Related to Bears

(This actually happened a few years ago, but I updated it to be part of the book tour.)

Last night in the rain and the near dark, my husband Mario and I went out into the forest with our tracker friend, Linda, and a friend of hers. We went deep into the wild. We were looking for wild things, and we were hoping to find bears.

We walked until Linda pointed to a dark place under some Douglas fir trees and said to her friend, "You sit there. Click your tongue if you see something."

Then the three of us walked until Linda said to me, "You're small. Crawl in through there." She showed me a rip in the metal fence. The tear in the fence was rather alarming since it looked as though some comic book character had come and pulled apart the fence to create an entrance or exit into or out of another world.

I went through the rip and sat under an evergreen tree. By or upon elk poop. It was raining, and I was dressed in a plastic bag and three layers of coats, a shirt, a camisole, and two pairs of slacks.

Mario and Linda walked on, but I didn't see where they went. I sat in the falling darkness, alone, still, quiet, watching and listening to the forest, the meadow, and the sky. I looked out at the forest and the giant hemlock trees that towered over all the other trees, slightly bent at their tops, as though they were bowing in prayer.

It grew dark. The rain began earnestly, drifting down from the clouds like a veil, a veil that fell again and again, gorgeously, sensually. I had never heard anything quite as wonderful as this rain falling on the forest. I watched the hemlocks take the rain and breathe it in, and I did the same.

I wondered if we would see any bears. The thought of a bear encounter made me a little nervous. I had dreamed about bears for years, until I wrote my novel Her Frozen Wild where bears and bear-people were central to the story. Once I finished the novel, the bear dreams nearly stopped. In researching the novel, I had learned that many indigenous people believed humans and bears were related. Before they hunted bears, Siberians and Native Americans followed elaborate rituals to honor the bear.

I’d also discovered stories about humans giving birth to bears in European, Native American, and Asian folk tales. In many different cultures, people often believed that humans could shape-shift into bears and vice versa. The great warrior berserkers were thought to shape-shift into bears when they put on a bearskin. (The word berserkers means “bear shirt.”) People believed this accounted for the berserkers fierceness and bravery in battle.

On some of my hikes in the forest, I had encountered signs of bears. I’d seen two short horizontal lines on tree trunks which I knew were teeth marks of a bear trying to get to the tree cambium. On other hikes we’d taken, Linda had pointed out claw marks on trees that were either bear or cougar. I had also seen a black bear in these forests once. I was in a car at the time, and the bear ran away faster than I’d ever seen anything that big run.

When I was a child growing up in Michigan, I heard about grizzly bears eating people in Yellowstone. All grown up and at the beginning of our married life, Mario and I stayed at Yellowstone Park one night. There were “beware of the bears” signs everywhere. I was terrified. We decided not to pitch a tent. Instead, we slept in the car. I had a very realistic dream of a bear trying to get into the car. I woke up gasping for air, my heart racing. That may have been my first bear dream.

The idea of encountering a bear in the woods did not fill me with happiness. In fact, it frightened me. I wanted bears living in the forest, of course, just like I wanted cougars in the forest. But I didn’t want to run into either of them during my treks. I imagined they wouldn’t be that thrilled to run into me either.

Once I dreamed I was a grizzly bear; I looked down and saw bear claws instead of hands. It seemed quite natural and right that I was a grizzly bear. In another dream, a bear was rampaging my neighborhood. When he roared into my house, I faced him, despite my terror. I told him I would make love with him--I would become his bear wife--if he would leave everyone else alone. He agreed to this bargain.

When I was writing Her Frozen Wild, Mario and I learned the bear dance from a Siberian shaman. At the end of the training, she said we were part of the Bear Clan.

This day, as it grew dark outside, I sat on the Earth amongst the wild things. I hadn’t heard anyone click their tongue to let us know they had seen something. I wondered where my husband was, but I figured he was safe with Linda. She was powerful enough to scare off any bear. Or at least she’d be able to get the bears to engage in a conversation with her until everyone understood we were all related. She had told us that when bear and human encounters went wrong it was usually because humans miscommunicated their intentions. We no longer understood the language of bear.

Somewhere in these woods, bears wandered. At least I hoped they did. Maybe they sat underneath trees to get out of the rain. Just like me. I wanted to close my eyes and sleep with my body next to the Earth, just like the bears. If I did that, maybe when I awakened, I would have bear claws again.

Too soon, Linda came and got me. As we all walked back to our cars, Linda told us that bears had ripped the hole in the fence I had climbed through. "The forest service comes out and fixes it,” she said, “and the bears keep ripping it open."

I shivered as I listened to her. Had I known who had created the rip in the fence, would I have sat so near to it, right on the path of the bears?

Yes, I decided, yes, yes, yes. And I was ready to do it again and again. Eventually I might run into a relative of mine. By then, perhaps, I would remember how to speak with bears.

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Entangled Realities

Green Snake Publishing has published a short story collection of ours called Entangled Realities. In it, you'll find some favorite stories of Mario's and of mine. It was a lot of fun collaborating in this way.

Where did we get the title? Mario's blog is called Conditional Realities, plus his short story imprint on Green Snake Publishing is "Conditional Realities." My imprint on GSP is "Entanglements." We put the two together to come up with Entangled Realities, which is also a good title for our life together!

From the cover of Entangled Realities: Short story masters Kim Antieau and Mario Milosevic combine their talents in this extraordinary collection of fantastic tales. These stories originally appeared in Asimov’s SF, Twilight Zone Magazine, Shadows, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Interzone, and The Clarion Awards. Included are: “Hauntings,” “Sanctuary,” and “Listening for the General” by Kim, and “Up Above the World So High,” “Winding Broomcorn,” and “The Untied States of America,” by Mario.

print • kindle • nook • smashwords

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Joanna Interviews Me!

