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?

I Have Completed a Draft!

I have posted about how my brain is working SO MUCH BETTER because of some new meds that have been treating my depression. And it's been great! I have been absolutely unable to write a book, or to even concentrate on anything long-term for years. But once I started my new meds I was sitting in my bed, scribbling book ideas and outlines in a notebook for two weeks--filling a brand new notebook full from start to finish.

And then I kinda drafted the book in a month.

Yes! I have completed a draft of my new book, which does not have a title at this time but which I will call RED PLANET for ease of discussion.

I am in love with this book, in the way that you're in love with your first born child. And I think it's because it took so dang long for me to get back into a place where I could do it. I had fallen out of love with writing--and now I'm in love with it again!

The draft is an absolute mess, so let's just be clear about that.

For starters, I have always been a plotter, and on this book I started with an outline but 20,000 words in I decided to throw in a big twist. You know the big twist that happens at the very very end of Variant? I was going to pull another one of those at the end of RED PLANET, but when I got to the 20k mark I just thought "You know what? Let's just do it now." And thus the outline was completely out the window.

So I'm doing revisions now and realizing that, when I'm not working off an outline I just make up whatever-the-crap-I-want nonsense and shove it in the story. And sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. It's especially in a problem in a book like this which takes place on Mars in the future, because: science. I did not do my research before writing this book and am now having to look up stuff. Like what is "smart matter"? It's a thing I found in a list of possible future inventions, so hey! They now are using smart matter!

But it's a lot of fun. I haven't been in a character's head in so long, and I love it!

Also, I used to always joke with my wife that I didn't know what I used to think about before I wrote books--because when you're writing a book you're always living in that book. And that is totally back! I couldn't get to sleep last night because I kept thinking about my characters.

All of this to say, I'm really liking this book and I'm looking forward to a day in the vast distant future when you will get to read it. Who knows when or how.

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.