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?

Do I Not Have the Tools to Write?

Allow me to let you in on a shameful secret: I really have a hard time reading.

I have mental illnesses (plural) one of which includes OCD. And one of the medications I take to control these obsessions and compulsions has a side effect: it makes it so I can't obsess about ANYTHING, meaning I can't keep my attention up for a long time in any real direction.

Note: this has nothing to do with ADHD, which I also have. No, this is something specifically meant to tamp down my ability to concentrate on a long-term project--like reading a book.

Because of this, I went a solid THREE YEARS OF MY LIFE without completing a novel (like reading, but also not writing). I couldn't even do audio books. Heck, I couldn't even do movies or stick with a TV series.

And I felt incredibly guilty because there's the famous quote from Stephen King, from On Writing (a book I absolutely love) which says "If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write."

And I totally agree with that statement! If you don't read, you shouldn't be writing. I've been in the writing world long enough to have met several--too many--authors who say they just don't have time to read now that they're a writer, and I think "That's bananas! That's not how this is supposed to work!"

Thankfully, my meds have changed making it possible for me to read again, though I do feel like the 3+ years I was not reading AT ALL make me impossibly behind in both understanding my market and in understanding the cultural zeitgeist. Things have changed between 2019, when I was reading a book a week (usually through audiobooks consumed during my 2 hour commute each day), and 2023, when I finally got back into regular reading.

I noticed that my tastes changed a little during that time--in terms of what I enjoy reading. I kind of really love hard science fiction now, where I was much more of a soft sco-fi guy before. I am getting really into the details, loving the deep dives into minutiae.

I'm still writing my same old style, though, I hope, a little better. I don't know. I think that my tastes have changed for the better, and I think that has made me try harder to write a little better, but my books continue to be the same old Rob Wells stuff--just with more care taken.

All of this to say, I welcome reader recommendations, because I feel like I am very out of the loop, especially when it comes to my preferred genre: YA science fiction. To be fair, the genre is suffering a little bit at the moment. The current craze seems to be romantasy and MG fantasy, and the YA sci-fi market has never recovered from the post-dystopia nosedive. But I'm still here! And I'm going to keep writing!

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.

Why Are All My Books Set in New Mexico?

Here's a thing you'll notice about my books: almost all have some connection to New Mexico.

• My first book, On Second Thought, was set in a fictional town called Los Alamitos that is 100% just based off of Grants and I don't know why I didn't call it Grants.

• Variant and Feedback, my first national books, were set somewhere in the Carson National Forest, up west of Taos and north of Espanola.

• Blackout and Dead Zone have characters from New Mexico (the opening scene is also set at Glen Canyon Dam, which I'll come back to in a second).

• Dark Energy's main character, Alice, had a grandma who lived on the Navajo reservation in scenic New Mexico.

• And on and on until my current work-in-progress which takes place on a different planet, but the main character is from Albuquerque.

So why do I keep setting all my books in New Mexico?

Well, for starters, New Mexico is pretty great. There is so much to love about that state. It is incredibly beautiful, rivaling even "We're So Great We Have Five National Parks: Utah". New Mexico is truly gorgeous. Also, culturally it's incredible. There are (I believe) fourteen different tribes that call New Mexico home; the biggest on is Navajo and most of the rest are pueblos, and pueblos are really super awesome. Also, when it comes to culture, New Mexico was settled by the Spanish (New Mexico is the second oldest European city founded in what is now the United States, way back in 1610--that's a long time ago!) And so the culture is very Spanish and not as much Mexican as the name would suggest. Still very Mexican, but super Spanish.

Taos Pueblo

And the food reflects all of these cultures. The food is incredible. If you've ever had green chile? New Mexico invented that! The best green chile comes from a little place called Hatch, and if it ain't Hatch Green Chile, it ain't green chile. Sorry, Colorado--you think you're neat, but you're not. (Just kidding. I lived in Colorado, too, and it's great.)