The virtual blog tour for Her Frozen Wild continues this month. Here's one of my favorite interviews with one of my favorite people, Joanna Powell Colbert. She's the creator of the Gaian Tarot, one of my favorite tarots. It's one of the two tarot decks I use nearly every day. Plus her lovely blog, Gaian Soul, is one of my favorites, too. (Favorite is the operative word in this post!) Something wonderful is always happening around Joanna, so be sure to check out her place. Here's a list of my other stops.

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My Virtual Book Tour

Don't forget my virtual book tour for Her Frozen Wild this month and next. Every weekday I'll have a new interview or blogpost or someone will review Her Frozen Wild. Here's the link to the schedule. Once something is posted, the date goes from black to red and then the link will go directly to the piece that's about Her Frozen Wild. Today Pump Up Your Book interviewed me.

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Mario's Short Story Collection: Miniatures

Mario Milosevic, who also happens to be my husband, has a new short-short story collection out. This is his first short story collection, and it is amazing! The stories are quirky, weird, wonderful, moving, and funny. As you can see, I really like it. Check it out for yourself! Here's the Amazon link. It's available at all your favorite e-book stores for all your e-readers, too.

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Her Frozen Wild Book Tour Begins!

We're starting the virtual book tour for Her Frozen Wild. This link will take you to the list of where I'll be when. Hope to see some of you there! First stop is at The Character Connection.

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Swans in Winter is Published!

I'm pleased to announce that Green Snake Publishing has published Swans in Winter. Here's the cover blurb:

India Lake loves the wild and she will do anything to protect it—including taking off her clothes.

India Lake is in the middle of a full blown mid-life crisis. Her love life is stalled, to say the least. And her boss forces her to take a two-month vacation after she loses her temper with a library patron at work. A few days later, while observing the swans who have migrated from Alaska to a pond near her home, India meets photographer extraordinaire Benjamin Swan. India and Benjamin are immediately attracted to one another. India wonders if he might be what her friend Rhonda calls a “sole mate,” someone India can walk through life with. But the mysterious photographer and nature lover has many secrets. When the swans and Turtle Pond are threatened by pesticides and a shadowy lumber company, India and her friends from POOL (Pissed Off Old Ladies) decide to pose in the buff for a lunar calendar they can sell to raise enough money to hire an environmental lawyer to protect the land and the swans. As India talks to each woman and Benjamin takes their photographs, India comes to realize her place in this community of Swan Maidens. Once Benjamin’s secrets are revealed, can she forgive her Swan Knight? And can she save the wild and learn who her true “sole” mate is? print • kindle • nook • smashwords

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Short Stories

Every week we are making more and more of my short stories available for your e-readers. Most of them are old favorites, but I throw in a new one every once in a while. You can go to any of your favorite e-bookstores to get them. We're also going to begin putting our stories into collections and these will be made available for e-readers and in print editions. You can check out my stories at Entanglements on Green Snake Publishing, too. Mario has been making his stories available for some time, and now he's publishing a brand new story a week. You can find his at your favorite e-bookstore, too, and check them out here.

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Thorny Palace

Today is our last day on the Sanctuary. We're nearly all packed. Tomorrow we'll leave before the sun is up. Mario is inside the casita preparing dinner. I am in the Quail House where I have as company a huge spider. She clings to an old blanket in the chair behind me. Perhaps she is waiting to hear stories from me, or else she's come to share some of her own.

Outside the wind blows, stirring up dust and memories of winters past.

I lean my head out the top half of the Dutch door and listen. Does the wind bring me more stories? Coyote serenades? Bobcat purrs? Mesquite wisdom? The secrets of the paloverde?

I came here a month ago still recovering from the flu. For the first few weeks, I felt a bit battered. A rough year had taken its toll. I felt unmoored by dynamics in relationships I didn't understand. And when I felt I did understand, I didn't understand. Why was it that some people felt lifted up when they were trying to bring someone down? I had encountered this throughout my life. Because I often appeared confident, people saw this as an opening to try to degrade me—knock me down a few pegs.

Confidence was not a characteristic often valued, especially in women.

It often seemed that some of the people in my life--friends, family, acquaintances--liked me better when I was ill or not myself, when I was failing rather than succeeding.

Mario believes this is often true with many people, especially those who leave their familial environs. "The tribe doesn't want us to change," he says. "That's why people who go away are often teased or belittled when they return for a visit."

Often if we know something, we're accused of being know-it-alls. And if we're good at something, we're accused of not working hard enough or not deserving what we have.

I don't understand this attitude.

I like to be around people who are smarter than I am. I like it when people know more than I do. I like it when people I know and love are successful. I love it when they are hale and healthy. I love it when they are full of themselves and having a great and joyful life. I am cheering them on, always.

I realized this month that many people like it when the people around them are small.

That must be an awful feeling, to wish people ill, to want them to fail, to want them to be less than who they can be.

So this month, I had an opportunity to observe and contemplate the world of people. During this same time, I sat down and started to write my novel Whackadoodle Times.

I had a tough time at first. I had written the first chapter a few years earlier. I had really liked it, and I was afraid I couldn't keep going and have it be as good. In it, a homeless woman comes to live with a very rich family (at least that's what we think is going on); in exchange for room and board, the homeless woman promises to do one great thing a day.

Besides worrying about whether I could make the entire book good, I was stymied about the "one great thing a day" idea. I thought I needed to figure each "great thing" a head of time, and I couldn't. That was my first concern.

My second concern was that the main character was not exactly admirable. She was a foul-mouthed adulterer. And she was rich. I didn't really want to be in her head space.

But she really wanted me to write her story. I balked, figured I'd write something else, but there she was. Ideas kept popping into my head like little word balloons from her saying, "See, wouldn't this be fun?"

She was funny, I'll give her that.

So I told myself I'd try it for 10,000 words.

I began writing.

All the emotional crap I'd been struggling with dropped away almost as soon as I began writing. And I wasn't aware of any of my physical stuff. If I felt crappy, I didn't notice while I wrote.

It turned out I didn't have to worry about the one "great thing." Each day (in the book) something happened that became the "one great thing." And I fell in love with the main character, Brooke McMurphy. I felt liberated as I wrote because she says pretty much anything and does pretty much anything. That was wonderful!

