On Ambition
as well as one romance and one fantasy book to read, oh and A PHOENIX FIRST MUST BURN IS OUT IN 10 DAYS!!!
Do you ever feel like you have an important, deep convo and then iterations of that conversation are suddenly popping up everywhere!? I do. And lately I’ve been discussing ambition, what my big goals are, if it’s okay to have ambition (can you ever have too much), and how/why we often hide and self-sabotage our own ambition a lot.
The other day, I was talking to a writer friend who was being really pessimistic even though really exciting things are happening in their career. I was like, dude—can you just celebrate this. (imo part of friendship is also calling each other out…lovingly) I was like yes, your fears are valid and also I’m so happy for you, you deserve this, it’s all so fantastic, also let’s not act like you’re not ambitious and didn’t hope for this… and then it was like the lightbulb came on. They realized that they were acting not how they wanted to, but that they were holding themselves back from celebrating because they felt like they weren’t supposed to be ambitious like that. As we kept talking, they shared about, from watching others they’ve seen how unpredictable this industry is, about how nothing’s guaranteed, and so to them being ambitious is like a curse—you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed eventually. So why even bother owning your ambition and celebrating when something cool happens if sooner or later something will go wrong.
I had literal chills as they said this because I’ve been talking with my therapist about the very same thing. 2018 and the first half of 2019 were really hard for me and so as more and more things have begun to “go right” i.e. all the hard work I put into things for nearly 10 years is paying off, I’ve become more and more paranoid that something terrible is going to happen. When friends have asked me questions about career goals, I’d basically lie and be like I’m just happy to see where things take me because I felt like by uttering anything else, I’d doom myself.
On one hand, I’m often talking about how important it is for us to not link goals we can’t control with our self-worth… like I’ve had friends fail to hit the NYT best-seller list (which is near impossible to hit AND curated ie sales numbers matter but aren’t everything) when it seemed like they were going to and feel like a total failure and become majorly depressed. But on the flip side, we should allow ourselves to be wildly ambitious—as long as those ambitions aren’t affecting our self-worth. I am both incredibly happy where I am and I have long list of things I want to do and happen in my careers as both agent and author. I think this holding back our dreams and goals also leads us to deny the amazing things that have happened. I was having lunch with my UK editor and she asked me how A PHOENIX FIRST MUST BURN came to be and I was like “and then it sold at auction”— and she was like wait what… it sold at auction? how many houses? and I got all shy and was like uhhh yeah… like half the editors we submitted it to offered so it was a pretty massive one and she was like why has no one ever mentioned this and then I remembered how I asked my then agent to downplay it because I was so nervous. I didn’t want to say publicly like some people do in announcements that 10 + editors offered—what if in two years when it published the book became a total flop and people were like oh, that’s just another book someone paid a lot for that failed. Especially because I worked in publishing then just as I do now and how much a book sells for is 1. relative and 2. sometimes a guarantee of nothing except for that advance.
What changed? Why am I mentioning it now? Well, being an agent + having friends go through the publication process and seeing my clients and friends doing the same thing I did. And I’m not just talking about advance-size/books going to auction—I’m really not talking about that at all, I’m talking about how yeah not much is guaranteed in this industry so why do we downplay the amazingness that happens instead of celebrating it because it might not happen again? I most often notice it with women, with people of color… we tend to bury our ambitions thinking that if we make ourselves smaller, we’ll be more digestible to others, that we won’t make others feel less than…that we’ll make others feel more comfortable, and that if—when—something goes wrong well if we never rocked the boat to begin with then nothing really changes…it’s easy to become invisible again if we never step out of the shadows to begin with. There’s obviously a thick ass line between bragging 24/7 online and sharing your amazing accomplishments and sharing your amazing ambitions. But for myself and so many others, that line is so far away… it’s like someone who gets nominated for an award but thinks they have no chance of winning so they don’t even bother to show up to the ceremony or send someone in their place to accept the award just in case.
It hurts me to see even friends who are what anyone would label successful in their careers doubt that they (technically their agents) even have the right to ask for more for their next book. So then you think well if they can’t summon up the right to belong, how can I? I love Twitter but also sometimes it becomes like an echo-chamber of people refusing to own their hard work, refusing to shout about their hopes and dreams. It sends the message that the best way to get success is to stumble into it and while yes, there’s no roadmap to or guarantee of success and yes, it’s defined differently by us all, if you never share your ambitious side with anyone, how will anyone ever think of you for that Star Wars book you secretly want to write. I have literally seen people get book deals because of tweets because some editor was like I had no idea x author wanted to write for [insert franchise property], I would’ve never thought of them because they write in [insert different genre] but omg I love their books they’d be perfect. And that’s just one example, it doesn’t have to be about writing a superhero haha. And you don’t even have to tweet it, you can start by sharing with a friend or even by writing in a journal all your hopes and dreams.