Hatch Green Chile

And this is to say nothing about the history of New Mexico. Yes, the pueblos have been there a super long time--the Sky City Pueblo on the Acoma Reservation is, arguably, the oldest continuously inhabited place in the United States, dating back a thousand years! (Maybe! People argue about it!) And there's the ruins of magnificent civilizations that lived there longer ago. The Ancestral Puebloans (formerly known as the Anasazi) were based out of New Mexico--in Chaco Canyon and Aztec and a hundred other sites. And if you know anything about anthropology you have probably heard about the Clovis culture, or "Clovis points". That's New Mexico, too! And then the Spanish showed up, and there were wars and atrocities and treaties and broken treaties, and the United States showed up to make and break even more treaties. It's just a place where a whole lot of stuff happened, and that culture is reflected everywhere you look.

Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon

So, Aside From the Fact That New Mexico is Objectively Awesome, Why Do You Put It In So Many Books?

Well, the fact is I lived there. But I lived there in an interesting way.

First of all, I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), and I was a missionary. Missionaries don't choose where they go, it's assigned. My brother went to Chihuahua Mexico. My dad went to Kobe Japan. You just go where you're called, and I was called to the New Mexico Albuquerque Mission NNAM. At the time, the NMAM covered New Mexico north of Socorro (so, about halfway up), everything in Arizona that was on the Navajo and Hopi reservations, a corner of New Mexico that includes Cortez, Durango, and Pagosa Springs, and a little chunk of Utah that was mostly polygamist towns (there are little towns of fundamentalist LDS people, or FLDS, who live down there. The mainstream LDS church does not condone polygamy and hasn't for over a hundred years. Anyway).

So. That's where I went on my mission. You leave on your mission--or I did at the time--when you're 19 years old, and you're mostly an idiot, because all 19 year olds are idiots. Missionaries try hard not to be idiots, but we're not only 19 but we're boys, and we're 19 year old boys who mostly have never lived on our own. We do a lot of stupid things.

(There are young women who go on missions, too, but they are, in my experience, not nearly as dumb--and generally not as young--as the boys.)

So, I do some training in a place called the Missionary Training Center, for a couple of weeks, and then I got shipped down to Albuquerque where a kid, who has looked like he has seen hell and lived to tell about it, picks me up in a pickup truck and we drive to the absolute middle of nowhere. My first area was called Pueblo Pintado, which is 100 miles from everywhere: 100 miles from Albuquerque, 100 miles from Gallup, and 100 miles from Farmington. It was on the eastern edge of the Navajo Reservation, and the town, such as it was, consisted of our trailer, a chapter house (kind of a government center--all Navajo communities have a chapter house), two hogans (traditional Navajo homes that are round and built from logs and mud, and a school for about 60 kids. This place was not a large place. It was rugged. It was rough. It was isolated. The nearest store was five miles up the road, and even that was just a convenience store--the nearest gas station was 45 miles away in Crownpoint.

The eponymous Pueblo Pintado

But I cannot tell you how much I loved living in Pueblo Pintado. It was absolute desert, but it was high desert--I think it was somewhere around 7000 feet--so an interesting climate. And it was full of sage and it smelled so good all the time. There were interesting rock formations all over, as we were very close to the Bisti Badlands, and I lived not only 15 miles from Chaco Canyon, which is amazing, but 3 minutes from the actual ruin called Pueblo Pintado. It was an Ancestral Puebloan great house, that was (if I remember right) at least three stories and had at least one great kiva and several smaller kiva. It was something like 30-40 rooms. And, at the end of the day, we'd just go and hang out there and watch the sunset, and it was amazing.

But I didn't always live on the reservation. I spent some time in Los Lunas, a city about 30 minutes south of Albuquerque. That was fun, but I wasn't there long enough to really get a sense of anything. (I should say that when you're on your mission you move around from area to area. I think it kinda keeps things fresh and doesn't let you get bored.)

