bronze Age civilizations I examined, and I’m ashamed to say that before I stumbled across it while looking up something on Babylon, I’d just barely heard of it. So my fourth thing might be the whole of the Indus Valley civilization, but one thing sticks out, and that is something worth everyone’s attention: there are very, very few weapons associated with the Indus Valley Culture. There are so few weapons, in fact, that some theorists have proposed that they were pacifistic, or even proto-Jains. Amidst the cloud of spears, swords, sickles, axes, arrow points and chariots of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt and Mycenae, the paucity of weapons really stands out.
I was lucky enough to be an a Fantasy Con last year where a group of us, all writers who like writing a good fight scene, all began to discuss the purpose of violence in any literature; the over-representation of heroic violence in fantasy, and the sheer difficulty of representing heroism and epic without resort to violence. I won’t pretend I hadn’t thought about all this before; I’ll just say I walked away determined to show some heroic pacifism, and here, before my eyes, was a whole culture that at least archaeologically speaking seems to have eschewed violence. Maybe that was the most important thing that I learned while writing Storming Heaven. Maybe.
The Big monuments weren’t built without a price
I was almost done writing Storming Heaven, which, if you don’t know, is about a group of mortals banding together to overturn some particularly loathsome (but sometimes funny) gods. I had all my cultural references in order, pages of outlines and notes, and I’d written about three hundred pages. For Christmas, my partner gave me a copy of a new book by two anthropologists called The Dawn of Everything.
Let me be brief; I read it and discovered that I don’t know anything. It’s a wonderful book; I’m sure it is full of flaws, and I saw a few things that, even as an amateur, I saw as questionable, but the authors’ contention that the growth of government and kingship and tyranny and war is not inevitable, and that early societies managed quite well without, thanks, and that some civilizations have turned their backs on the excesses of oppression as firmly as the Japanese turned their back on gunpowder in war, all of that was new to me. And wonderful, and allowed me to reexamine everything I thought I knew about Egypt and Sumeria, Babylon, and the Mayans. A single thought will encapsulate what I learned…
All the archaeological monuments that we use to symbolize ancient cultures, every pyramid, every temple, and every obelisk, is dedicated to someone’s ‘great project,’ that involved forced or at least coerced labour by thousands of people under the direction of a few or a single person; whereas successful communal cultures mostly leave uniform small houses, and maybe a public bath, difficult to date and not particularly imposing. Academic and popular history are drawn to the great monuments; who goes to see an early Bronze Age seaside trading town like Thermi on Lesvos? There’s almost nothing to see!
Bonus thing
I went to Thermi on Lesvos. There’s very little to see except the outlines of some private houses set in modern concrete; it’s nothing like visiting the great fortresses of Orchomenos or Mycenae, the Pyramids of Giza, the magnificent ruins of the Mayans or the Inca. But it does tell a story; small houses, close together; people living together, and choosing to do so, without much in the way of gold, or weapons (one copper knife, I believe) or statues, or temples. It looks like a nice place to live. For everyone.
I have COVID, of the 2019 vintage but blended with a soupcon of whatever the latest variant/subvariant combination is. As I just returned from overseas, I like to think it’s a fancy European variant — the Champagne to America’s sparkling COVID. Bubbly and effervescent. And such terroir.
Point is, I’m a little down for the count at present — feeling mostly okay, have the Paxlovid (which is to say, my mouth tastes of hairspray and robot ass), but the rest of the family has it too, so we’re hunkering down. If you need something from me at present, you are unlikely to get it.
Figured I’d teleport briefly into your lives and tell you what I’m up to, currently, and tell you where I’ll be —
Did I finish up and turn in the first draft of my new middle grade horror novel, Monster Movie! –? I did, and should be getting edits back soon.
Am I working on a new novella collection with most excellent buddies Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson? Could be, rabbit, could be.
