Fear, Failure, and Robot Hookers

Well, it’s happening. My seventeenth book, WHAT HAPPENED TO LUCY VALE, comes out in two days. (Actually, it’s my nineteenth book—I wrote two wild experimental books under top-secret pseudonyms They kind of both fell on their face, even though I did earn a wild review comparing one of my novels to A Canticle For Leibowitz, but with more robot hookers!)

A friend of mine asked me whether I still got nervous about publication. The answer is no. I don’t still get nervous. I still get terrified. I am enormously afraid of failure, and it’s one of my largest daily challenges. It’s an old and familiar thought-pattern that spirals easily into worst-case scenarios: what if no one, not one person, reads the book? What if my publisher decides to yank support for my next book? What if I then can’t find anyone to publish my books again? Do I even have any books to publish? Do I have any ideas left? Do I have anything of value to say? Maybe I should just dig a hole, build a tent, and live out my life as a hermit.

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Yes, this is an accurate description of my daily inner monologue.

It’s funny, though, because as I began scrutinizing this today, I realized that I have spent much of my life failing in one way or another. (See above, re: the secret experimental novel with robot hookers). I started developing creative technology in 2016; we didn’t get a single client until 2024. I have written at least one script, and pitched at least one show, for Hollywood every year since 2014. It was 2021 when my first TV show, Panic, came out, and that was cancelled after one season. I still have never actually gotten a feature made. Some of my books have been wildly successful; others have come and gone with barely a whisper on the surface of social media. Funnily enough, those have been many of my favorites: Liesl and Po, for example, a middle-grade novel that I have always felt is one of my best.

And yet here I am, still cobbling together a creative career, doing the work I love, experimenting—and, I hope, growing as a human and a writer.

The problem with predictions is that we draw them in straight lines: from X event to Y outcome, simple as that. But the real world is, as my tech friends would say, stochastic: messy, surprising, extremely hard to anticipate, constantly giving rise to new challenges and, simultaneously, new opportunities. Actually, it’s our self-determined forecasts of the future that so often hem us into a straight line towards the outcome we most feared. On days when I am convinced that everything I write will fail, for example, it's almost impossible to motivate myself to do any writing!

Point is: I really need to stop freaking out. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Just in case, though, I might buy a tent today…

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