Why Do I Write?

I've been working on a draft of a book for the first time in five years, and it has caused me to reflect on why I'm doing this in the first place.

(I should note that this entire conversation has also been going on in therapy once a week, because there's a whole lot of emotions tied up in this, and I've got my own issues to deal with.)

But here's why I am NOT writing a book:

For The Money: When I sold Variant, it was for a lot of money--an absurd amount of money given the time in my life that it arrived. Fortunately, I had just finished grad school and was in desperate need of the money, so I welcomed it gladly, but it was a lot. I have never been paid as much for any book since, because that was a time when publishers were really throwing a lot of cash at YA dystopians.

But I'm definitely not writing this book for the money. I can't. It makes me sick to think about writing for money again. Which isn't to say that I won't accept an advance, but just to say that I have ZERO interest in ever writing fulltime again. A book a year? Sure, I could do that. But quitting my day job and writing? Not a chance. The thing is, I've done both, and there's just nothing that fulltime writing offers that isn't surpassed by a steady paycheck and health insurance.

But more than that, I have decided that I'm not going to plan anything with the money. No "if we get X amount of money we can get that new car" or "if we get X amount of money we can go to Disneyworld". Not even "if we get X amount of money I can pay off my credit cards". Because as soon as I start assigning that money to something, then I stop writing for the love of writing, and I start writing because I REALLY NEED TO PAY OFF THOSE CREDIT CARDS. And that's just not healthy.

The thing is, I am really enjoying writing for the fun of it. I don't want to write for extrinsic motivators. (Mostly. We'll get to that.)

For Critical Praise: Variant won a lot of awards. Several of my books got starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. I won a Whitney Award and then I won another Whitney Award. I won a YALSA award. I won the Sunshine State Young Readers Award. And those things all stroked my ego, and maybe they brought in some more sales, but mostly they just gave me a big head.

And do you know what all of those awards have done for me? Well, I got a damn cat and he knocked EVERY SINGLE ONE of those awards off the window sill above my desk, shattering them into pieces. I am very bitter about this, and I have never forgiven that stupid cat.

Why I Am Writing This Book:

Because It's Fun: I'm honestly just really enjoying the process of writing a book. It's good to be back in that headspace, and I'm loving immersing myself in a world. I haven't written for fun in a LONG time. Honestly, the last book that I wrote purely for fun was Airships of Camelot, and that was in 2015. Since then I have written, but it was as writing fulltime was winding down--and my mental illness was ramping up--and I was writing very much for the purpose of earning money. I did a lot of ghostwriting and co-writing, and none of it was just for me. So this is fun.

Because I Want People to Read It: Here's the thing. I don't want the book to sell well because I want to make a lot of money, but I do want people to read this, because I really like it. I don't want money--I want people to enjoy it, and, if I'm being honest, I want people to tell me they like it.

So it's still a sort of extrinsic motivation. I just want compliments, not money.

(Yes, of course I realize that this is a problem because I know all too well that authors shouldn't read reviews. So I'll stay away from Goodreads, most certainly, but, why, two days ago I got a stray piece of Variant fan mail. If a book from almost fifteen years ago can still bring in fan mail, then maybe this new book can bring in a couple of positive notes.

The Point

All of this depends, of course, on the book actually selling and finding an audience. I don't know when or if that will happen. So, who knows?

Fire in the Belly… It’s Back!

I've been telling everyone that I've been in retirement for the past five and a half years. I just haven't felt like writing. Previously on the blog I talked about how I write fulltime for a digital marketing agency, and that just kinda sapped the creativity out of me. I've described before I how just don't have "the fire in the belly" for writing that I used to have.

Well, I have been writing a LOT recently, and that fire is back.

Here's what I think was going on. I was just tired, and I was depressed. You can read this blog post about how depressed I have been and how new meds and therapy are getting me through it and it's been amazing. But the other big thing is that a whole bunch of my author years were stressful. From the period when I finished Dark Energy till when I cowrote The Warning, there was about four years in there where money was incredibly tight, I was incredibly sick, and writing was incredibly hard. And I just don't look back fondly on writing.

Even now, there's a whole lot about publishing that I don't like. The world is very different from when I published Variant in 2011, and it's VERY different from when I published On Second Thought in 2003.

When Variant came out, Twitter was brand new. Facebook was new. No one really had social media strategies. The closest thing I had was a blog tour, where my publicist at HarperCollins would set up interviews with book blogs. But now blogs aren't a thing at all (he says as he writes this blog...)

But when On Second Thought came out, my publisher wouldn't even let me include my website URL in my bio at the back because they didn't have an internet marketing strategy AT ALL, and were suspicious of me doing self promotion that they, the publisher, couldn't oversee.

It was a totally different world! So when I see authors making Reels and Stories and TikToks, I have no idea what I would ever do in that world. That, above all else, scares me away from publishing more than actually writing a book. I can't be a good writer and also a good TikTok'er. I'm just not built that way. (There are some authors who pull this off amazingly well, and there are some authors who just seem to be flailing in a desperate attempt to get people to buy their books--and I don't want to be the latter. I don't want anyone to watch me badly acting an unfunny skit on Instagram and them thinking "This Rob Wells sure is a shill.")

