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I want to share an essay today, ane of the nigh personal things I've ever written, and ane of those I'one thousand proudest of. It's about how I sold my starting time novel.

I've been stunned since I learnedToo Like the Lightningis a finalist for the Best Novel Hugo. This really is the highest honor I can imagine, my piece of work being recognized as ane of the near valuable contributions to the community of conversation which drives us forrad through speculation about other worlds to touching and creating them, both hither on Earth and out amongst the stars. The community where the Great Conversation thrives. While I always intended to contribute to that conversation, I never expected this kind of reception for a very hard and intentionally uncomfortable book, one which I had imagined as finding an excited but niche audience, never a large ane. I oasis't known what to say other than "Give thanks yous!" but a common "Thank yous!" feels mismatched, like paying the same fifty¢ at a rock store for a shiny hematite ane week and the Philosopher's Stone the next. And I've also been swamped with last exams, colliding deadlines, three European conferences, research travel, illness, editing book three, preparing a new projection on the History of Censorship (more on that later), all the usual time-eating co-conspirators that make information technology easy to put off annihilation difficult. And information technology is hard to figure out how to write a world-sized thank-you to match this earth-sized joy.

Only I think one appropriate thank-you is to share this essay. I wrote information technology for Shannon Page for her brilliant collectionThe Usual Path to Publication (Book View Café, 2016), which contains 27 different authors' stories well-nigh how we sold our beginning novels. The volume's variety succeeds in showing what it set out to, that there is no "usual path," no consistent method, no one slice of advice that always helps on the path that no 2 people ever walk the same way. The volume is absolutely my elevation recommendation for new or aspiring writers (also this really really good Book Riot Article on how much coin authors brand incl. cocky pub & traditional pub).

I suspect I'm not the just contributor toThe Usual Path to Publication who plant that the story that came out, when I tried to tell it, was so personal, so saturated with the nigh intense emotion, that I was more than a little nervous sharing it at first. But I also think telling the story ways even more at present that it has a Hugo nomination at the cease of it, and a Campbell nomination, and the Tiptree Honors List, and the Compton Crook Award. Considering I grew up in Maryland, then I've seen the Compton Crook Accolade given out to a Best First Novel in the genre every year at since I was a piddling daughter, every time thinking "Maybe anytime information technology will be me?" So this is how I got to Anytime.

The Key to the Kingdom, or, How I Sold Too Like the Lightning.

by Ada Palmer, 2016

Some people say revenge is living well –
I've found information technology sometimes works to go away
And be more awesome. Permit him sit down alone,
To scout your wildfires leaping as you lot play.

-Jo Walton, "Advice to Loki" 2013.

The midpoint first, so the primordial darkness, then the always after.

It was 2011 (retrieve, this is the creation myth of a book that won't come out until 2016). I was in Florence, sitting in the height of a xiii^th century tower betwixt Dante's house and my favorite gelato place (actress relevant in an united nations-air-conditioned Baronial!), and talking to Jo Walton about whether or non I should start a blog. It was the beginning of a year in Florence, a postdoctoral enquiry fellowship at the Villa I Tatti, Harvard'southward institute for Italian Renaissance studies. Life equally a Renaissance historian had granted me long stays in Florence twice before, one time on a pupil Fulbright, and one time taking a shift as I Tatti'south resident grad student mascot (#1 duty, exist introduced to rich donors and look bright-eyed and promising). During my earlier stays I had written a series of e-mails describing my Italian experiences, and sent them to a list of friends and family. The listing grew over time as the recipients recommended them to more than distant cousins and acquaintances, until I had about a hundred people on my list. In fact, those eastward-mails were how I knew Jo. Ane of my then-roommates, Lila Garrott (a poet, writer, book reviewer, and now editor at Strange Horizons) had posted a few of what, in neoclassical way, I called my "Ex Urbe" e-mails on LiveJournal, where Jo had enjoyed them. In 2008 Jo had invited Lila and the rest of our eclectic household to visit her for Farthing Party in Montreal. Jo was with me in Italy that Baronial because the question "Practise you lot want to come stay in my apartment in a 13^thursday century tower in Florence?" has i correct answer. "I wonder if it would exist less piece of work to just post them on a blog," I said, overwhelmed past trying to gather the new list of people who had asked to receive my e-mails. Jo looked at me very seriously. "If you brand a blog, I'll ship the link to Patrick Nielsen Hayden."