Of course, she was screwed up. She had so many problems, but I sympathized with her. She was surrounded by people who did not live up to her expectations, but mostly, she didn't live up to her own expectations.

I wrote this book more quickly than I'd ever written any other book. I never laughed as hard while writing a book as I did writing this one. In the end, I never cried so hard during the writing of a novel.

Each night I'd read a section to Mario, and he'd laugh. This gave me the confidence to keep going.

I finished writing it in about ten days, give or take. Then I went up to Sedona with my oldest and youngest sisters. We had such a good time. We didn't fight; we didn't have awkward silences. We talked and laughed and hiked and grossed each other out. It was fabulous.

When we came back to Scottsdale, I stayed overnight with my father and got to spend time with my dad, three of my sisters, and three of my brothers-in-law. It was a good visit. Once again, everyone seemed kind and funny and just nice to be arouond.

Back at the Sanctuary, I took a day off. But I had decided that I wanted to try and write another book. I had about ten days left before we were heading home. I could do it.

At first, I didn't know what I wanted to write. About twenty years ago, I wrote a mystery novel with the character Jane Deere. In that version, Jane had run away from her family when she was young, changed her name, and was living in a small town in Washington. Even though I loved her character (and the character of Dragon, her main squeeze), I didn't like the novel so I put it away. During this last summer, Jane had come knocking on my imagination again, only this time, she was living in Portland, Oregon.

Now while I was sitting in the Quail House figuring out what I'd write, Jane Deere came out of the woodwork: She was here in Tucson and her entire family thought she had died in a fire-bombed cottage twenty-years earlier.

So I began writing her story. When the events of the novel were going to take place Portland, the novel was called Doe. But here in Tucson, the novel became Pricked. The title kept me thinking about the fairy tale, Briar Rose, which happened to be one of my touchstone fairy tales. Years ago I had written a short story called "Briar Rose," and it was one of my most reprinted stories.

During the time I was working on Pricked, I read several versions of Sleeping Beauty and Briar Rose. Even though my novel was not a retelling of Briar Rose or anything close to that, I felt like the essence of that tale was at the heart of this book.

I also came to believe that the essence of this tale was at the heart of my life.

For years, I have had this theory--unprovable thus far--that Western fairy tales may be coded instructions left by our ancestors. They were a way of preserving the Old Ways, but they were encoded so that the conquerors, the church, or the new dominant culture wouldn't know the truth of them; those who could figure out the key or code would. They were liked pages of a Book of Shadows hidden in plain sight.

Even if this isn't true--and there's no research that indicates it is--I like thinking about it, and I like reading fairy tales with this in mind. (One day, perhaps, I'll do more with this idea.)

In any case, one night Mario and I went out to dinner and we read a version of Briar Rose. He had never heard the Grimm's version before. We tried to look for hidden meaning in the tale. But we kept coming up with what seemed obvious: Don't disrespect the women, especially the old wise women. (Good advice.) Don't try to subvert fate because it's useless. (I'm all for trying to subvert fate or anything else.) Your prince will come. (I don't think so.)

I said let's look at the fairy tale the way some people look at dreams: Imagine that everything and everyone in it is the dreamer.

This made me contemplate the prince, which I hadn't done before because he seemed incidental. I hadn't cared about him. But now, I was thinking of him as the dreamer. The thorns were the dreamer. The spindle, Briar Rose, the king, queen, the prince: They were all the dreamer.

I realized that the prince didn't fight his way through the thorns. He happened to come along when the 100 year curse was over. He approached, the thorny hedge moved out of the way for him, and he stepped through. He walked into the palace where everything and everyone was asleep until he found Briar Rose's room. She was just waking up.

In the version Mario and I read, she was waking up when he entered the room. He didn't kiss her. He wasn't the hero. He just had great timing.

I kept thinking about this over the days that followed. I imagined that thorny hedge growing up to cover the palace and everyone inside. They were protected from the outside world during that 100 years. No one could come and hurt them, rob them, destroy anything.

But when the time was right, the thorny hedge moved aside and let the prince enter the palace grounds.

When the time was right, the princess woke up.

I walked the Sonora Desert and looked at the thorny bushes and trees all around me. In most places, it looked impenetrable.

Often I felt covered in the thorns of my suffering. Out here in the desert, surrounded by thorns, I became more aware of who I was and what my life had become. Was I inside my own thorny palace? Only I wasn't asleep, I was coming awake.

One day I wrote 7,000 plus words on Pricked. The next day I wrote 10,000 or thereabouts. It didn't feel like work. It felt like how it always feels when I'm in the flow: Like I was writing down what I saw.

Each morning I did what I had done every day here. I'd step outside of the Quail House with my rattle, the one I had made last spring out of elk hide, a rosemary branch, and rabbit fur. I acknowledged the Mysteries, asked if they would co-create this day, this novel, and my good health with me. After my song, after my prayer to the elementals, I'd go in and write.

I was feeling more and more free.

How can I explain? It felt physical. It felt soulful.

For a year or more I'd been trying this indie writing path. I didn't worry about finding a publisher for my work. I didn't worry about the length of my books. I just let the stories come to me, and I wrote them down.

My true creativity was returning.

When I was a girl, I had written for the pure joy of it.

I'm not saying I wrote for myself, but it was joyful. I always wanted an audience. My mother introduced me to Emily Dickinson when I was a girl, and I loved her poetry. But I knew her story was not my story: I wanted my work to be read.

I used to say, "I'm not writing for my dresser drawers."

Now, in the Quail House, I felt as though I was writing for an audience, but it was not an audience of publishers, editors, or agents. I wasn't writing for the marketplace. I was writing for an audience of readers.

Writing Whackadoodle Times was one of the most joyful writing times I've ever had. And writing Pricked was equally as joyous for a different reason. It felt physically joyful. It's hard to explain. I was being transformed by these novels.

