Time for some Candor

I’ve forgotten how to write for love.

Writing has always been a part of me. I truly believe it is so deeply ingrained in my soul that I couldn’t survive without it. Even as I promptly dropped out of soccer, field hockey, 4-H, Girl Scouts, Aiki Jitsu, horseback riding, voice lessons, band, and I’m sure an embarrassing number of other activities, I’ve come back to writing time and again. First, I wrote little stories that I shared with my mother, then teachers, then friends. I started writing fanfiction and posting it on the internet. I found a community of fellow writers who were inspired by their favorite fandoms, too. My best friend and I spent countless hours as teenagers on her computer (not watching porn, surprisingly) writing. Writing out fantasies about our favorite boybands, about being in a singing group ourselves–stories of romance, suspense, friendship.

I loved it. I lived for it. I spent all of my free time reading and writing. (Reading! I barely ever read anymore!) I spent too much time in class daydreaming, thinking up plots for the next story.

I read biographies and wrote research papers on J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling. Visions of a future as a professional author danced in my head. Book tours, signings, fame, fortune, people writing fanfiction about MY fiction, and–most importantly–getting to do what I loved for a living.

I studied English Literature in college (after I dropped the Education part because, as with many things, I grossly idealized what being a teacher was like). I became obsessed with honing my skill, learning from the authors I read and read about. I had begun reading trashy romance my senior year of high school (still love them), and in 2008, I won a short erotic fiction contest. The dream seemed within my grasp. And that was the start. I began writing erotica partly because I enjoyed it, but mostly because it was marketable. Who doesn’t want to buy sex?? I sold several short stories, I actually got PAID for my writing!! I began learning to navigate contracts, fill out forms, communicate with editors and publishers in a professional manner. I wrote queries and synopses. I wrote a romantic novella. I sent it to agents. It didn’t get picked up. It did, however, get picked up by a small publisher. More contracts, forms, ROYALTIES. I sent another book. I received edits.

I was becoming increasingly obsessed with marketability. I became jealous of people like Stephanie Meyer and E.L. James, who decided on a whim to write and publish. They were living my dream, dammit. One I was working 10x harder to achieve.

Everyone had advice. My eye was on success. But what was success? Was it getting published? Done. But I didn’t have a REAL book published. Did I? I didn’t have a book in bookstores or reviews from the New York Times. Then bookstores started to close. Did bookstores even matter anymore? Shouldn’t I be receiving more royalties? Shouldn’t I be able to make a living off this yet? How can I possibly call myself successful, call myself a writer, when I have so much more to achieve?

The small publisher went under in a tsunami of shady, shady shit. The progress I thought I’d made was ruined. But you know what was picking up speed around that time? Self-publishing! But not print, print was on its way out (or was it?). E-books! I could do that. So I did. But the successful self-published writers came out with at least a few books a year. I made myself a schedule. I made myself write, tried to make the things I wrote marketable. I googled my own name to find ratings and reviews. I waited anxiously for someone to notice me, to notice my work, to help me do what I wanted–write for a living, dammit!

(Unsurprising side note: Writing because you have to isn’t fun.)

It never really happened. And whenever I wrote, my eye was on the prize, on being the next J.K. Rowling or Carly Phillips or, hell, fine STEPHANIE FUCKING MEYER (See? Why am I such a snob towards her? Not fair.), and my heart wasn’t in it as fully as it should have been. Not the way it was when I was young and writing fanfiction with my best friend until 2am. Not the way it was when I wrote and illustrated my book about my new bike and proudly showed it to my mother. Not the way it was when I posted Star Wars fanfiction on fanfiction.net and had one single stranger say they liked it, and it made my heart burst the way I’d now decided only a 5-star New York Times book review could.

At that point, it was hard to be proud of anything. There was always a voice in the back of my mind saying “Not good enough, not good enough, not good enough.”

Not good enough for what? For who? Once upon a time, I didn’t care. Once upon a time, stories filled my mind, heart, and soul until they flooded from my fingertips and I wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and that simple act made me happy, made me feel alive. I didn’t do it for money. I didn’t worry about marketability. I did it because I couldn’t not.

I’ve been aware of and ignoring this struggle for years. I was afraid of losing something. (Losing what? Progress? Fans? Respect? The look of pride in my husband’s eyes as he tells everyone we meet that I’m a writer, while I both swell with pride and profusely protest. What happens when I’m no longer the writer, his wife and I become his wife, who happens to write? Will he still be proud? Will my mother? Does any of that really matter?)

I had a baby. Everything changed. You might think it doesn’t have to change things, but it does. It puts everything into perspective. You don’t matter so much. Your pride doesn’t matter so much. You just want this little potato with a face to grow and grow and look less potato-y and be happy. Once I wanted to write and be successful at writing more than anything. Now I look at her, and I think to myself, “If I could only choose one of you, I would choose you. Every day, on your worst day, and every day, on my worst day, I would choose you.”

I stopped writing. For five months.

I didn’t miss it at first. I didn’t miss writing, and I had a bit of an identity crisis. But slowly, the ideas crept back in. The ideas, without the question of whether they were good ideas or bad ideas or what that even meant. If an agent would be interested in the idea, if it had been done before, what genre would it fit into, who would read it, how would I execute it, would it make money?

I have ideas. Just ideas.

If I ever get published again, it will be a happy accident. I will no longer criticize every word as I write them. I will no longer write romance and erotica if I feel like writing fantasy, simply because that’s what people now expect of me (and if I ever have ANY hope at all of being successful I MUST publish and I MUST stay relevant in my genre).

I am relearning how to write for love. As I’m writing this, the birds are chirping, a warm spring breeze is coming through the window, and my little baby is sleeping. I feel the familiar urge. I feel, for the first time in a long time, the familiar peace that writing brought, once upon a time. And I am happy. I am happy being “Mommy, who writes” instead of “A writer, who is also Mommy.”

So don’t expect to see much more from Heather Lin. I’ll leave all of my published material right where it is on Amazon, but I’ll be bumping all titles down to $.99 in the near future.

I’ll also be publishing the sequel to The System in the near future on something like FictionPress. It will be free, and it will be fun, and I hope you’ll read it and enjoy it.

Writing is my dream. It is my passion. It always will be.

But, finally, after nearly ten years, I think I am no longer consumed by it.