Don’t be afraid of your potential. No one knows better what you need and want than you. By figuring that out and owning it, you then become a stronger advocate for yourself… it’s why I always say that my agents now are a much better fit, it’s not that I didn’t like my first agent—I did—it’s that when I signed with him I didn’t know what I wanted—I had given very little thought to what I wanted my career to look like—so I signed with him because we liked the same things. After I parted ways with him, I did a lot of career soul-searching. I had really in depth conversations with the agents I queried (after parting ways with agent #1) who offered. I signed with my now agents because we are on the same page about what we want for my career.
As I told my friend, deep down you know what you want out of your career and you know that you have every right to want those things. It doesn’t mean they’ll all happen; it doesn’t mean they all won’t. Sometimes your ambitions are like a sign—they tell you what’s not working anymore in your life, they tell you when it’s time to move on from a thing or person or when you need to keep trying. Do my ambitions scare me? Sometimes. But I’d rather be ambitious than lie to myself and make myself small to give others comfort.
TWO MUST-READ BOOKS!!
Some of you are gonna be like, omg Patrice you hadn’t read that yet and no, I hadn’t. Bought it on kindle a while back and I had read the other books I’d brought with me on vacation and I was like okay I’ll finally read this and like the first three chapters were lovely, super compelling main character that kept me turning the pages even without much plot-happenings and then the book became a wild AF ride and woah, writing goals. Listen to me, everyone is right—she’s a literary goddess, read it!! (Yes, Spinning Silver is def already on queue)… for me, the reason I never read it is because it always sounded interesting like a very cool fairy tale esque fantasy but never different enough to really grab my attention and make me read it ASAP (like magical dark woods…I love theme but I’d read that in a billion stories lately)… so I’ll add that it is all of that, and also the protagonist is incredibly fascinating, super interesting magic system, brilliant mastery of first person (like the specific way things are described…love), and also a heart-wrenching friendship story between the protagonist and her best friend… and no one mentioned that would’ve made me read sooner because I LOVE and always feel we’re lacking in stories that center female friendships over romance (but also there’s that too!). Ultimately, I think it’s just one of those books that it’s better just to read it because my LOVE for it snuck up on me in totally unexpected ways.
Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.
<3
Something to Talk About by Meryl Wilsner
OMG I LOVED THIS BOOK. I read this first and then read Uprooted haha so complete opposite reads. This is a f/f romance between a badass female showrunner/producer and her assistant. It’s super sweet. Funny. Loved the side characters. Really believed how they came to fall in love. And just everything I wanted in a queer romance made me immediately be like omg we need more queer women in romance novels and I now might write my own one day…highly recommend.
I read a lot more than these two but most are in a #blackgirlmagic book list I have out soon, so I’ll tweet that when it’s live!
A PHOENIX FIRST MUST BURN IS OUT IN TEN DAYS
So my YA Fantasy/Science-Fiction anthology that’s Beyoncé’s Lemonade meets Octavia Butler is out in ten days. You can pre-order it here (links to all retailers…US/CAN/UK). Penguin Teen is running a pre-order campaign for US residents—you receive a super cool pin if you pre-order—and then I’m also touring with some of the contributors…more info on all the seven stops here: Visit me on tour!!
I am currently in London and spent a day at my UK publisher’s offices + had lunch with my editor…and around the same time a bunch of book influencers received copies of the book and the praise has been making me cry lots of happy tears and I’m just so excited for this book to be out in the world.
Even though I write in the book’s intro about how I did this because it’s the book I wanted but didn’t have growing up, it didn’t hit me until I started reading a bunch of Black blogger’s posts about the book the other day how much for a lot of people this is the first time they’re seeing themselves represented. There are just so very few SFF books centering Black protagonists, especially in YA. Even less with queer people. I would LOVE to get to do a volume-2 one day, with another group of amazing Black writers, and the only way that’s going to happen is if the sells are good for this one. I know because I asked my publishing team and they’re so hype about the idea but it ultimately comes down to sales for this book. So pre-orders and reviews and library borrows, etc. matter. And you know me, I’m forever real and honest about these sorts of things. I’ve gotten very lucky to have an amazing team behind me who loves this book, but it’s still a business.
Leaving you with a snippet from A PHOENIX FIRST MUST BURN’S FOURTH STARRED REVIEW, from Publisher’s Weekly:
Lovers of Octavia Butler will find her spirit in this smoldering anthology of 16 short stories that center black female and gender nonconforming characters within fantasy and speculative fiction…Fiercely fantastical and achingly honest, this book delivers a more inclusive means of self-discovery.