Have I received an unholy number of wonderful, gasp-inducing blurbs for Black River Orchard, a book that also recently received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly (which you can find right here), where the review said some very nice things like “Wendig is brilliant at slowly raising the plot’s emotional temperature and making his characters, caught in a creeping nightmare, feel both real and empathetic. This masterful outing should continue to earn Wendig comparisons to Stephen King.”…? Indeed, indeed, indeed. I’ll show off the blurbs soon — and here I selfishly note that ahem ahem ahem, you can preorder the book, out 9/26, at any and all of the cool places where the books live? Though if you want a signed, personalized copy, Doylestown Bookshop will be your best friend in this regard. Pre-ordering books is good for the author, good for the bookstore, and sends a vital signal to the publisher about what you want to read and what authors you like. So! Yeah.
Is there now not just one but two UK covers revealed, one for the ARC (advanced reader copy) and one for the full-on release? Heck yeah, and here are both of those for the pleasure of your eyeballs —
And then, am I going to be in Spain for the Celsius-232 festival at the end of July? Fuck yeah, I am. It’s from the 18th to the 22nd, in Aviles, Spain, and there’s a bunch of excellent authors attending as professionals, like Kiersten White, Joe Abercrombie, Alma Katsu, Charlaine Harris, Neon Yang, P Djéli Clark, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. (I think they also just announced Mike Flanagan attending? Which, needless to say, is pretty damn exciting.) I’ll also be bopping around the Netherlands and Germany prior to that, but more in a “wandering Wendig” way, not in a “official events” capacity.
Finally, will I be hanging out with Philip Fracassi at the Doylestown Bookshop on August 23rd, with him talking about Boys in the Valley, and me chatting a bit about the paperback release of Wayward? Yes, yes, and yes. Details here.
(And yes, there will be a Black River Orchard tour — it’s getting cobbled together now, but the hope is to do a run through the northeast, maybe bring along some WEIRD-ASS APPLES from various local orchards, and then after that, maybe some dates out on the West Coast? More as I know it!)
Rebellion is brewing and refugees have begun to trickle into the city at the edge of the world. Looming high on the cliff is the Nest, a fortress full of mages who offer protection, but also embody everything the rebellion is fighting against: a strict hierarchy based on magic abilities.
When Isha arrives as a refugee, she attempts to fit in amongst the other mages, but her kher tattoo brands her as an outcast. She can’t remember her past or why she has the tattoo – only that she survived.
Tatters, who wears the golden collar of a slave, was once one of the rebels. He plans to stay in the shadows, until Isha appears in his tavern. He’s never seen a human with a tattoo, and the markings look eerily familiar . . .
As the rebellion carves a path of destruction towards the city, an unlikely friendship forms between a man trying to escape his past and a woman trying to uncover hers, until their secrets threaten to tear them apart.
1. Trust the muse.
When I started working on The Collarbound, it wasn’t the story I had planned on writing. I didn’t intend to write a trilogy, I didn’t intend to start the story in a tavern, I didn’t intend to write a dual magic system of mind and flesh. It was all happening in an epic fantasy setting, with rebels and mages and giant glowing lightborns flying in the sky, yet it was focused on people, nearly entirely character-driven. As I delved into the manuscript, I worried who on earth would read this slow-burn character exploration, this piecing-together of backstory through mental battles, dreams and mind-games. Yet it was the novel that got me an agent, and a mainstream editor.
Trust the muse. It knows what it’s doing. Or at least, trust that what you love and what fascinates you will be fascinating to others, and that they might love it too. If you care, if it’s what your soul is singing about, write it. Other people will care too.
2. Make it worse.
But doing what you love doesn’t mean going easy on yourself. Quite the contrary. I would recommend always making it harder, for yourself, for your characters. No looking for the easy way out. No glossing over the hole in your magic system. You’ve spotted a gap, a way the magic can be abused or circumvented? Characters will as well. Let them exploit it.
For example, if mindlink means mages have to stand still when they occupy each other’s minds, as they’re focused on the mental worlds, then what happens when someone works out how to project mental images while throwing a punch? Or say the fleshbinding magic allows people to share sensations – it’s all very well that the grizzled characters think of this as a way to share pain to avoid succumbing to torture, but what does it mean when someone comes up with the idea to share pleasure? How does that change the way the first date goes? Actually, what does it look like coming from a culture that has had centuries to explore that idea and become familiar with it?