I did make a blog. (This weblog.)

In three months, it was in the sidebar of Making Light.

In six months, Patrick asked Jo if the author of this ExUrbe web log had written any fiction.

In two years (almost to the solar day, August 2013) Patrick bought Too Similar the Lightning.

My appetite to run across my fiction in print had been overwhelming since elementary school, and I vividly remember the thrill of standing on tiptoe to spotter my starting time typed story (a single paragraph, about blueish-and-silver alien raccoons) crawl its manner out of the phenomenal new dot matrix printer at Dad's role. I had begun a novel by quaternary course, three past tenth, and I devoured summer writing courses, of which the courses on essay writing (Johns Hopkins) and prose poetry (Interlochen) proved far more valuable than the fiction ones. I remember one time thinking to myself at fifteen, bored during a school convocation, that if I hadn't published a novel past xx-five then… the stop is vague. Then I should give up? Then I was a failure? So I should curse the heavens? It was my first serious higher writing mentor Hal Holiday who helped me understand how absurd that was. He made me weep in his function, with my starting time-ever B on a paper. I didn't understand what I'd done wrong. "Writing is a long apprenticeship," he said. I hadn't done anything wrong, just writing well—not well for your age group, merely well in an absolute sense—was difficult to attain. It took real time. Spending every childhood summertime and weekend writing, taking every summer writing course, those were good steps, they helped, just they were a offset. I finished my first novel typhoon that year, flipped back to page one, and started writing it all over over again.

In 2002, at twenty-one and with Mom to stuff the envelopes, I sent my (totally-rewritten) commencement novel-length manuscript winging its optimistic style to slush piles at agencies and publishers. I sometimes recollect, if we could harvest the emotional energy in all the fatty manila query envelopes aspiring writers entrust to the mail service office every solar day, we could motion planets. I have a binder of rejection letters from that commencement volley, and, looking over them at present, I can come across the skilful signs in them, the peppering of personalized notes, praise and encouragement amidst the form messages. I didn't understand then how many queries editors, agents and interns read, how generous information technology was for them to sacrifice precious seconds to write these extra lines (give thanks y'all!), simply it did a lot to proceed me going. And in the back of the binder I e'er kept a printout of Ursula Le Guin sharing a very grim rejection letter she received for The Left Manus of Darkness, with her notation "This is included to cheer up anybody who simply got a rejection letter of the alphabet. Hang in there!" Thank you. Later on eight months of agonizing suspense, and the sporadic gut-punch of rejections, that first volley got me an agent. She was not an F&SF specialist, only was game to try, and spent the next years doggedly marketing what neither of us realized was an unsaleably long fantasy novel.

I don't recollect where I received the wisdom that it'due south meliorate to go on and write Volume one of a new series rather than write Book two of a series when you oasis't sold Book i yet. Wherever I got it from, I obeyed it, and soon my plucky agent was shopping ii serial, then three. Despite loving to sleep in, I followed the old advice and wrote in the morning time, every day, an hour or two, giving my best hours to fiction and the remainder of the day to the demands of grad school, and thereby wrote close to a million words of fiction over 7 years. Looking over those practice projects now, I can see my writing improve with each, the sentences, the stride, the plot. Every paragraph was a step in that long apprenticeship. The wait stretched on—3 years, 4—and it hurt—the growing, gnawing ambition. Sometimes I would lie awake at night just from the pain of wanting something then much. But I had an agent, and that gave me confidence, and comfort.

