The Strangest Year of Life and Publishing: Lessons Learned in 2020

I always love looking back and writing these “what I learned” posts, as both an agent and an author. I feel like there’s always something new, even after a decade of being in this business.

This year though… it hits differently.

2020 kicked off on such a high. Don’t Read the Comments published in January. I went on a book tour, up and down the East Coast, out to California, through the Midwest. It was the absolute dream. And then when I flew back from Minneapolis in March, I found out things were grinding to a halt. Everything was.

My coworking space shuttered. I built an in-home office. I’ve barely left my neighborhood these last nine months. And bemoaning losing all of those things, like time and personal space, feels so petty and trite compared to friends who lost loved ones as the world changed. I’ve kept going, working away, in a narrow hallway next to the bathroom in my home.

And I've had a lot of time to think and reflect about this year in writing and publishing, particularly as I started going to therapy for the first time. So let’s chat.

-#-

If Your Self Worth is Tied to Other People, You Can Feel Worthless

Book festivals, conferences, teaching, events… there’s something about being around other people that gives me a lot of energy. Life. Joy. And whether it was my life as a teenager theater / band geek or my career as an author and publishing professional, there’s always been this element of finding my worth from being around other people.

And that’s… not great.

It’s especially not great when you come to that crushing realization in the middle of a pandemic, when all of those things are temporarily gone. Suddenly, the person who should be your biggest fan, yourself, is the only person you’re really spending time with. And when you discover you’re unable to cheer for you, there’s a spiral waiting.

I wish I had a concrete “well here’s the solution to that” moment here, but I don’t. It’s easy to say “well don’t do that.” It’s easy to say “you shouldn’t place your value on what other people think of you.” It’s way less easy to actually enact those feelings.

I’m working through it. I hope if you feel the same way, and have had a similar year, that you are too. My reading list has been decidedly less YA in this space, as I’ve been reading Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change by Maggie Smith, How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community by Mia Birdsong, Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed, and Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert while journaling.

It helps.

-#-

Burning Out is Easy, Finding Balance is Hard

I’ve always been the sort of person who takes on way too much, but is comfortable with bearing the weight of it. I work as an agent, I write books, I teach in an MFA program… it’s a lot, but I like the juggling game. It’s all books, all the time, and it makes me happy.

But when a traditional 9 to 5 schedule is uprooted, those carefully set hours ripped away, without structure, it’s easy to completely fall apart and burn out. All the conferences I took on went virtual. But so did all my students. Books got shifted and moved. Deadlines for my own writing still had to be met. Suddenly I found myself staying up until wild hours, exhausted. Falling apart. My family only managed to find childcare in the last months of the year, and still, the hours are limited now.

I figured it out as the year wrapped up. Turns out the answer is saying “no” more often.

It’s a simple thing, right? Saying no when you don’t have the time, the energy, the space? But in publishing, in all creative pursuits, really, we’re often programmed to say yes to every single opportunity. Because, what if you don’t get another one? What if this is THAT opportunity that brings you new ones?

If you’re burned out, if you’re exhausted, if you’re unhappy… that opportunity isn’t going to bring anything. Your work will suffer, and the people expecting something from you will notice. Burn out doesn’t lead to growth. It leads to collapse.

Say no.

-#-

Surround Yourself With People Who Want Nothing From You

This year was a big year for “hey it’s been a while, here’s a book idea I’m working on” messages. A big year for it. And I get it. Some folks have found themselves with a surprising amount of time on their hands, and are maybe returning to writing, art, music, you name it. Anything to refill their own personal well.

But that doesn’t mean they’re entitled to drink from yours. Especially if they’ve never offered you a drink before.

Relationships shouldn’t be transactional. This is one of the big reasons I missed my coworking space so much, working with a bundle of people who code and make software and do other things I don’t understand. I miss people reaching out to grab lunch, ask about bad Netflix movies, who frankly did not care about book stuff. I need more of them in my life.

If you’re hinging your self worth (remember what I talked about earlier?) on other people, and those relationships are transactional, it’s even more damaging.

Because there’s a difference between people who care about you, and people who care about what you can do for them.

It’s a hard thing to spot. It takes practice and a bit of heartbreak. And I’m sorry if you’ve experienced it, or if you’re about to. But I hope you’ll come out stronger, with better friends in the end. You deserve them. And I do too.

-#-

Community is a Circle, Not a Straight Line

This might sound odd to all my book people who aren’t quite familiar with my life outside of that space, but every August is a bit of a bummer month for me. I think about the old Philadelphia Geek Awards, a big ceremony I used to throw with my good friends, tied to a popular hyperlocal blog I once ran. It was a lovely affair, and I threw a lot of work into it year after year.

This year, being fairly cooped up as I’ve been, with a lot of my thoughts, it was harder than others.

When my wife and I left Philadelphia for a spell, a lot of the folks I worked so hard to uplift through that ceremony and that website… quickly forgot about me. And I struggled with it a lot. Where did these friends go? Who I spent so much time trying to help out?

Well, it turns out those people weren’t quite friends. And I’ve noticed a bit of a drop off in my book life too, when Paste Magazine shuttered their books vertical, and I stopped podcasting with BookRiot. It bums me out, but these are lessons, I suppose.

Here’s the thing about what a real community is. It’s not a straight line. It doesn’t start in one place and just abruptly drop things off. It’s a circle. It keeps going. You give back to one another. It doesn’t stop once someone does a favor. It doesn’t end because you got what you wanted.

If that’s your experience in your community, that’s not your community. But there will be others who work in a circle. You just have to look. I promise. This year, a number of authors also working with their kiddos at home, reached out. Writers with autistic children, who I’d never really spoken to before, emailed me, to offer up insight and love as my wife and I navigated our son’s diagnosis.

They didn’t want something from me.

They wanted something FOR me.

And that’s the only kind of relationship I’m interested in now.

-#-

Hm.

Seems like all my lessons this year, had to do with work and relationships. I guess that’s 2020, for you. Navigating new spaces, figuring out old relationships, discovering new ones.

I hope whatever new normal you found this year, that you found some comfort.

I think I did. I’m still trying, but I’m getting there.