Jessica Scott

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe other writers poised with their toes on the ledge of their first book launch are able to do something besides study the horizon. I’ve tried, but I’m failing. Maybe I should say falling?

and Falling, Fly, my debut dark fantasy novel, pits the fallen angel of desire, now a vampire, against a self-medicating neuroscientist in the Irish, steampunk-inflected Hotel of the Damned. I started writing it three years ago, fairly confident it was too weird to sell, but, needing to wrestle with my relationship to desire, and who better to teach me than its angel?

It wasn’t an easy book to write. When I finished, I started working on a second manuscript that I intended as a more mainstream, hopefully more saleable endeavor. I entered and Falling, Fly in contests, because I’d learned so much from contest feedback on my first (and now properly buried) manuscript, and I watched with some concern as Deus Inversus (the working title for book two, now called In Dreams Begin) got progressively weirder.

Then, almost a year in, just as Ida Jameson – Irish whiskey heiress, member of the Golden Dawn, and my erstwhile heroine – began taking on a distinctly wicked sheen, a final-round contest judge called with an offer on and Falling, Fly. With barely an audible “click,” I dropped into the alternate, parallel space-time of publishing. Suddenly I had agents to call, extensions to plead for, decisions to make, and documents to sign. When I landed again in the so-slow-it-appears-motionless parallel, I had a savvy, hungry, clever agent (Holly Root) and a two-book deal with an incisive, smart and organized editor at Berkley (Leis Pederson). And I was a little out of breath.

Then nothing happened.

For almost a year.

There have been a few hops across into the ‘everything-at-once’ track since – editing deadlines, short-notice opportunities to create a PowerPoint deck for a cover conference, appeals to certain luminaries for advance blurbs – but for the most part, I’ve spent the last year-and-a-half happily plodding along the well-worn channels of ‘Publishing Slow-Time’, which all aspiring writers tread until some otherwise indistinguishable cog of an query letter or conference pitch session engages, and drops them into the whirlwind.

But now I’m listening to the gears. I know it’s coming. My book launches March 2. I can hear a hum revving up beside me. And I’ve completely lost my ability to keep marching along. I’m poking my head over the parapet – checking Amazon rankings, and Googling my book title in case Google Alerts misses something, and rechecking my inbox – trying to climb the walls and get a peek at what’s coming.

I have no idea what it will be like. I’ve never done anything like this before. The closest experience I have is back in my misspent youth, when I was part of an experimental theater company.

Opening night would come, and the cast I’d worked with for months would gather in the green room. As director, it was my job to give the actors a final “you’re ready for this, you are all amazing” speech. I loved doing it. We’d all hug, and they would all leave. My actors would all go on stage. And I’d pace underneath it, listening for the laughs, the applause at the act break, the lobby conversations at intermission, the length of curtain calls. Helpless to *do* anything anymore, trusting my actors, doubting myself, opening the after-show wine earlier than necessary to have it poured for toasts.

Except it took two hours, pep talk to curtain call; March 2 is thirty-five days away, and I can’t really pace and drink for that long. Publishing in general, and particularly right now, feels less like theater and more like a benign version of a description I once read of a soldier’s experience: days of boredom broken by seconds of terror; and I thought, “Who better to talk with about waiting than Jess?”

Any pointers, my friend? Anybody else?

I have one galley left (OK, actually two, but I’m keep the last one), and I’ll give away to the first person who can provide the (wonderfully apt) title to the Vietnam novel I paraphrased above.

Ready? Leap!

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Tags: and falling, fly, guest author, skyler white