I spent time in Page, Arizona, and was there during the winter. It's right at the edge of Lake Powell on the Arizona Utah border, and it's there where Glen Canyon Dam is situated--which features prominently in the beginning of Blackout. That was a gorgeous area--I mean, the Glen Canyon Dam is at the head of the Grand Canyon, so you know it's beautiful. But I wasn't there very long and I was quite sick while I was, so I didn't get out much.

Lake Powell viewed from Page, AZ

I went to Cortez, Colorado, which is in the very most southwestern corner of Colorado. That was a very cool place because--and I have no idea if this is accurate or if it was made up by someone local--but Montezuma County (that county) has more archaelogial sites per square mile than anywhere in North America. This is defining "archaeological sites" as anything from a scattering of potsherds to a cliff dwelling. But the stuff is really everywhere: the town has a lot of farming, and every farmer had a collection of things that they'd dug up while they were working their fields. (According to the Antiquities Act, it's legal to possess ancient artifacts if you found them on private land. I don't think that anyone except the private land owners are happy about that--they ought to be in museums--but the fact remains that this stuff was everywhere.)

And we went to Mesa Verde almost every week, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site as well as a National Park, that is awash with cliff dwellings. This place is spectacular, and if you ever get the chance you should absolutely go.

Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park

But then I went to my favorite--and everyone else's most boring--place of all: Grants, New Mexico.

There is so much to love about Grants. First of all, it's weird. It had been the center of a major uranium mining boom and the town was huge and growing very rapidly. And then, sometime in the early 80s, the mines shut down, and this town that was getting so big lost half its population. So, there were boarded up buildings everywhere. Whole neighborhoods of shuttered apartment complexes. The town, at the time I lived there, was about 5000 people, and it could easily have handled twice that. All of which to say it was economically depressed.

But they were doing interesting things to make money. At least three prisons are in Grants (it might be four). And they were getting into big greenhouses when I was there. That's why, in my book On Second Thought, the main character, Walt, most to Los Alamitos to work at a big tomato greenhouse.

But getting aside from the weird economy, there is a lot to love in nature and history:

The town sits at the base of Mt. Taylor, which is one of the four sacred mountains for the Navajo. The sacred mountains, as I understand them, define the homeland of the Navajo and give protection to all who live inside their boundaries. So we were on the southeastern corner of those boundaries.

Mt Taylor

To the south was El Malpais, which is the Spanish word for Badland. It is a massive lava flow--Mt. Taylor is a volcano--and there is a lot of hiking and exploring to be done. At the time I lived there, you could go deep underground into the lava tubes and crawl around and do neat things, but I understand that it's closed to the public now.

El Malpais

To the southwest is the Zuni Mountains. And while I may have set Variant in the location of Carson National Forest, I imagined Variant in my head as the Zuni Mountains. So, whenever I'm describing the forests and hills surrounding Maxfield Academy in Variant and Feedback, I'm describing the Zuni Mountains.

There's El Morro about forty miles south, which is an oasis in the desert that people have been stopping at for millenia, and whenever they do they leave their mark on a massive butte. There's pictographs and petroglyphs, there's markings from the 1500s from early Spanish conquistadors. There's US Army from the 1800s. There's early Mormon pioneers. There's miners. There's everyone. It's really fascinating. That's a National Monument.

Inscriptions on El Morro

In Summary:

I write about New Mexico because New Mexico is a startlingly beautiful place. It has a magical culture (the motto is The Land of Enchantment, both because the land is enchantingly beautiful, and because the culture is based on magic). It has the best frigging food you'd find anywhere. It is just a remarkably wonderful place, and when I need to a character or a location, I just find so much to draw from there. It's like I'm a painter and I'm selecting colors--and all the best colors are from New Mexico. I am not nearly as inspired by anywhere else that I've traveled. I've set one book, Blackout, in Utah, but they leave Utah pretty quick and go somewhere more interesting.

New Mexico is just neat.

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.