Success Story with Erin K. Wagner

I was far more prolific as a teenager than I am now. Bound and determined to be a novelist, I marched into the post office with a bundled book ready to be mailed off to an open submission period. The post officer smirked a bit and asked, “You write a book?” And I remember my offense, what I assume was a huffy (or more realistically, bashful) yes, and my desire to show him and show them all. I would be an author.

But I was no wunderkind. Homeschooled for much of my childhood, I had an advanced vocabulary that led to Dickensian prose of a distinctly violet hue. I was also not interested in what was realistic so much as what served a plot. I remember my dad raising an eyebrow at a plot point that required my protagonist to carry a baby bird in his pocket during his adventures (to show how sensitive he was, of course).

It took practice. A lot of practice. To realize that sometimes a sentence could be short, could be plain. (And now, when I hear my prose called sparse—in a good way—I’m still a bit surprised.)

My sister once asserted that she too could write like I did, but that she just didn’t. This, also, I found offensive. Why wouldn’t she acknowledge my talent? But, in retrospect, I realize this was both true and not true. Because writing is a matter of doing it—again and again and again. It’s not always brilliant and innate talent. It is a willingness to revise and accept feedback—which I find myself only embracing and doing well (or adequately) now, after more than twenty years of writing.

So, it was when I trunked my teenage novel (and acknowledged that not everything was publishable), and accepted the challenge of turning an oft-rejected short story (with prompts to build out the world) into a novel, that I finally found something like the success I had craved in that post office. (There’s always a bit of luck as well, luck and privilege.) I remember it all feeling a bit unreal when my awesome agent, Jared Johnson of Olswanger Literary, first reached out and expressed an interest in representing me. It felt very odd to hear my agent, and then my editor at Daw, compliment the book, the prose, the concept.

Sometimes matching reality with dreams can be tricky. Mechanize My Hands to War is my first novel, after two smaller novella releases. It has met with solid reviews (including two starred ones from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal) and been featured on to-read lists. But the experience is by no means cinematic. And if you grew up as a high achiever, you find yourself continually setting new goals and new hurdles, chasing an unrealistic high, chasing the movie-version of an authorial life. It’s important to remind myself that writing is a matter of practice and revising—negotiating book covers and titles, adding plot—and that these moments are valuable unto themselves. That writing is rewarding, not just publishing (though that ain’t bad).

The paperback of Mechanize is out in October, and I think its plot—the question of who controls, weaponizes, and capitalizes on artificial intelligence (and human)—is becoming more timely, rather than less. It has shootouts and proper near-future sci-fi moments—but it also features the navigation of the small, everyday things that we do which shape who we are on a fundamental level. The novel examines how being human is a matter of doing and revising and dwelling. And sometimes, when I write, capturing those moments of late sunlight or sticky-stemmed flowers or old aches becomes all- consuming.

Erin K. Wagner (also E. K. Wagner) is a professor by trade, a medievalist by discipline, and a writer of speculative fiction by design.

She lives in upstate New York, a storied and story-making place, but her roots are in Appalachia. She grew up in the hills and hollers of rural southeast Ohio, just across the river from West Virginia. As a professor of English, she teaches literature, writing, and communication. Her interests, both academic and creative, lie in examining how the human responds to the nonhuman in whatever form it appears–artificial, supernatural, or unidentified.

Her creative writing has appeared in award-winning magazines like Clarkesworld, Nightmare, and Apex. Her books are available through DAW, Aqueduct Press and Tor.com. She is an active member of SFWA.

Photo credit: Kathryn DeZur.