3. Names are hard.
While we’re on creating a new culture, one aspect I bumped against was names. I hate naming things – I tend to do that last, so characters and places are often called ‘XXX’ in the first draft. Naming is hard to get right. If you get it wrong, it can carry certain cultural associations. It can belong to the wrong language group, making people wonder why this fantasy term sounds like Anglo-Saxon or Latin; it can place your fantasy world in a certain cultural space which isn’t the one you wanted it to land in. People will make different assumptions about Anwen, Arushi or Anita, just from her name on the page.
To avoid this, research is your friend. When writing the khers, a species of red-skinned, horned, nomadic humanoids, I studied the roots of an old Tuareg dialect. By looking at the language’s origins, finding words which had then split into several other words and spawned offspring to create various new languages, I was hoping to find sounds and names that were hard to place, that didn’t carry associations for the reader. For the two other main languages in The Collarbound, I based myself on Proto-Germanic and Sanskrit words. The result was distinct cultural sonorities: the Sunrisers had terms such nasivyati, stana, rohit; while the Duskdwellers had names like groniz, baina, raudaz.
Another workaround which I found useful was simply to translate words, or blend existing terms together. Languages are flexible, and you can play with them by merging words together: mindlink, fleshbinding, lawmage. Or invented words can be made to sound just right: lacunant, for people who suffer from a lacuna in their mind. Or why not simply call the cliff at the end of the world the Edge, or the high-perched castle full of mages and seagulls the Nest? It can work just as well.
4. Tropes are your friends.
The thing with writing is, you have to both zoom in and zoom out. The language is important – it’s all words, words, words, as Hamlet would put it – but the structure of the story is important as well. Knowing your tropes means knowing the building blocks of your story, and how to play with them. Sometimes a trope is a shortcut, a way to tell the reader that yes, this character is the comic relief, the foil to the main character. Nothing too bad will take place while he’s around, but beware the moment he’s seriously hurt, because it will spell serious trouble.
Once those tropes are established, they become ways to play with the reader, surprise them or tease them: how about we take ‘the rebel hero fighting the evil empire’ trope… But we’re firmly from the point of view of people living under the empire’s rule, and the horror they feel when the rebels destroy everything they’ve ever known. I love playing with known stories, twisting them into unexpected shapes, testing what they become if told from a different angle. Or telling a story in the wrong order, or after the facts. Sure, this character is a classic fantasy rogue hero, with too many skills to count, but it’s been years now, and what’s left of the adventures is mostly trauma, and he would like to live quietly in his tavern off his teaching job while pursuing romance, if you please.
5. You’re putting in a lot of stuff you’re not aware of.
I once heard Jeanette Winterson say that fiction is a lie detector. I think that’s particularly true of writers – we put stuff in our stories, convinced they’re things we invented, only to find out that they’re things we believed, or lived through, or worried about. I found myself writing about a mixed-race young girl, cut off from one of her cultural identities; about a White-passing man from a faraway land; about languages and mixed identities, trying to live at the threshold between three cultures; about violent revolutions failing and what we might do instead to make this world a better place. And then a friend, or a relative, points out that I’m mixed-race, White-passing, that two of the three cultures I’ve been influenced by – French and Iranian – both have violent revolutions which end with a worse dictature taking over in its wake, in 1789 and 1979 respectively.
It seems so obvious in retrospect, I’m not sure how I missed those themes while I was writing the manuscript. I was convinced the story was about two mages making friends or sometimes failing to, exploring mindmagic and fleshbinding powers, and fighting off the violent rebel army of Renegades – and it still is all of that, of course, but a lot more is hidden in there that I hadn’t realised I was putting in.
Maybe that’s why, in the end, it’s important to write what you love, what the muse whispers to you in your dreams. Because it’s what moves you, whether you realise it or not at the time. Because looking back on the book will be like looking into a mirror – and hopefully, you’re not the only person who will see themselves reflected there.
***
Rebecca Zahabi is a mixed-heritage writer (a third British, a third French and a third Iranian). She started writing in her home village in France at age 12 – a massive epic where women were knights and men were she-witches which set out to revolutionise feminism. Since, she learnt how to actually write, and has slightly re-jigged her expectations of what she can achieve with a keyboard and a blank page. The plan of taking over the world, however, has not changed.