Meanwhile I was working on my Ph.D. The single best thing that ever happened to my writing—looking at the novel I was working on at the fourth dimension you tin see the very affiliate break where it happened, similar lightning struck and *ZAP!* the prose was finally adept—was in 2005, when I had to cut downwardly my 20,000 word dissertation prospectus into a 7,000 word conference paper. Without knowing it, I had stumbled on "Half and Half Over again," equally it'south called by people I know in journalism, a grooming exercise in which you lot go through the agony of cutting an old work downward to half length, then one-half of that, learning to spot the chaff and bloat in your own work, and how to make it tight and powerful. Lightning. I published other things—my start academic article, blog pieces for Tokyopop about manga & cosplay, a Random Superpower Generator for Maple Foliage Games, merely none of them eased the wanting. I also learned more about the world of genre publishing, from going to conventions and chatting with author friends made through Lila, and through my science fiction clubs, HRSFA (the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Guild), and Double Star (at Bryn Mawr Higher). F&SF specialist agent Donald Maass spoke to us at Vericon, a great little con HRSFA runs at Harvard every yr, and I learned from his talk virtually the field, the extreme crowd of submissions, the challenges of length and salability. I had queried Donald Maass (unsuccessfully) mode back in 2002, but in 2006, with my writing much improved, preparing to begin a new series which I felt in my gut was spring above the others (and somewhen became the Terra Ignota series), I decided to break off my relationship with my beginning amanuensis (with much gratitude and good will) and to try fresh to get a new agent at a major F&SF specialist agency.

I finished the offset typhoon of Too Similar the Lightning (Book one of Terra Ignota) in 2008, my penultimate twelvemonth of graduate school. Betwixt 2002 and 2008, plump manila envelopes had evolved into instantaneous e-queries, and my generic comprehend messages had acquired the varnish of proper name-dropping. I had recommendations from random people in the publishing world (Walter Isaacson, Priscilla Painton) whom I had met through Harvard. And, while my beginning 2002 volley had showered queries on dozens of doorsteps (many quite inappropriate), I sent Too Like the Lightning to but one printing in 2008, my keen promise: Tor. The more than I learned nearly the world of genre publishing, the clearer it became that Tor was ane of the just (if not the only) press that had the stability and resources to gamble on a big, fat scientific discipline fiction series (four long books!) by a first time writer, books which were dense and highbrow, and totally not similar to anything—trends are a safe investment; oddities are a gamble. Plus, I had an 'in'. At that place were people at Tor who were friends of friends, alumni and assembly of both Bryn Mawr and Harvard, some of whom knew my Double Star and HRSFA connections. (Aye, I tried nepotism for all it was worth, anyone would—I still lay awake at nights, just wanting.)

Afterwards some other twelvemonth of lying awake and wanting (and finishing my Ph.D., and facing the academic task market, which in 2009 had but entered its sudden death spiral), a Tor contact told me (I think at Readercon?) that the book had avant-garde from the "slush" pile to the "shows promise" pile. This was good news, but an united nations-agented manuscript, which the editor knows has been sent to no other printing, can stew in that pile forever. That November I queried Donald Maass, hoping a kind word from Tor would aid me become an agent, and that a good amanuensis might prod forth the literary glacier. I even got a Harvard-made mainstream publishing contact to eastward-mail Donald Maass with his endorsement to accompany my query. (Coil for nepotism! Did it achieve annihilation? Not actually!) On December 31^st, I received an e-mail from Donald apologizing for losing my query and getting back to me so late (apologizing for a filibuster of just 2 months! Such professionalism! Such sanity!) and saying he loved the showtime of the book, and was eager to read the whole thing. I sent it right abroad. I waited. I shopped other, older projects with a YA agent recommended by a friend (no luck). I published other things—more academic manufactures, critical essays, introductions to manga and anime releases. I stayed upwards nights. Sometimes information technology was then bad I couldn't go into a bookstore without feeling sick to my breadbasket. In November 2010 (a total year after Donald had asked for the book) Amy Boggs, then a adequately new member of the Donald Maass Agency, wrote to say that Donald—swamped by unspecified and mysterious stuff—had passed the volume on to her, and she loved it. We finalized the contract past early December, and Amy started shopping the book around in the commencement of 2011.

That spring I received my I Tatti Fellowship, and that summer I sat in a tower in Florence with Jo Walton, contemplating a blog. Jo had talked to me well-nigh Patrick Nielsen Hayden, though I too knew of him from other sources; legends of such titans echo far through our little magic kingdom.