ANYWAY, the point of ALL of this is to say that I AM writing a book, and it's going really, really well, and the drafting process is going really, really fast. It reminds me a lot of writing Variant, which I drafted in eleven days. I'm not going that fast on this one, but I am three weeks in and at 50k words, which is pretty darn quick.

And I'm loving it, in a way that I didn't think I was capable of loving writing a book ever again.

There's a thing I used to say: "I don't know what I used to think about before I became a writer." And I didn't! Because, when you're a writer, you're always living in your head, thinking about the plot and the characters and the themes. Always. All the time. But when I wasn't writing fulltime I just kinda thought about... my day? Stuff? I've been depressed most of the time so I didn't do a lot of thinking at all.

But I'm living in my head again, and I'm loving it.

Here's the rub: I'm a plotter, but I've been pantsing this whole book. I started with a pretty solid outline, but 20k words into it I threw in a MASSIVE curveball--something that I had been saving for the final chapter as a twist--and it has shaken up the whole manuscript. And ever since then, I've just been makin' stuff up.

And for non-writers, you'll say "well don't writers always just make stuff up?" and yes, we do, but I've always had a plan, and now I don't have a plan. And this is not how I write books, at all, but it's how I'm writing this one--and it's fun!

It's gonna require SO much revision, though, because you can't just make stuff up for 50k words with no plan and have it make sense. I've got this character I love, who is a musician in the future (the book takes place in the 2140s) who is named Beast Fire, and I adore this character, but I also kinda forgot that he existed for about 20k words of the book and have just now brought him back. Where's he been? Who knows? Not me.

The point is that I have that "fire in the belly" back again, and I really love it. Will this book ever be published? I don't know, because 1) I'm out of practice and it might not be good, and 2) publishing is never guaranteed no matter what, and 3) YA science fiction is not a hot genre at the moment. And folks, I may have the fire in the belly for writing again, but I don't think I'll ever have the fire in the belly for self-publishing. I respect the heck out of self-publishers, but I do not have the mental bandwidth for being a microbusiness. I just want to write books and have someone else shepherd them through the editing/cover design/marketing/distribution pipeline.

So we'll see. I want people to read this thing, because I love it and I think that my readers--especially those who loved Dark Energy--will really like this one. But we'll see.

For now I'm just having fun.

Coming Out of Retirement

Astute readers will note that my last book came out in 2019 which was, like, a long time ago. Before that I was publishing (almost) yearly. So what have I been up to?

Well, I’ve been calling it semi-retirement. I got a fulltime job after six years of writing fulltime because as much as I loved the freedom of calling myself a real honest-to-goodness successful author, I also never had the financial stability I wanted. And I honestly will trade annual publishing in exchange for a steady paycheck and health insurance any day of the week.

The problem is that the fulltime job is also as a writer—just as a different kind of writer. I work for an internet marketing company and I write content for other companies’ websites and emails. It’s not exciting (my personal specialty is in roofing and plastic surgery), but it pays the bills in a way that writing books never did. (ie: reliably.) Anyway, the problem is that when I’m writing all day for the day job, I don’t have a ton of creative stamina to write after hours for books. So I haven’t been writing.

Add to this the fact that I am mentally ill and that I have been suffering for the past three years from terrific depression. (To be clear, I’ve been suffering for the last fifteen years from depression, but the last three years have been debilitating.)

BUT: about five weeks ago (end of July 2024) my psychiatrist made a change to my meds that has done the following:

• Bought me three more hours of productivity in the day. Previously the depression essentially put me in bed at 3pm every day. It still does put me in bed, but I’ve found I have the willpower to gut through the depression and work three more hours on my laptop or in a notebook.

• Made me not sad all the time. Which, you know, is great.

ALL OF THIS TO SAY:

I’m kinda working on a book???

It’s still in the early stages, but I’m really loving the process of creative writing again. I am completely out of the loop on the market, so trying to step back in and pick up where I left off is daunting. The YA market is not what it was when I left it.

For starters, I write science fiction, not fantasy, and YA sci-fi just doesn’t sell like it used to. My whole career was built on the shoulders of The Hunger Games—my books were often called dystopian even though they weren’t really dystopian. I always referred to them as modern day young adult with a science fiction twist: you know, androids and bioweapons.

The book that I work on doesn’t fit this mold exactly, but it certainly isn’t middle grade fantasy, which seems to be all the rage.

My current project, temporarily titled “Failure to Thrive”, takes place 100 (or so) years in the future. There is an international science fair kind of thing called the Junior Genius Grant, and the book starts with Maeve, our main character, and her team landing a top spot and winning a trip for an internship on a Mars colony. But when they get there, things start to go very wrong.

Will it be published? I have no idea. But I’m writing again and it feels good. I’m 28k words into it and haven’t gotten nearly far enough in the story. This thing is going to be long (for a YA), or, in other words, it’s going to need a ton of revisions. But that’s okay. I like revisions.

Anyway, it’s good to be writing again. And, if all goes well, this book will eventually make it into your hands.