Deep in my black heart, I always dreamed of a day when I would write a series full of non-romantic friendships with as much tension — nay, more — than the romantic relationships. Where readers would gasp and clutch their pillow in suspense … not over whether or not A and B would kiss, but rather if C and D would still be friends in a month.
Not to discount romance or kissing in the slightest, of course. Rather to lift up and point at the Healing Power of All-Consuming Best Friendship.
A reader asked me at a signing if Calla and Persephone had been sleeping together — if that was why Calla was destroyed by the events of book 3. I don’t recall what I said at the time — probably I just opened my mouth and words poured out in a grammatical fashion — but I was thinking how strange I felt about the idea that a platonic or asexual relationship was considered to be a subordinate thing to a sexual relationship; that passion in the sack equaled passion in one’s heart. Love is love. I am ferocious about my best friends; I reckon that is what I’m trying to say in The Raven Cycle.
Does that make the answer “yes”? I think it does. Yes. There was a reason.
urs,
Stiefvater
ETA: I forgot to mention that when I wrote The Raven Boys, I had a sticky note affixed to my computer that read: Remember that the worst thing that can happen is that they can stop being friends.
it’s 2018 and I’m written so many words about Ronan Lynch and Adam Parrish in the last year and I still think the best ship name I’ve ever seen for them in the TRC fandom is #the mechanic and the tool
This is sorta a complicated question. Well, maybe it isn’t. No, probably it is. Well — ok, so here’s the thing. You should know that when I wrote before that when someone wrote fanfic with my characters for money, they were doing what is truly and legally and contractually my job, I got a fair amount of heat about it from fandom. Talking about how my writing pays my mortgage always ends up a very weird and unpleasant conversation and so I mostly avoid doing it. So I guess let me start with a link to some info on how I actually get paid.
And repeat this upfront, because it’s always going to be the most unpopular bit, I guess: legality aside, it doesn’t make me feel good when other people charge money for writing about my characters.
Onward:
Fan art is a squishier area —the visual rights to my characters are somewhat protected in my copyright or in the right Scholastic holds, but I don’t make my living creating Raven Cycle art. I love seeing fan art, I love that fans are so invested that they bring it to life in a more colorful form than just words on a page. I’m glad it exists.
Fan merch is weirder — I don’t really make my living off merch, but a really complicated feeling plays through my head when I see someone using my characters in their online shop with the somewhat ironic warning on the page: PLEASE DON’T STEAL MY DESIGNS.
Zines … zines are another thing altogether. In theory, I think they’re a cool thing, a miracle of collaboration across states and countries. In practice, they often actually are cool things. However, if you told me I had to take an official stance? This is where it gets complicated. I’d have to tell you they make me uncomfortable, because even though the hypothetical zine in this case is supporting a cause I’m 100% great with, if it’s ok for anyone to make a zine with my characters as long as the proceeds are going to a cause instead of to an individual, it would be equally legit for them to use my creation for a cause that I very much really do not stand for. TRC zine for meninists or whatever.
And that would sort of make me dead inside.
This is kind of what copyright is for, to make sure that your work doesn’t get used in ways that you aren’t ok with.
So like I said, it’s complicated. They don’t hand out booklets to creators when fandoms begin to form. I prefer getting to be the parent who hands out new stories rather than the parent who enforces the bedtime and other laws.
Once upon a time, a loopy author deep into her deadline bought 35 80s songs at 1 am in the morning while writing a novel and then joked that it sounded a little off for Adam Parrish to be singing Mr. Mister and 90% of the fandom laughed and 9% of the fandom decided this meant canon Mr. Mister and 1% formed a dreamy-memory of something involving Ronan and synthesizers and that was the last time the author ever tweeted after midnight again.
I’m asked at least once a week how to get published. Once upon a time, this was a very straightforward answer:
1. Write a novel.
2. Write a query letter.
3. Send the query letter to agents or to editors.
4. Rinse and repeat until said agents and editors ask to see the rest.
5. Rinse and repeat until they see the rest and ask to buy it.
5. In the case of multiple offers, speak to all parties on the phone and see which one makes you feel like the prettiest pony.
Here were things you did not do:
1. Pay to be published.
2. Pay your agent anything besides 15% of the sale price of your book and your royalties.
3. Pay for any of the costs associated with being published such as cover design, editing, printing, hiring of performing bears, etc.