After honing in her craft in a variety of genres – playwriting, short stories, an attempt at Icelandic sagas – she hopes to write novels that can make a difference. She is currently working on Tales of the Edge, an ambitious trilogy blending magic and structural violence.
Her début adult novel, The Collarbound, was longlisted for The Future Bookshelf program at Hachette UK before being acquired by Gollancz, and made it to the top 10 Sunday Times bestseller list.
Hi there! My name is James L. Sutter, and for almost 20 years I’ve worked in science fiction and fantasy. I was a co-creator of the Pathfinder and Starfinder Roleplaying Games, and worked as both Starfinder’s Creative Director and the Executive Editor in charge of Pathfinder’s tie-in novels with Tor. I’ve written official Dungeons & Dragons adventures, comics, video games, short fiction for places like Nightmare and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and two adult fantasy novels set in the Pathfinder world.
When David stormed out of his band, he missed his shot at fame, trapped in an ordinary high school life while his ex-best friend, Chance, became the hottest teen pop star in America.
Then tragedy throws David and Chance back into contact. As old wounds break open, the boys find themselves trading frenemy status for a confusing, secret romance―one that could be David’s ticket back into the band and the spotlight.
As the mixture of business and pleasure becomes a powder keg, David will have to choose: Is this his second chance at glory? Or his second chance at Chance?
Perfect for fans of Alice Oseman and Red, White, & Royal Blue, Darkhearts is a hilarious, heartfelt, enemies-to-lovers romance about love, celebrity, and what happens when the two collide.
Not exactly what you expected, right? Yeah, me either. Genre-wise, young adult contemporary romance is about as far from my previous work as you can get. But while it’s been a sometimes bumpy road from there to here, I’ve never been happier with my writing career, creatively or financially. So in the interest of transparency, here are a few lessons I’ve learned along the way.
You are not too big to fail.
In 2017, after leading the Starfinder RPG team through a wildly successful launch, I left my job in the game industry in order to write novels full-time.
I know, I know—I can’t count the number of times I’ve told people to hold onto their day job as long as possible, and especially a creatively fulfilling one. But I honestly thought I’d hit the point where working full time was holding back my career as a novelist. I already had two well-received fantasy novels under my belt, and a respectable following online. I had a bigshot agent and a new novel out on submission. I also had a wife with a tech job who was happy to support me. It was time to stop building my runway and actually take off… right?
*ahem*
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
A month after I quit my job, my wife got so sick that she had to quit her job—permanently. Suddenly I, the freelance author, was our sole breadwinner (plus full-time caretaker and househusband). Fortunately, we’d planned ahead and had a comfortable safety buffer. And I still had that novel on sub.
Except that novel didn’t sell.
So I wrote another novel.
But my agent didn’t like it.
So I got a new agent.
Except that novel didn’t sell either.
So I wrote another novel.
But my agent didn’t like it.
So I got a new agent…
That’s not a copy-paste error: despite having sold the first two novels I’d ever written, it took me four years, three more novels, and three agents to sell another. And that’s with an established fanbase and all the industry connections you could ask for.
Which brings me to my point: It might seem like success in one genre should transfer over to an adjacent one. And sometimes it does! But just as often, straying from your lane even slightly means you’re going to have to start all over again at the bottom.
You don’t need an agent—you need the right agent.
We don’t talk enough in this industry about the importance of switching agents. We worry that people will wonder what was wrong with us that the relationship didn’t work out. We remember how hard it was to get our first agent, and worry that we’ll never get another. (Which is bullshit: if your work was good enough to get one agent, it’s good enough to get another. And if it’s not, it’s probably better to polish it some more before you go public anyway.)
Switching isn’t necessarily about good agents vs. bad agents, either. Obviously, if your agent sucks—if they aren’t behaving ethically, if they don’t treat you with respect, if they aren’t selling books for anybody—you should move on. But more often, as with dating, it’s about finding the right fit for you. Someone who meshes with you on communication styles, editorial comments, and vision for your career.