There is a fresco by Perugino in the Sistine Chapel, which shows St. Peter, in a cute neoclassical foursquare, receiving the Keys to Heaven from Christ, with a group of apostles and others gathered around to watch. It's a securely tender moment, Peter's awe at the sight of the divinity which is also the friend he loves and so much. But I tin can never meet it without imagining the next console of the comic book, where Christ has gone back to Sky, and Peter is left in the square holding these enormous gold and silver keys, and everyone is standing around awkwardly, trying non to stare, and someone sidles upward saying, "And then… tin can I become you a cup of coffee?" Y'all can't put them down, that'due south the thing, in one case you lot have the keys to Heaven, no one on World tin can forget it, non for an instant. And that's very much what it'southward like beingness an acquiring editor (I've described this to Patrick, he agrees), because you accept the Keys to the Kingdom, and people around yous—at conventions, at talks, online—desire it so much. And so much they lie awake at nighttime. There are infinite horror stories about editors beingness harassed and chased at cons, having manuscripts shoved under bathroom stall doors, repeated due east-mails which get weirder and more drastic. And so, from babyhood (picture me scrawny and eleven, following Dad and Uncle Bill to a Physician Who convention, with my male child-short vivid blonde hair, dressed equally the Peter Davison Doctor) I had information technology drilled into me that you should never approach and bother an editor (or published author) about your manuscript. Q&A when they were on panels was OK, but outside that sphere verboten! In fact, I had met Patrick at Farthing Party back in 2008, but, knowing who he was, I was an emotional wreck just being near him, racked between the Scylla of my want and the Charybdis of the taboo, and so I spent much of the weekend actively hiding around corners and behind pillars to avoid looking at him. Merely Jo knew I had a manuscript, and passed information technology on to Patrick for me in leap of 2012 when he asked her if the writer of ExUrbe had written any fiction.

And I waited. And I lay awake at dark. On a trip to New Orleans, an editor friend of Jo's told a story about a query which had taken twelve years to be accustomed, which actually made me throw upward. I tried to start another novel series, but I couldn't. Terra Ignota meant too much to me, and so I broke my own law and wrote Volume 2. And Book 3. So many heartfelt eggs in that handbasket. Amy had occasional non-news for me, and I was overseeing the publication of my outset nonfiction book, the academic history Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, which will hopefully (knock all the wood you tin!) become me tenure here at the magnificent I-dare-y'all-to-bear witness-information technology's-non-Hogwarts University of Chicago. (Where I teach history of magic. Really.) [addendum 2018: I got tenure!!] I had submitted the monograph proposal to Harvard University Press way back in 2009. Given the infamous snail's stride of academic publishing, I often idea of Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance and Likewise Like the Lightning as twins fighting to see which would exist the get-go to make it out. But Tor, wonderful, infuriating, experimental, ambitious, field-shaping Tor, is slower.

In March 2013, Jo reported to me that Patrick had said positive things to her about the first page of Also Similar the Lightning. One page downwardly, 333 to get. That leap and summer were the madness of producing and recording my two hour close harmony a cappella Viking stage musical Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok, and its demands were exhaustion enough to let me mostly sleep. Every bit August came along, Patrick told Jo to tell me (in our surrealist game of phone) that he and Teresa wanted to have dinner with me at Worldcon in San Antonio, and I should have my respond so. This was more a year later Patrick had asked for the manuscript, and five years later on I had first submitted it to Tor.

I was working a berth at that Worldcon, an outreach display for the Texas A&M University Cushing Memorial Library and Athenaeum, which has 1 of the world'south slap-up scientific discipline fiction collections, an impregnable treasure vault total of rare pulps, fanzines, first editions, and the archived papers of authors from Star Trek scriptwriters, to George R.R. Martin, to (at present) me. (Are y'all a writer? Do you lot have random papers and notes from erstwhile projects cluttering your house? Cushing'due south crawly librarians totally want to accept your clutter, alphabetize it, and preserve information technology for posterity! Win-win!). The first morning of Worldcon, I was walking through the dealer's room on my way to our booth, when Jo Walton gestured me over to the tabular array where she was doing a signing. I gestured dorsum that I didn't desire to interrupt the people who were waiting patiently in line, but she flailed emphatically, so I came. She told me that Patrick told her to tell me "Yep." I recollect hugging, and crying, and intense crying, and gasping out a vague amends to the guy who was in the front of the line, merely he said "It'due south OK, it'south clearly important." Jo smiled at him and said, "She'due south just sold her first novel!" A keen, satisfied, brightness entered his face, like when you lot taste an unexpectedly excellent sour candy, and he said, "So, it does happen."

