{"id":28010,"date":"2015-10-20T09:51:35","date_gmt":"2015-10-20T13:51:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=28010"},"modified":"2015-10-20T09:51:35","modified_gmt":"2015-10-20T13:51:35","slug":"what-do-you-mean-i-need-social-skills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2015\/10\/20\/what-do-you-mean-i-need-social-skills\/","title":{"rendered":"Ilana C. Myer: What Do You Mean I Need Social Skills? (And Other Concerns)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ilana has a debut fantasy novel out — Last Song Before Night<\/strong><\/span><\/a> — but before that, she’s done a lot of work as an accomplished blogger and freelance writer, so I’m excited to have her here to speak a bit about one skill most writers don’t think, or know, that they need…<\/em><\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

As an author whose first book just came out from Tor, you could say I\u2019ve achieved exactly what I set out to do. And I\u2019ll be real: I set out to do it a long time ago. This is not one of those instances when the author takes up writing on a lark and a novel comes out. If only. It\u2019s more like, when I was a teenager I decided to start taking seriously this dream I\u2019d always had. I was already thirteen<\/i>, it was time to get moving.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s because I was living in Jerusalem in the mid-90s and fully convinced \u2014 not entirely without reason \u2014 that I wouldn\u2019t survive high school. (Buffy <\/i>was to have incredible resonance, years later.) Being a kid, doing things like having fun or whatever, was a waste of time when life was short. (Plus, being in a class of kids who don\u2019t speak your language is not that conducive to having fun either.) So I did two things. I read a lot, and critically. Whatever I read, I picked apart. I looked at the things that worked and tried to figure out why<\/i> they worked so well. Sometimes I couldn\u2019t figure it out, so I just reread those glorious sections repeatedly, as if to absorb them into my bloodstream. (In retrospect, this means I can open my old notebooks at random and be like, \u201cRight, that\u2019s when I was reading Dune.<\/i>\u201d)<\/p>\n

Because another thing I was doing was writing my own novel. And I worked incessantly. By the end of high school I had completed the first volume of a projected epic fantasy trilogy. I had written it longhand in a series of notebooks. Teachers knew to be suspicious of these notebooks and occasionally they were confiscated.<\/p>\n

Eventually I was to give up on the high school novel, dismissing it as too juvenile. I started a new one while still in college. That novel, in the course of years, became Last Song Before Night<\/i>.<\/p>\n

So this is great, right? I did it.<\/i> I put focused effort into achieving my goal, by developing the skills necessary for that goal, and succeeded.<\/p>\n

Fast-forward to this past year at Book Expo America, when I and three other debut authors had the honor of being on a panel hosted by John Scalzi. Except this wasn\u2019t really a panel. It was a game, for the general public, of \u201cWould You Rather?\u201d We would get questions and need to answer them, cleverly, on the fly.<\/p>\n

This was a foretaste of what it means to launch a novel out into the world. My calendar for October has been a series of public appearances, readings, another game of \u201cWould You Rather\u201d with Scalzi at New York Comic Con, and \u2014 incredibly \u2014 a\u00a0 New England book tour with Fran Wilde and Seth Dickinson where we\u2019ll be visiting five bookstores in five states in five days or something like that. And answering questions, and being witty, and hopefully impressing the ever-loving hell out of everyone.<\/p>\n

I did not do a single damn thing in my life to prepare for this. And it\u2019s made me reflect on this dissonant quality to being a writer: what makes us excel at our work, what gets our books to the level of being publishable, involves being alone, a lot. No matter how many workshops you attend, ultimately the work only gets done when it\u2019s just you and the page. Or just you and the necessary act of reading. All of it intensely alone.<\/p>\n

And now my success, or at least a good fraction of it, might hinge on how scintillating I can be in public appearances. I\u2019ve been thinking back and realizing that authors\u2019 behavior at their events has occasionally influenced my interest in their work. If an author seems brilliant and confident at an event, I think we are programmed to expect that same acumen reflected on the printed page.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s one thing I\u2019m learning: Experience helps. With five readings behind me, I\u2019m starting to enjoy doing them. And at the recent panel at New York Comic Con, I was surprised to find that I was not nervous beforehand. I knew all eyes would be on me and I would be expected to make clever responses to surprise questions, but there was a corner of my brain, newly awakened, that said, \u201cYou\u2019ve been here before. You\u2019ve got this<\/i>.\u201d\u00a0 And also: \u201cHave fun<\/i>.\u201d Because hey, I finally have a book out. That is pretty awesome.<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019m not going to say it was all flawless, but it was better. And maybe that experience will pave the way to the next appearance being better. And the next one.<\/p>\n

Recently I went to a consignment shop and found a designer red dress on sale for a ridiculously low price. Not deep red. Not maroon, which I\u2019ve been wont to wear in the past. Shocking, fire engine red. The kind of thing I\u2019d never have worn before, favoring instead more modest shades of blue or purple or green. I bought it.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t prepared for this, and there are going to be moments when a witty comeback eludes me, or people notice my hands shaking (this happens, especially if I haven\u2019t eaten), or I am simply stumped for a response for several seconds (this has happened too). But if you see me at these events, and I am wearing the red dress, you\u2019ll know I\u2019m wearing it to remind myself that the time for solitary communing has passed. It\u2019s time to be out in the world and visible among people, at least for now. I have a book out, the thing I\u2019ve worked toward my whole life. This is no time to hide.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Ilana C. Myer has written for the\u00a0Globe and Mail<\/em>, the\u00a0Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon<\/em>, and the\u00a0Huffington Post<\/em>. Previously she was a freelance journalist in Jerusalem for the\u00a0Jerusalem Post,\u00a0<\/em>the\u00a0Jewish Daily Forward, Time Out Israel<\/em>\u00a0and other publications. She lives in New York City.<\/p>\n

Ilana C. Myer: Website<\/span><\/a> | Twitter<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Last Song Before Night: Indiebound<\/span><\/a> | Amazon<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Ilana has a debut fantasy novel out — Last Song Before Night — but before that, she’s done a lot of work as an accomplished blogger and freelance writer, so I’m excited to have her here to speak a bit about one skill most writers don’t think, or know, that they need… * * * […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-28010","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-7hM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28010"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28012,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28010\/revisions\/28012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}