On the last day that I wrote on Pricked, I stood under the sun with my rattle in hand. I sang to the directions. I sang to the desert. I sang to the sun. As I did so, I saw in my mind's eye that thorny hedge covering the palace, that thorny hedge that staved off all intruders and visitors. Staved off all saviors, had there been one. I saw the thorny hedge move away, saw flowers blossom, saw the path leading into the palace. Into my heart? My healing? My own happiness.

Timing is everything.

I felt as though joy was bubbling up from the desert ground. I raised the rattle up high and sang. Now was my time. Now was the time for healing. Now was the time for success. My slumber was over; my suffering was over.

Timing is everything.

Time for healing.

I went into the Quail House and continued writing on Pricked. That evening, Mario came and sat with me as I wrote. I was completely in my imaginal world. For years I had thought it strange that I was the most comfortable in my stories. Wasn't that a sign of some societal deficiency?

No, no!

I have often said that I'm a stenographer to the imaginal worlds.

Now as I finished this book--my second completed novel in less than a month--I realized I wasn't just a stenographer: I was a mediator between this world and the imaginal worlds. I brought these stories out of there and into here.

The thorny hedge was moving. I looked out into the Sonora Desert, the desert that had pricked me awake for the last eight winters, and I brought Jane Deere's story into the here and now.

When I wrote the last sentence, I stood up and cheered.

Wow. I had written a novel in five days.

Now it is our last night here at the Old Mermaids Sanctuary. (We call it this; the owners have a different name, but we respect their privacy.)

I first came here eight winters ago. This place has been a sanctuary for me. It has saved my life. I am a different person from the one who first came here. I was struggling inside my thorny palace, not comfortable with my thorns. Or anyone else's. Today many of the same issues haunt me that haunted me eight winters ago.

And yet, the stories are freer now.

I am freer now. I feel my true self rising again after a long painful slumber. It can't matter that anyone wants me to be small or wants me to be less than I can be. It can't matter. It's too high a price for companionship.

I'll tell the stories.

The rest will follow. Healing will follow.

That is my wish. My desire.

I wonder if I should redecorate the thorny palace or leave it all together?

I suppose if we imagine that Briar Rose was on a pilgrimage (albeit a sleepy pilgrimage) and now the pilgrimage is over, she must leave the palace.

I must leave this thorny palace, this refuge.

So that I may be healed.

May I be healed, may I be healed, may it be so.

It is so.

I wish the same for you.

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Claypot Dreamstance

Mario Milosevic's marvelous new novel, Claypot Dreamstance, is now available as an e-book and in print. Mario talks about his novel here.

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Her Frozen Wild is Here!

My newest novel Her Frozen Wild is published. Here's a preview. The e-reader versions are all available, and the print version is available now, too.

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Walking in Prickly Beauty

Once again I am at the Old Mermaids Sanctuary. It is named something else by other people, but that's what we call it. It is here where I first learned about the Old Mermaids when they came up out of the wash and told me their stories.

We've been here for nearly two weeks. It's been blue skies most of the time, and yesterday, it finally got warm. We take long walks in the desert; we take short walks in the wash. In the evening, coyotes serenade us. (OK, they're probably serenading each other, but you get the idea.)

At dusk, we often see javelinas. One night when I was taking out the trash (down the long dirt drive to the road) a javelina followed me. She was either looking for love in all the wrong places or she wanted my garbage.

You pick.

I've also seen two road runners, once at the Catholic church near here where Mario and I went to walk the labyrinth. The second time was when I was in the wash. The one at the church seemed a bit thin and too interested in us. The one in the wash took one look at me, raised her tail, and sauntered away.

I believe that was the healthier response.

And of course, the Sanctuary is filled with rabbits and birds and cacti and my beloved agave, and mesquite and palo verde trees.

In the mornings, Mario goes out and writes in the Quail House. When he's finished he returns to the casita. I feed him breakfast. Then I go out to the Quail House and work. When I'm finished, he feeds me lunch. Then we go for a walk.

It is an idyllic life in many ways, these weeks we're here.

The first day I wrote here, on Solstice, I wrote a Old Mermaids Healing Tale. The second day, I wrote 10,000 words on a novel to finish it.

On Christmas, we drove to Scottsdale to be with two of my sisters and their significant others and my father and my aunt Alice. We had a good time, but I was wired the whole day and didn't relax, as is often the case when I see my family for the first time on a visit. Once when I went home to Michigan, I lay curled up in a fetal position for two days. I have no idea why. My family members are good people. We each have our own difficulties, like most people, although we rarely talk about them with each other. There is a tacit agreement, as there is in many families, to keep it light when we're together.

I've never been a keepin' it light kind of person. When I was younger, I always wanted to talk about things, get them out in the open, solve problems. But I've gotten over that. Spilling your guts at a family gathering never does anyone any good as far as I can tell. So mostly I just try to get along and still be myself when I'm with family. I want them all to be healthy and happy, and since I was a kid, I felt responsible for their health and happiness.

I'm not certain if I was born that way or if I was created that way. I remember when it started. It was in first or second grade and one of my teachers took me aside and told me that the other kids looked up to me. I was a natural leader. And if I was nice to Billy (the kid who pooped his pants in class, who always stunk, and who lived with the other poor people in Saxony subdivision), everyone else would follow my lead.

Now I was a naturally shy kid, so I'm not sure if anyone was looking to me for anything, but I listened to my teacher and I was kind to Billy. In fact, I became the little kid (because I was quite small) who was always standing toe to toe with the bullies trying to protect other kids, most especially one of my little sisters who was always getting picked on.

And I was the one who noticed things were wrong long before anyone else did and I'd try to get help. Tried to get help for my pony who was sick (she died). Tried to get help for one of my sisters who was starving herself. Tried to save the killdeer on school property that the boys were always trying to kill.

I was always trying to fix or save something or someone.

