Trust your gut. Even if your gut is telling you to write a weird time travel story with robots and dinosaurs.
Let’s start over. Apropos, considering we’re going to talk about time travel. In 2018 I signed a book deal that changed my life; The Warehouse sold in a pre-empt to Crown, then in more than 20 languages, and was optioned for film by Ron Howard.
I’d written five books prior to that, about an amateur private investigator, which came out from a small press. Granted, it was a small press that punched well above its weight, getting solid distribution and media hits.
But The Warehouse let me quit my day job and write full-time. It opened a lot of doors. All this from a book I never expected would actually get published (I didn’t think criticizing the company responsible for something like 75 percent of book sales in the US was a wise decision, but, nothing ventured…).
With all that came a lot of stress, pressure, and anxiety. It was enough to push me into therapy. Granted, I had a lot of other stuff to deal with, but The Warehouse got me on the couch.
One of the toughest things I had to do was figure out, career-wise, was: what do I write next?
I’d gone from small-scale punk rock noir to big idea speculative sci-fi. Do I go back to my roots? Do more of the same? More importantly, what is going to be expected of me?
I remember sitting with my agent, Josh Getzler, in his office. We were having lunch and talking through what to do next. I had two ideas.
One was about a world where solar flares wiped out the power grids and the humanity was thrust into the Dark Ages. It was a story about power and classism, and seemed to be in the Warehouse wheelhouse.
The other was about the house detective at a hotel for time travelers, and it would have robots and dinosaurs, and it would be about Buddhism, and grief, and…
Josh said, Don’t write the time travel book. Please.
At the time, he was not wrong to say that. For one, I did a terrible job explaining it. It was a germ of an idea, and based on how I was presenting it, it would have been a hard turn into science fiction, and take me too far away from the crime and thriller arena, as well as from the commentary I had done in Warehouse.
It also didn’t make a whole lot of sense yet.
So I got to work on the blackout book. And it was a nightmare. I did a ton of research. Wrote and re-wrote the opening. I would send things to my editor, Julian Pavia, and we could not see eye-to-eye on it. We had multiple meetings and phone calls, and a long dinner at a nice Italian restaurant in the West Village, and it was like we were speaking different languages.
Eventually I realized the problem: I had a lot of cool ideas to play with but nothing to bring them together. The characters weren’t strong enough. And I was too worried about writing what I thought would be expected of me, instead of what I wanted to write.
And what I wanted to write was a weird time travel story with robots and dinosaurs.
When I was stuck in the quagmire of the blackout book, I remember sitting in a bar in Hoboken with Chantelle Aimée Osman, the editor of Agora Books, and someone whose opinion I trust implicitly. She had been helping me talk through the blackout book, but when I started riffing on the time travel book, she was like, That’s the book you need to write.
It happened again a week or two later; I was sitting in Shade in the West Village, letting The Hard Bounce author and bartender extraordinaire Todd Robinson get me drunk on a lazy weekday afternoon. Todd is another person whose word is as good as gold to me. And when I talked about the time travel book he told me, You sound so much more excited about that one; that’s the one you should be writing.
They were both right and I’m glad I listened. So I sat down and reworked the pitch until it actually made sense—making it clear that this wasn’t a hard science fiction novel, and more of a thriller with some weird elements that was about someone who was trying to face herself, and struggling to do so.
And I went back to Josh and he did what any good agent would do: He heard me out, saw my passion for it, and backed my play. My editor dug it too.
Yes, there was some security there—I was, in a way, returning to my roots. A first-person POV, a wise-ass narrator, a murder that needed solving (this was just a murder that only the main character could see…).
But I also knew it was a big swing. Time travel is a tough subject to write—even more so when you’re writing it in a commercial thriller.
When I finished the book and shipped it off to Josh, I felt a huge sense of relief. Maybe I’d fallen on my face, maybe the damn thing didn’t work, but at least I wrote the thing I was passionate about.
And once he got the chance to read it, he called me up and said, You actually pulled it off. I wouldn’t say he was surprised. He trusted me. But it was nice to hear.
Julian liked it too. And thus far, the reaction has been pretty good. When I got a starred review from Publishers Weekly, Josh texted me and said, You come to me with a book with robots and dinosaurs!
I want to say it one more time for the people sitting in the back: Josh did his job—he worked with the information I gave him to make the decision that seemed best for my career. I needed to give him better information. Which meant figuring out how to explain the mess of ideas in my head in a way that made sense to anyone besides me. It’s an elusive skill and I’m still working on it.
The best way to do that is by learning to trust myself. All writers, to one degree or another, struggle with imposter syndrome. As I embark on the process of building out my next book, I’m feeling it in a very deep and profound way.
(I’m not kidding—I’m going back and forth between writing this, and looking at two one-page pitches; one for a brand-new novel and one for a Paradox sequel, and part of my brain is like: if this is the best you got, maybe you should take up knitting.)
But that feeling of fear and uncertainty is not a curse. It’s a blessing. It just means that I want to challenge myself, put out my best work, and make the next book better. This time, I can go at it with a little more confidence.
As long as I trust my gut, I’ll probably be okay.
***
