“If you could talk to the person you were when you were writing your first-published novel, what insights and guidance would you give yourself about the writing life?”

When I first read this question, I started compiling a list of all the MANY MANY things I could tell my young self as I started plunking away at Draft 1 so many years ago.

I’ve come up with moral support and technical pointers, assurances that all will be okay, in spite of the heartbreak, tears, crumpled up rejection letters, and the negative advice I kind of picked up in the vibes of anything I read about trying to publish: you never will. It’s impossible.

Joining the writing community earlier on than I did would be a good suggestion for the younger me. More so, learn the ABCs of plot development, which will save a ton of rewrites. Above all, keep submitting those manuscripts in spite of disappointment, because it will happen, I can tell you that assuredly from where I sit. So chill, girl!

But on further reflection, I guess it would be folly to try to change who I was, because who I was is who I am, and the road I travelled had to be travelled. I kept writing in spite of ignorance of the rules and my doom and gloom expectations. So now I can say it was steeliness, or gumption, or foolhardiness, or some such thing that got me here, rather than a promise dangled from a future self.

The only bit of advice I would be tempted to tell myself is: Open your eyes a little wider; explore, ask questions, listen, take pictures, make note of the geography. You may not be by this way again, and that person you’re talking to may be gone tomorrow ( believe it or not, people do die).

What you’re experiencing right now is pure gold. Live it!

I probably wouldn’t have listened, but that’s what I’d tell myself from here.

BUSINESS: Do you have a literary executor named in your will? What would you like (or loathe!) to have happen to your work when you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil?

A good question. I hope I live a good long while, but in the off chance that I don’t, it would be good to have this problem worked out in advance, now that I’ve gone and created this monster: a published series. These monsters (also sometimes known as assets) go crashing along on their own, but need their creators there with them. I can’t imagine what mine will do in this world without my company. What a sad thought!

But it’s a thought that must be confronted. Until this good question was asked, I actually didn’t know there was such a thing as a literary executor. Now I do, and have researched it a bit, and it seems that if you have a literary agent, that is the best person/firm to entrust with such legalities — so that is what I will do.

That’s the easy part of this question. The other part is, what happens to my unfinished series left hanging, all my protagonists and antagonists having skidded to the edge of the cliff and just kind of  left suspended there, mid-grapple, not knowing what will happen next.

I guess it’s just like life itself: c’est la vie. I write a series, with a backstory running through it. Would it be a good idea to write up a neat series summary, for anybody who wants to know what happens — or would have happened if I hadn’t popped my clogs without warning? Not really, as I don’t know what the end result will be myself, not a hundred percent, not yet. Probably best to take it with me.The better scenario is I wrap it all up before then, get my final copy edits in, and leave this mortal coil knowing that my monster is living peacefully in the clouds of somebody else’s imagination…