My new book, Perceiver, came out today, August 31st, 2021.
Perceiver is about a young girl, Hattie Flores, whose parents are kidnapped by creatures from an alternate world known as Tsava. Hattie makes a deal with one of the creatures. She would work for him for five years, and in return, she would get her parents back. But she quickly becomes tangled in Tsava’s mysteries and soon discovers she has a greater role to play.
People keep telling me, “Your first book! How exciting!” And I’m like, “Yeah!” Because it is! But I’ve worked on Perceiver and its sequels for so long—a decade, in fact—that I mostly think, finally. Here is this thing I’ve carved from hours, day dreams and words. Whenever I read author acknowledgements in other books I’m always shocked to see how many names appear. The parents, editors, friends, first readers… To list all the people whose lives and stories nourished Perceiver would make the book one hundred times longer. I wouldn’t know many of their names. They would be the people who inspired the authors who inspired me. They would be the parents, the lovers, the rivals, the enemies, the names written in the flyleaves of the family Bible in different inks and hands.
I cannot separate the creation of Perceiver from becoming a writer: of growing aware of my place in the world, discovering what I value and fear, and what I need to write.
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I had before been an avid reader and hobby writer. I took up a professional attitude toward writing when I was 16. I spent hours after school typing up my stories on a desktop unconnected to the internet. I wasn’t thinking of writing as a profession then, but I already knew I would write for the rest of my life.
The man who kickstarted my drive to be a professional was Al Young. I met him at the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute; he taught the poetry discipline. One day I asked him, “Do you write every day, even if you’re not inspired?”
His answer stuck in my brain: “Every day.”
Sometime that fall after the arts camp, I discovered and gorged myself on John Steinbeck’s work: Cannery Row, East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath. I fancied myself smart and had strong opinions of what great writing should be— full of elaborate description, wisdom, characters real enough to talk to— and Steinbeck’s writing was the very model of Great. From a selection of his diaries, published in the Paris Review, I found this quote:
“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.”
John Steinbeck
I thought, psh, I bet I can do two pages.
I bought a knockoff Moleskine notebook (Fauxskine) and tried to write every day. It was the first time I wrote even when I didn’t want to. It was like turning on a rusty faucet. I had to put muscle into it, and sometimes only a trickle came out, and I had to wait for the words to dribble filter down the page before I could let go. But it got easier to turn the faucet on every day.
Then as a junior at the Oklahoma School for Science and Mathematics (OSSM), my workload was immense: microbiology, mechanics, world literature, Japanese II, etc. OSSM has mandatory study time from 8:00pm to 10:00pm. But if you were a really good student, you’d study after lights out. My roommate studied; I wrote. We put construction paper shades over our desk lamps so no excess light would leak under the door, and we turned our pages gingerly so the hall monitors wouldn’t hear them and catch us. Sometimes I wouldn’t finish writing until past midnight, getting so sleepy my words would wander above and below the lines.
On January 1st, 2011, I decided to give my vow an official shine, and made it my New Year’s Resolution. I made the whole year without skipping a single day. On January 1st, 2012, I thought, Okay, encore!
I began writing Perceiver when I was a senior at OSSM. The story began from a few elements: The nursery rhyme about Jack and Jill, and a picture I found on StumbleUpon of a girl falling from the sky and a long-limbed young man in suspenders running to catch her. Elements from the movie Spirited Away and the Russian fairytale Vasilissa and Baba Yaga found their way into the story. Girls who braved new worlds, made friends and enemies, and who fought for what they believed in. Girls of courage, ingenuity, and compassion, who felt older than they were and angry at the state of the world.
I had no doubt it would be a bestseller. I was special, destined for great things.
The early drafts of Perceiver imitated my favorite books: The Bartimaeus trilogy, The Mysterious Benedict Society trilogy, The Monster Blood Tattoo trilogy, His Dark Materials trilogy. Perceiver is a trilogy because I thought that’s what you had to write! I also thought that books had to be about good and evil. I imagined battles between good and evil looked like CGI orcs smashing into elves and monologues before battles, after battles, during battles. But I didn’t know what good and evil looked like personally.
I kept writing. I finished the first draft of Perceiver my first year of college, and wrote the sequel and conclusion my second and third year.
After college, I floundered. A close family member had a mental health crisis that lasted over a year. I worked several part-time jobs that led to nothing. I submitted short stories everywhere and got rejected. I revised Perceiver blindly, at a loss for how to make it better. I prized my determination and hard work but berated myself because I felt that I was still smart and didn’t need to, shouldn’t be, struggling. Especially with writing–the one thing I thought I was good at.
During this time, fiction, especially YA, especially YA fantasy, failed to sustain me the way it had in middle and high school. When I read stories about chosen ones, I thought, “Well, aren’t you special.” The characters’ bravery pointedly reminded me how I failed to live up to the values I wrote about and read about: those of courage and caring, of making the world a better place, of spunkiness and standing up for what was right. I felt like I was a minor villain in the story of my own life. I wanted to make the world a better place, but in the abstract sense. I was aware of the evils of the world, but it didn’t spur me to take action. I cared about writing and reading more than anything, and didn’t–still don’t–want to do anything else.
I recently read George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Saunders admits that if he knew stories actively made the world a worse place, he would still do it. I thought, Same, dude, same. I no longer feel as if I’ve ever been chosen or called. At least, not in the way that somebody would single you out for greatness. I felt like I was a fraud for writing about good and evil without knowing either.
I thought more, read more, wrote more. More importantly, I lived more. As an Americorp member, I met amazing, ordinary people who tried to change the world. A complete stranger comforted me during one of the worst days of my life and I glimpsed grace, something I’d always believed was hooey. I experienced evil.
Every time I thought I knew something for sure, the world would turn around and say, “Oh, really?” and hit me with a counter argument. I couldn’t always argue back. I realized that my answers to the major questions of human life were at best unexamined and at worst dishonest. More and more, I wrote to find honest answers. My stories stopped rehashing old answers to big questions. Instead, they asked better questions, which the characters would fumble and wrestle to answer.
The first book of the Perceiver trilogy asks, “What does it mean to be chosen?” The protagonist tries desperately to avoid the question. Why? Between the first draft and the final draft, I learned this: the answers to big questions need to be experienced. Those experiences rend your life apart.
The only thing I’ve been chosen to do is write every day, usually from the hours of 8pm-10pm, sometimes until midnight, and to pay attention. The endeavor of writing Perceiver and the friendships, missed connections, and communions with other people helped me become the writer I needed to be. Perceiver is not entirely mine.
I hope it will be something people will slide off the shelf and enjoy centuries later. I hope when I’m dead and famous some kid somewhere will read this blog article and thinks, Two pages? Psh, I can do that.
You can read the summary and the first chapter of Perceiver here and purchase it here.