Most of the rest of the San Antonio Worldcon is lost in the mists of bliss amnesia. I call up staggering back to the Cushing booth all puffy and red-faced, and struggling to communicate to my colleague Todd Samuelson that I was OK, just overhappy from yep! Yeah! YES! I retrieve I couldn't find my phone to text my dear friend Carl Engle-Laird (a HRSFA alum, who was so a new editorial banana Tor.com, and sharing my suspense) so I borrowed a phone from Lauren Schiller (my singing partner and roommate of 10+ years), only I couldn't see through my tears, so the message came out all garbled and full of typos and r5and0m nuMB4rs. I was on a panel right after that, with Lila Garrott (whose online connections had been so instrumental in all this), and I had no time to break the news before the panel, so I just typed it on my then-recovered cell phone and ready it on the table in front end of us: "Patrick said yes." Lila glowed.

Afterwards Jo'south signing, nosotros found Patrick in the concessions area, and in that location ensued perhaps the well-nigh cool chat I shall always have. I was still paralyzed past the aftereffects of Scylla and Charybdis, and so shy and overwhelmed that I could barely strength myself to wait directly at the legendary Patrick. Merely Patrick is himself a naturally shy person, and skittish afterward and then many years carrying the Keys to Heaven, so he couldn't look at me either. And in that location we were, both trying to hide behind Jo (who is a caput shorter than both of us), unable to brand eye contact while trying to talk about how we wanted to piece of work together for the remainder of our careers. That was when I started to see the absurd flip side of information technology: all the while that I had been terrified of budgeted this incredibly important editor who had power over everything I always wanted, in his earth I had been the intimidating one, this afar Harvard Ph.D., with all these impressive publications, this learned and authoritative tone on my weblog, and I had everything he wanted, cracking science fiction that it would exist a pleasure to publish. In Settlers of Catan terms, I had bricks, he had woods, but we were and so mutually overwhelmed neither of the states could get the words out: "Shall nosotros make this road?" We had dinner with Jo and Teresa at ane of those Brazilian Barbeque places, where they chase the bully beasts of the plains and serve them to you on spits carried past excessively statuesque young men—at least that'south what Jo says, considering elation amnesia has erased everything except a vague memory of asparagus and a beige tablecloth. I remember Patrick said he and Teresa wanted to audition to edit and shape my career. Audition? I would have begged!

Patrick took me to the Tor political party that weekend. I know he introduced me to Tom Doherty and l other genre VIPs, but I genuinely don't recollect a thing except recognizing Liz Gorinsky from a distance by her hair. Patrick forgot to give me his business card, so I almost left without the ability to contact him. Information technology took three weeks to cease feeling similar a dream. No, that's not true—it still feels like a dream. I signed the four book contract by crackling firelight, huddling over the hearthstone during the power outage acquired by a New year's day's blizzard, which absolutely feels like a dream. I have a release appointment now (that took 2 years), and cover fine art (same), and the Avant-garde Bound Manuscript in front of me (well, a lacking ABM missing the concluding three capacity—oops!), and I have a fantastic recording of Patrick—the Patrick—playing guitar with me while I sing my ode to fandom's support of space exploration "Somebody Will" (super ultra win status!). But I still feel prepared to wake upward tomorrow, back in my sometime bedchamber, and find it was all a dream. Possibly there will e'er be that edge of doubt, the scar of how intensely I worried that the door might never open. Sometimes it doesn't. But if information technology did open for me, it wasn't considering I kept pounding on the gate with the same desperate query. And information technology wasn't the favor-trading, or the Harvard connections, or my attempts at nepotism, or fifty-fifty (honestly) my amanuensis (though she's done so many great things for me then and since). It was that I set forth to exist more awesome. I kept honing my craft, starting new projects better than the last, producing other works, articles, music, essays, enquiry, the blog. I fabricated my burn fire bright in the dark. People practise see.