In my case, my first two agents were objectively good at their jobs—they have big clients, get good deals, conduct themselves in a professional manner. But like any relationship, agents and clients can grow apart. My first agent had signed me based on a YA fantasy romance, so when I came to her with an SF thriller that read more like adult—and a bunch of other ideas that felt similarly outside her wheelhouse—she suggested I find someone else. So I signed with an adult SFF agent—which was fine until I found myself unexpectedly writing YA contemporary romance and loving it. Neither situation was their fault.
Yet while it was these basic logistical conflicts that led me to my current agent (Josh Adams of Adams Literary), now that I’m here, I’ve discovered just what a relief it is to have an agent whose style perfectly matches mine. When I have a question, he gets back to me immediately—sometimes within minutes. For an anxious author like me, who would otherwise probably spend the hours between question and answer pinned to the floor as my brain does panic-donuts inside my skull, those quick responses save me a ton of lost productivity. Plus, he’s excited to represent me in all the different directions I might want to take my career. (And of course, the fact that he sold Darkhearts in two weeks sure doesn’t hurt!)
So if you’re not thrilled with your current agent, or if they don’t support the direction you want to go next, consider switching. It won’t necessarily be easy—the seven months I spent looking for my third agent were significantly more painful than either of my previous agent searches—but now that I’m here, I’m so, so glad that I did it.
Different genre, different money.
Back when I was commissioning tie-in novels for Pathfinder, all the stats I was able to gather suggested that a “normal” advance for a first adult science fiction and fantasy novel was around $5,000 unagented, or $10,000 agented. Sadly, that number doesn’t appear to have changed much over the last decade. So I went into selling my first young adult novel with that as my benchmark.
Turns out, young adult has more money—like, a lot more. Of course, part of that is my glorious shark of an agent, but Darkhearts has only just launched, and I’ve already made an order of magnitude more money off it than from my Pathfinder novels. If you’re considering hopping genres (or media), do some quick googling and see what numbers you can turn up. You might be surprised.
Follow your heart, trust your gut.
Strategically speaking, writing Darkhearts was a bad idea. I was a speculative fiction guy, with a speculative fiction agent and a speculative fiction fanbase. But when the pandemic hit, I found myself struggling with the dystopian book I’d been working on. On the advice of a friend, I started reading a bunch of contemporary YA romance—and absolutely fell in love (no pun intended). It was just such a wonderful escape to sink into something with a funny, sassy voice, where character rules all and you know you’ll get a happy ending. Because I can never read something great without wanting to try my hand at it, I decided to experiment, drawing on my own experience as an underage musician in Seattle (not to mention a confused bisexual teen). And it felt great. The words flowed, the voice felt natural, and suddenly it was all I wanted to work on.
I knew writing this book wasn’t a smart decision. (In fact, I held off on telling my agent about it until I was almost done.) But I’ve come to believe the best indicator of whether an audience will have fun with a book is whether you have fun writing it. And Darkhearts was fun—there are text-message dick jokes between the two boys that still make me laugh. Now, several years and a new agent later, it’s already the most successful fiction I’ve ever written, giving me a whole new career as a YA author.
Maybe I’d feel different if the book had flopped, but all I know is that I wrote the thing that felt good, that pulled from my own experience and talked about the issues I wanted to discuss—and it worked.
Darkhearts is a novel about realizing you no longer fit inside the box you’ve assigned yourself. That’s true of its protagonist, who has to wrestle with not being the rock star (or the straight guy) he thought he’d become. Yet it’s also true of me as the author, realizing that maybe I’m not meant to exist solely within the genres I’m used to.
So if you’re feeling stuck, if writing’s lost its luster—try something out of left field. Play around with genre, media, voice, subject matter. You might find that you’re a more versatile writer than you thought—and that you’re a whole lot happier that way.
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James L. Sutter is a co-creator of the Pathfinder and Starfinder Roleplaying Games and the author of the young adult romance novel Darkhearts, as well as the adult fantasy novels Death’s Heretic and The Redemption Engine. His short stories have appeared in such venues as Nightmare, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Escape Pod, and more. In addition, he’s also written comic books, essays for publications like Clarkesworld and Lightspeed: Queers Destroy Science Fiction, a wealth of tabletop gaming material, and video games. He lives in Seattle, where he’s performed with musical acts ranging from progressive metalcore to musical theater.