In any case, Christmas was wonderful this year and it was difficult. On the way home, in the dark, I heard Judy Garland singing, "Have yourself a very merry Christmas," on the radio, and suddenly I was remembering being a kid singing, "yesterday," while I was on a swing, wishing my life was easier and I was happier. I was about ten years old! As I sat in the car next to Mario, I looked back at my life and I couldn't find one memory where I was happy. I was always so sad. And that realization made me sad. My whole life was just one big pile of unhappiness. Every memory I had was rife with illness and sadness.

When we got back to Tucson and the Sanctuary, I couldn't sleep. My mind raced. I could not turn it off or down. I kept thinking about the day. I should have said this to so and so. I should have said that to so and so. I should have made a better effort. I should have tried to have a conversation with so and so.

Oh. My. Gawd.

I knew it was ridiculous, but I couldn't shut it off.

I got a few hours of sleep and woke up miserable. And I still had a stupid cough from the flu I'd had two weeks earlier. I felt sick and depressed.

I looked at the photos I'd taken Christmas day. As we were leaving Scottsdale, Mario and I had stopped at the Franciscan Renewal Center to walk the labyrinth there. Mario had taken some photos of me. In one I'm on a swing and I'm smiling.

It was the first photo I had seen of myself in probably twenty years where I thought I looked like myself. Where I looked as though I was full of myself--which has always been my goal. I looked at the photo and thought, "Well, I don't look sad there. I look happy. I must be happy." I realized I had been catastrophizing my life, something I was prone to do and something many people with chronic depression and anxiety do. It's all or nothing. I was always sad or I was always happy. It was always bad or it was always good.

For me, it was always bad. And even though I knew it wasn't always bad, since I was often depressed, sad, and/or anxious, it all seemed bad.

I thought about this year. It was a difficult year for me. I felt like I was slip-sliding backwards. I was sick or depressed or anxious the whole year.

At least that's what I thought.

I knew it had been a bad year for many many people. Friends of mine had lost family members. So many other people had lost homes and jobs and life savings. We'd all witnessed the horror of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

I'd finished school but at the end of it, I couldn't find a job. Any jobs in my field were shit jobs. The pay was awful, the hours were awful, and most of jobs were in hovels. I refuse to work for the good of society by having a shit job in a shit building. So that sent me into paroxysms of guilt. I'd just spent a very stressful year going to school. I'd spent our money, plus I'd gotten a loan from one family member and another family member had gifted me with money so that I could go. What had I done? Mario said it would come to something. It would have some meaning and value in our lives eventually.

But I didn't want to end up in the poor house or in the streets, panhandling. (Granted, we don't have poor houses any more.) Ever since I had gotten ill and had to quit my regular day job, I had tried to figure out a way to make a living in this ol' world. I had to do SOMETHING to be of value.

It had been a tough year in other ways, too. But I don't want to list all the crappy things that happened. Then I would have to remember them and relive them. Let's just say the whole year seemed like I was just dragging one foot forward and then jumping two steps back.

But as school ended, I realized two things. One, I realized again (again, again) that I am a storyteller and that's what I'm good at and it's what I want to do. Two, connection with Nature, particularly with plants, was where it was at for me. (Not in a botanical way, per se, but in that 'let's talk to the plants and get groovy' kind of way.)

Mario and I had launched Green Snake Publishing in the fall of 2010. We started out slow, but then after I got out of school this summer, we went crazy full speed ahead.

In the winter, we had published a new edition of Coyote Cowgirl. The cover design for that was a nightmare, at first. I knew what I wanted, but it wasn't coming out right. I was the concept person and then Mario had to bring my concept into reality. He didn't like doing it, and it wasn't fun for either of us. We wondered how we were going to proceed if every book was going to be this labor intensive.

Fortunately I have a friend who is a brilliant artist and we asked her to design a couple of our covers. She created a cover for Deathmark that we loved. This was a relief, to know we had someone to call on should we need it. She also did the cover art for The Gaia Websters.

But I also started playing with cover art. I love textures on book covers. I also like simple covers. We struggled with a concept for the cover of the reprint of The Jigsaw Woman. And then one day I took a clay statue I had made of Eriskegal (who is in Jigsaw Woman) and some indigo colored cloth and I put them together and took some photos. To us, they were stunning, and one of the photos became the cover art for The Jigsaw Woman.

The same thing happened with The Blue Tail. I knew what I wanted, but I wasn't able to convey my ideas very successfully to Mario or our cover artist, so I wasn't getting the cover art I wanted. I decided to start taking some photographs of mermaid tails and see what I could come up with. I had a green mermaid ornament. I put her on a green Fiesta plate. I took many shots. I found a couple I liked and then I changed their color to blue. Once again I loved the cover.

This happened again and again. I'd come up with a cover idea, and I was able to create the art myself and then Mario was able to design the cover. This was so freeing, especially since I had had some covers I was quite displeased with on books that had been published by major publishers.

We also found some proofreaders to help us with production. I loved being able to pay people to work with us. I have always wanted to have a business where I could help support my community members. Unfortunately, we just weren't making enough money (yet) to continue to pay for cover art or proofreading. Fortunately, someone who does proofreading at her work offered to help us (for free!), plus Mario and I continued to proofread. Since I've found typos and copyediting mistakes in all of my previously published books, I figured the three of us proofing each novel couldn't do any worse.

As I wrote in "The Making of an Indie Writer," I began to love writing and publishing again. I stopped worrying about the length of my novels. I tend to write shorter novels. Since Green Snake Publishing doesn't care about length, I could write a long or a short novel, depending on what the story merited.

I read the novel I had written last winter, The Desert Siren, and loved it. I wrote Butch, a novel I had been wanting to write to years.

My writing life was blossoming again.

And yet in other parts of my life, I was still struggling. I started a permaculture guild in my community, but there was trouble in paradise right away. At first people wanted to be involved, but then hardly anyone was involved. And then when the Occupy movement came to the gorge, some people in the guild got offended by any mention of it and wanted gone, gone, gone from the permaculture guild.

I was thrilled by the Occupy movement. After years of activism, I was exhausted. I didn't feel as though I had ever accomplished much. Seeing a new generation--and all generations--stand up for themselves and the environment was invigorating. I went down to Occupy Portland a few times.

