This is the first time I’ve ever attempted to document my journey as an author. I think I’ve shied away from it because it’s… well, exhausting. I also have to break it into more than one post, because there’s a lot to tell. But here goes…
I’ve been writing my whole life, blah, blah, blah. I won’t waste time talking about it too much because it’s not interesting—I scribbled stories in spiral notebooks as a child and wrote my first novella at 16. My high school creative writing teacher liked it quite a bit and had me read a chapter to the class each day. Like Manzakar, it was a story about colonialism and rebellion, and I was passionate about telling it. (Clearly, I’d found my subject matter.)
After high school, however, I stopped writing fiction. Coming from an Arab family likely had a lot to do with it: “Writer” wasn’t a profession in my family’s eyes. Fiction writing, like most artistic endeavors, was a hobby. So like the obedient first daughter of a Syrian immigrant family, I pushed art aside.
Fast forward ten years. I still hadn’t gotten back into writing, but I’d done a whole lot of other stuff: I’d gotten a BA from an Ivy League university, gone on archaeological digs, graduated from law school, gotten married, and had my first child. It was in that first year as a stay home mother—between wakeful nights of colic, diaper changing, and witnessing the wonder of a new human’s smiles—that my need to create art came rushing back. It started off as “mommy blogging” in 2007, where I recounted hilarious stories about motherhood in post after post, and suddenly I remembered how much I loved storytelling. I got myself Photoshop and began creating digital artwork, telling stories through images as well as words. I posted the words on my blog and the images on Deviantart. Both endeavors earned me quite a few followers, reinforcing the voice in my head that had been whispering to me since childhood: I was meant to tell stories.
(The above comment was left under this piece on DeviantArt.)
I made so many online friends—fellow mothers, writers, artists. I began freelance editing to make some money while taking care of (now two) babies. Most of my clients were romance authors, and a couple were published by Harlequin and Avon. Content editing fiction really got my creative juices flowing again…
On a whim, I decided to start posting chapters of a tongue-in-cheek time travel “romance,” The Noble Pirates, on my blog. It began very much as a way to poke fun at the whole “time travel” romance trope, as well as the fantasy of “falling in love with a pirate.” My goal was to make it as historically accurate—and therefore as unromantic—as possible. Like my blog posts, the story was meant to elicit laughter, and my blogger friends, particularly the avid romance readers, egged me on.
But then something happened: People started actually reading my little serial satire. When a week would go by and I didn’t post a chapter as expected, I got emails and comments of why, when, and could you please hurry up? Somewhere along the way, my story became more serious and the stakes rose higher. I took my two bundles of joy to the library and bookstore and did historical research. Meanwhile, I continued to gain more readers, people who wrote me to tell me that they were printing out my chapters, that they’d stayed up all night reading, that it had kept them engrossed during chemo treatment…
By the time I finished writing TNP, I knew I had to at least try and get it published. I also—naively—believed that literary agents would love my story as much as my readers did…
Boy, was I wrong. It could very well be that my query wasn’t great—it was my first foray into the world of publishing as an author instead of an editor, and my query/synopsis writing skills were (still are) terrible. In any case, I also have zero patience, so after months of trying to pitch to agents with no real luck, I submitted to a small Canadian press which immediately offered me a contract, and literally weeks after publishing my book, went bankrupt.
With my rights to the story back in my hands, I self-published it with a different cover. But the reviews had already begun rolling in, and guess what? Readers didn’t seem to like it. Granted, I’m basing this off a handful of Goodreads reviews, which can be notoriously brutal. But it was then that I realized maybe I wasn’t reaching the right readers—or any readers at all. Were the people scouring the Internet for good stories different from the ones picking up books? Was it a Goodreads thing? Or was it that I’d marketed the book itself wrong? Admittedly, like pretty much everything I’ve written since, TNP doesn’t fit neatly into a genre. It’s not exactly romance, or historical fiction, or fantasy, or science fiction…
I’ve since revised TNP—the original was laced with curse words and had a married MC who falls in love with a pirate, both of which are things that didn’t bother the online fiction folks at all, but really seemed to rub the book readers wrong. (The MC is still married. Fair warning.) Still, every once in a while someone finds it and loves it, and it will forever be the story that brought me back to fiction writing.
My humble little web serial helped me remember why we tell stories or, really, make any sort of art: To express ourselves in intimate and radical ways, and perhaps move others with what we’ve created.
If all TNP ever did was bring someone joy while they sat through chemotherapy, that is more than enough for me.
***