4. Do anything other than write and be paid for writing.
But now there are many ways to be published. Self-publishing and small publishers no longer have the same stigma attached to them. It is no longer the most obvious thing to say: to get published, write a query letter and submit it to an agency or a publishing house, DONE.
Instead, you must ask yourself: what is my goal in publishing?
If your goal is to write a book that you hope will appear on the shelves of Barnes & Noble, CostCo, and supermarkets everywhere, you still need to follow the first set of steps. A traditional publisher is still your only way to get into all of those places. And if you really do have your eye on stands in supermarkets and Sam’s Club and airports, you not only need a traditional publisher, but you need a large traditional publisher of the sort that generally exists in New York and is called something like Little, Brown, or Scholastic, or Random House. You will also need an agent.
You will need, as I said before, to do all of the steps I first listed.
If your goal is to write a book that you’d like to see on shelves but are fine with those shelves being the ones in specialty stores or libraries or schools, a smaller traditional publisher might be a good option for you. This is especially true if you’ve written a less commercial book. (here is a good way to judge if something is commercial: can you imagine your mother, your hair dresser, your veterinarian, and your brother in law all reading it? if so, it is super commercial. Commercial =/= good. It merely means many people will pick it up).
These smaller houses will carry the burden of editing and printing and marketing for you, but they won’t always have the clout to get your book into major stores. They are, however, often less competitive than the larger New York houses, and they will often give you more personal attention and promote your book for longer. You don’t always need an agent to submit to them either, though I recommend an agent if you’re pursuing a full-time career in writing.
But if your goal is only to be read, or to if you have a keen marketing mind and want to represent yourself, self-publishing is an emerging option. You’ll have all of the control, and there will be no rejection letters in your future. But you’ll also carry the entire burden of cover design, editing, printing, formatting for digital distribution and, most importantly, marketing and publicity. I was a self-representing artist, and success is possible, but it will look different than success at a traditional larger house, and it will ask different things from you. You will not, at this point, ever walk into a Sam’s Club and see a self-published title sitting on the table out front. It is very possible to be a writer without Sam’s Club. But it’s important to keep that in mind if a big commercial career is what you long for — the book on that table bears the logo of a large traditional publishing house.
A note: There are several companies that offer to help you with self/ digital-only publishing at the moment, but I’m not convinced of their usefulness at this point. I think it’s a little too soon to see how they’re anything but a middle man at this stage. My feelings are if you’re going to dive into the digital world, you should be doing it because you want the freedom and control in your own hands.
What it comes down to is that you need to be honest with what you need out of your publishing experience. Unhappiness comes from wrong-headed expectations and targeting the wrong house. If you long to see your book at O’Hare airport, you’re going to have a miserable experience self-publishing. If you want to publish a serial story in ten parts over two years, you’re going to have a hard time pitching it to a traditional house. Don’t expect a small house to suddenly change its stripes and drop a quarter million marketing budget on your novel.
DO YOUR RESEARCH.
Make a list of books and careers that you admire and would like to model, and then work backward to find out how those authors ended up where they were. And if something sounds too good to be true, it is. Consider suspect any option that seems like it doesn’t require rejection and work and practice and polish and scrabbling of your hands and teeth. This is the best job in the world, which means there are a lot of people who are fighting for it. If you really want it, you’ll fight alongside with them.
I share these ancient teenage drafts with the world only in hopes that other aspiring writers will learn from how terrible a writer I was when I began. As we all are. And in the hopes that anyone reading this post as the first introduction to my writing figures out that I have improved in the last fifteen years.
The guide to the name differences in the old drafts:
Sean = Ronan
Adam = Noah
Secret = Orphan Girl
Scott = Declan
Jackie = a Lynch sister who got deleted
Here’s a bit about when Ronan finds Niall Lynch’s journal:
Yes, Sean/ Ronan, we know, and no, you’re not the only one:
Here is Gansey as an old man with Knowledge:
A draft where Sean discovers he is a dream thief:
And a draft where Gansey has gotten theoretically younger in body but is still basically an old person. Also, Glendower was actually Llewellyn who was actually the Wild Hunt. Enjoy.
The Raven Cycle was a series that I picked up and put down and retooled many times between 15-19, and even though I wrote other terrible novels at the time, this one, more than any of the others, reflected my current interests and desires and fears and inability to avoid italics.
bullshit central 