I was also shocked by the invective directed at the Occupy movement. Here we were trying to make our country more democratic, more fair, more equitable for everyone, and so many people were just hateful towards us. I had someone in my own family write, "Let them come down here and we'll put them six feet under." When I pointed out that he was threatening my life, he continued to rant about how "they" should leave and go to another country.

What?

I was appalled by the ignorance. Our country is based in revolution, and pointing out what is wrong has always been a part of who were are as a nation.

Paradigm shifts are never easy.

Where was I going with all of this?

Was it a terrible year?

Yes.

Was it a wonderful year?

Yes.

I'm in the desert now. It's been a tough couple of weeks. I apparently somatize absolutely every feeling I have. Since I've been here I've had a cough, my feet have hurt, my hip has hurt, my back has hurt, and I've had insomnia.

I really think it would be easier on everyone if I just felt my feelings, whatever they are.

I am in the desert.

I love the desert.

I used to loathe it.

I love where I live in the Pacific Northwest. When I walk the great old forests, I feel as though anything is possible. I feel dwarfed by the bigness, by the awesomeness of the woods or the ocean or the rivers. I am a child or a bug or a puff of air. Small and probably insignificant.

When I am in the Southwest, I feel loved and accepted. I walk amongst prickly plants here. They all have prickles. I rubbed mesquite leaves across my cheek yesterday. They were nearly as soft as mullein leaves. And right there by the leaves was a thorn. Could have cut my cheek deep if I'd rubbed my face a little differently.

Everything is prickly here with a soft center.

I can relate.

Just call me Briar Rose. Not because I fell to sleep for a hundred years, but because I am covered in thorns.

When I lived in Tucson twenty-five years ago, I did not like it here. I hated it. I always liked the desert, but it scared me. That was the proper attitude. I love the desert. I feel at home in the desert. I feel welcomed in the desert. But I don't romanticize it. I know I could be dead in minutes should I get bitten by a snake. I could be dead in hours if I got lost on a hot summer day. I have to be alert. You can't let your mind wander in the desert. It is a constant teaching about being in the present.

The desert is a place for old warriors. A place for edge dwellers and crazy people. A place for peace mongers. A place for old dogs and new tricks.

I feel loved in the desert. Did I say that? Accepted.

I am battered and beaten up. My broken nose makes me look like one of those punch-drunk fighters. The white hair marks me as a desert dweller.

I fit in here.

The desert is where people throw trash, dead bodies, and beer bottles.

The desert is where some of us go to learn the language of our souls again.

For this coming year, I want to learn how not to be buffeted so much by the storms of my life. I want to be more Zen, in touch with the Tao, a more 'be in the now, baby' kind of person.

Really, I just want to be more myself. I can't believe myself was destined for such a life of sadness and illness. But whatever happens to me, I'd like to get my mind right.

What I've tried over the years hasn't worked.

Or maybe it has. I've gotten here. I'm sitting across from the man I love. I am surrounded by beauty. Prickly beauty.

My kind of beauty?

This next year, I hope to walk, dance, play, and write in beauty. I hope it's an easier year for everyone.

This next year, I'm not going to try to save the world. I'm not going to try to save anyone.

Perhaps I will save myself?

This next year, I don't want to just survive: I want to thrive.

I wish the same for you.

May it be so.

Read more here...

First Book of Old Mermaids Tales

Green Snake Publishing has published another book in the Old Mermaids' universe. This beautiful little book is perfect to take with you anywhere to look at and read when you need some words of wisdom from the Old Mermaid Sanctuary. This is from the cover copy:

The Old Mermaids left the disappearing Old Sea and stepped onto the New Desert where they exchanged their finware for skinware. With barely a backward glance, the mysterious and mystical Old Mermaids began building their sanctuary from earth, water, straw, and their own breath.

These standalone tales, many excerpts from the novels Church of the Old Mermaids and An Old Mermaid Sanctuary, remind us of the beauty all around us, even on those days when we wonder how we’ll survive, let alone thrive. Sister Ruby Rosarita Mermaid brews a magical storytelling soup to bring peace. A mysterious stranger brings the Old Mermaids an elixir which is supposed to heal all. And then there’s the Tea Shell where the Old Mermaids serve the most marvelous teas, and Sister Sophia Mermaid dispenses bits of wisdom like, “Never try to stop a wave,” “A watched pot eventually boils,” and “This is not the end of the world, it just feels like it.” Despite having lost their home and community, the Old Mermaids support one another, love their new world, and build community with all their new human and nonhuman neighbors. You can be assured when you stop by the Tea Shell for a cup of Essence of Coyote Laughter Tea that no coyotes were harmed in the making of your brew. print . kindle . nook . smashwords

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Terri Windling Benefit

Check out this amazing benefit for writer, artist, and editor Terri Windling. Terri has had an influence on many writing careers, including my own. She has been incredibly supportive of my work and generous with her talent. There's a drawing of hers in my Counting on Wildflowers collection. She bought a story of mine for the Coyote Road anthology, and it's her mural (doctored by photography magic) which will be the cover art for my story collection Tales Fairy and Fabulous. She is the artist and designer behind the wonderful (and original) Old Mermaids Sanctuary where I go for a writing retreat every winter. (It goes by another name, but I call it the OMS.) It's a place that has saved my life and my sanity; in large part, this is due to Terri and her ability to create beauty wherever she goes.

And that's just what she's done for me. I'm a tiny grain of sand on a wonderful beach of writers and artists who have been touched by Terri and her talents. I've made an offering of my own for the auction which ends December 15. You can go here to find out more, but part of my offering is that I will write a short Old Mermaids tale for you.

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The Fish Wife: an Old Mermaids Novel

I am very pleased to announce the publication of my new novel, The Fish Wife: an Old Mermaids Novel. Like Church of the Old Mermaids and The Blue Tail, The Fish Wife takes place in the Old Mermaids universe where great magic and great heartbreak is possible. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I loved writing it. You can go here for FAQs and to read the first chapter. This is from the back cover:

The women got closer to the water or the water got closer to them. In the semi-darkness, a wave of light filtered through the storm, and the beach shuddered and shimmered. Suddenly Sara saw the women for what they truly were, saw their tails gleam and glimmer, and she looked down and saw her own true self. A gust of wind unsteadied her and snatched her cap from her head. She broke from the line of sea women and tried to run after her hat; only she couldn’t run at first, so she shook off the part of her that was of the sea, as though it was a skirt she no longer needed. She saw the red of the cap bouncing down the beach and she ran after it. She couldn’t lose the hat, especially not minutes after her mother entrusted it to her. Someone grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the roar of the ocean. “I have your red cap,” the man said. “I know what that means.”

An ancient Irish curse holds Sara in its grip: Cormac MacDougal steals her red cap which means she must become his fish wife or she and her unborn child will die. One night she can bear her life no longer, and she seeks out her true love, Ian McLaughlin. When she finds him in the arms of her sister, she calls on the forces of nature to destroy all that she loves. She flees the village with Cormac before anyone discovers the truth. She risks everything on a perilous ocean journey away from the only home she has ever known. She struggles to remember the old ways, to conjure up the magic of her ancient mer ancestors. She washes up on the shore of a new world where she encounters the goddess Yemaya, a Vodou priestess, a shapeshifting lord of the manor, and the Old Mermaids. In this strange and beautiful realm, Sara works to build a new life. But has she outrun the curse, or will it finally be her undoing? print . kindle . nook . smashwords

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The Coma Monologues

Mario's fabulous new quirky and moving novel, The Coma Monologues, has just been published by Green Snake Publishing! You can read what Mario says about his new novel here (plus read an excerpt there).

Here's a summary of the novel: Gary Hawken—husband, father, civil engineer, and accomplished nerd—enjoys a good life with his family in suburban Toronto. Then a crow distracts him at a traffic signal and a truck slams into his car, knocking him into a coma. Doctors doubt he will ever regain consciousness, but Gary’s wife, Melody—English professor and determined mate—undertakes his resurrection by saturating his brain with the voices of storytellers from his past. Old friends, family members, half-forgotten teachers, mythical creatures, dead heroes, and even a few fictional characters stop by Gary’s bedside to tell the tales that will tantalize him out of his vegetative state back to the world. Is the universe made of stories? Melody believes we’re all nothing but stories and she stakes her husband’s life on that ancient promise. print . kindle . nook . smashwords

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Making of an Indie Writer

(What follows is my memory and impressions of my writing career. I'm sure I've gotten some of the details wrong, but it's how I remember it. I have no intention of vilifying anyone; I have known few true villains in my life. I often get questions about my writing life and why I'm now doing what I'm doing. So here are my answers. This version differs slightly from the version available online.)

In 2010, my husband, writer Mario Milosevic, and I started our own publishing company with the intention of publishing our own work. Even five years ago, this would have been the (supposed) death knell to any novelist's career. We didn't care. We were tired of the traditional publishing model: It wasn't sustainable, it wasn't resilient, and it sure as hell wasn't paying our bills.

Yesterday I finished the first draft of my new novel, Butch. In the next few days, I'll read it over and make corrections; then Mario will read it. Then I'll put it away for a while before I take it out and look at it again. I probably won't send it out to any other publishers. It's shorter than the standard novel. Even if it were the "right" length, I don't know that I would send it out to another publisher. This is fairly astonishing, especially coming from someone who has had six novels published by major publishers.

How had I gotten to this point?

I've been a storyteller since I was a child. I used to fold blank 8 1/2 x 11 inch pieces of paper in half, staple them along the spine, and then draw pictures to tell a story before I could write. Later after I learned to read and write, my parents bought me a little printing press. I'd write my stories and then print them out on my press. I was my own publisher!

I loved books, and I loved listening to stories told by my parents or other relatives. I loved writing my own stories. I loved art, too, and I won an art contest when I was in first grade. I drew the Man in the Moon. I remember thinking that I couldn't make a living as an artist, so I better become a writer.

Where that kind of logic came from, I have no idea.

In any case, I loved writing, and it was relatively easy for me. My teachers were often impressed by my imagination and my stories, and they encouraged me. My parents were encouraging too. My mother told me I should always write in pen instead of pencil; years from now, people would want to read the stories I had written when I was a child, and if I kept writing them in pencil, they would fade. I was astounded! Could it be true that people in the future would want to read my childhood tales? I got out my old stories and traced them in pen (and I have them to this day).

In high school, I wrote a novel a summer. When I was finished, I would put the pages together in a binder so that they looked like books. I no longer used the printing press, but I was still a publisher of sorts.

I took writing classes in college, and I majored in English language and then in American Literature for my Masters degree. I wanted to be a published writer, but it seemed like a long shot. Then the editor of one of the Norton Anthologies, who also happened to be one of my professors, called me into his office after reading one of my stories, "Into the Lion's Mouth."

He told me I needed to try and get my work published. I told him I had no idea how I would do that. He said I needed to find out the names of editors and then send them my stories. He suggested I look in the Writer's Market or the Literary Marketplace. (I can't remember exactly which source he suggested.) I went home and immediately started sending my stories to journals and magazines.

I got lots of rejections. For a time, I cherished each personal note I got, although they were far and few between.

A couple years later, I attended a six week writing workshop at Michigan State University to finish up my Masters Degree from Eastern Michigan University. I hung out with eighteen other weird and wonderful writers. By the end of the six weeks, I was determined to make a living as a writer.

I had also fallen in love with Canadian writer Mario Milosevic. We were married a year later. Soon after that, I sold my first story to a literary magazine that went belly-up before they could publish my story.

A few months later I sold a story to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. I was ecstatic. This was a popular magazine that would pay me real money! When I got the contract in the mail, I read it eagerly. And then my heart sank. They wanted ancillary rights to my characters (merchandizing rights for toys or t-shirts, etc.).

I didn't think anyone would want to buy t-shirts or cups with my characters' likenesses on them, but I certainly wasn't going to sign my rights away to anyone. Besides, I was writing a novel with these characters.

I talked to a lawyer friend who was also a writer. "Sign it," she said. "If you make a fuss they probably won't publish the story."

I was not going to do that. I called Damon Knight who had been one of our instructors at the writing workshop. I read the troubling clauses over the phone to him. Yep, I had understood them correctly. He suggested I call the magazine and talk to them about my concerns.

That's what I did. My heart was thumping. I was worried I was going to ruin my career, but as far as I was concerned, I didn't have a choice. I talked to the contracts manager and told her I had some problems with some of the clauses. She asked me which ones. We went through them, one by one. She dropped each one I objected to and even suggested I change another one.

It was a good experience. The next time I got a contract from Asimov's, they still had the clauses I objected to, but the ancillary rights were on a separate sheet with a separate signature required. I just never signed that separate sheet.

And so my paid writing career had begun. I continued to be pretty sharp with contracts. Most of the time, the contract managers worked with me. It was only the editors of smaller publications who sometimes got their knickers in a knot, seeming to take it personally that I wanted to change something. "Well so and so signed it the way it is," they'd say, "and he's a big name."

Nevertheless.

I began selling short stories fairly regularly. Mario and I had moved from Ann Arbor to Bandon, Oregon to live in a free house a couple of blocks from the beach. We were going to try to survive as writers, without any other jobs. We had $3,000. Within about six months, we were almost out of money. We both had to find jobs. We lived in a small economically depressed town: There weren't many jobs. I ended up as a waitress and Mario eventually got a job at the newspaper doing paste-up and layout.

I wrote a science fiction novel called Timemarkers. Eventually I was able to get an agent on the merits of that novel and my short story sales. Finding an agent was as difficult and time consuming as finding a publisher. Back then (the 1980s) a writer had to have an agent submit her books to a publisher. Very few books were ever bought from the slush pile.

We met other writers in this tiny Oregon town. Some of them had their own linotype presses and they printed their own work. I thought this was crazy. How were they ever going to survive? They all wanted to make a living writing, but they were more in love with the life of an artist. They cared about what they could say, what words they could use to shape an exquisite poem, what story they could tell that would raise the hair on the back of their necks. They loved telling stories out loud to other people. They loved gathering with others to discuss Baudelaire or Tom Robbins.

Mario and I wanted to live creative lives, too. We had decided before we married that we didn't want any part of the American suburban life. We would try the writing life instead of getting regular nine to five jobs.

We were certain we would succeed.

Ah the ignorance of da youth.

I looked at these other creative people living in Bandon with us, all of whom were older than we were, and they were so poor, many of them living hand to mouth. I didn't want that kind of creative life.

One writer friend was certain the reason he couldn't get his book published was because there was a New York publishing conspiracy. "You gotta be from New York," he said, "or at least from back East. You gotta know someone. That's the only way."

We thought he was paranoid.

While we lived in this tiny town, I became quite ill. I wasn't able to write for a year, and I could barely read for almost as long. We didn't have any money for healthcare or anything else, and we had to go on food stamps--for a month or two. I hated that. I felt humiliated. I was a well-educated middle-class kid on food stamps. I decided the writing life was bullshit. I had to get a regular job. Maybe go to business school. Something. I was working as a librarian at a small library in Langlois, OR, down the road from Bandon, even though I didn't have a library degree. I liked the work, so I decided to go back to school to get my Masters of Library Science degree.

Mario and I once again picked up and moved to a new place: Tucson, Arizona. I went to school full-time while also working as a teaching fellow. Mario worked full time at a print shop and wrote while he wasn't working. I barely wrote. I thought it was a waste of time: It was a child's dream. I even resented Mario for continuing to write. I'd look at him and think, "Why don't you grow up and get a real job?"

Then Nina Hoffman sent me a short fiction review by Charles de Lint. She highlighted where he had said nice things about some of my short stories that had recently been published. I was touched. Something about the way he talked about my stories inspired and encouraged me. I couldn't quit. I'd been writing stories since I was a child. I had to keep going.

I got my degree, got a job, and we moved back to the Pacific Northwest. Mario and I continued to write. It was slow going. (I don't know if I was on my second or third agent at this point.) I would write a novel and send it to my agent. S/he would read the book and decide whether they would represent it or not. I never understood this and it drove me crazy. Who cared whether they liked the novel or not? Their job was to be a door opener. Once the door was open and the book sold, their job was to work on the contract.

Agents weren't writers or editors. But they often acted as if they were. My third agent would say, "Send it through the typewriter one more time." After I did that he usually sent the revised manuscript out to publishers. Sometimes he wouldn't. So I would spent a year working on a novel only to have my agent reject it. It was infuriating.

When he did accept a novel, he would send out it out to one editor at a time. One editor at a time. Then we'd have to wait for a response from that editor before my agent would send out the novel to another editor. This could take three to six months for each editor. It was maddening. But that was the way it "worked."

I left one job and got another. I had had quite a few horror stories published before I got sick. Afterward, I wasn't interested in horror stories. I felt like I was living one so I didn't want to write any. Around this time, I discovered Starhawk, Marija Gimbutas, Vicki Noble, Merlin Stone, Patricia Monaghan, and Mary Daly. I wanted to write goddess stories. I wanted to write stories that liberated: beautiful stories. Mythic stories.

I couldn't find many places who were open to these kinds of tales. I decided to start my own magazine, Daughters of Nyx: a Magazine of Goddess Stories, Mythmaking, and Fairy Tales. We paid our writers and artists, not much but something. We found an eco-printer in California who used recycled paper and sustainable inks. For two years we put out this beautiful little magazine. I loved providing an outlet for some amazing writers and artists.

Unfortunately, it was unsustainable for us. Dealing with distribution was a nightmare (especially when the main distributor went belly-up before paying his debts). It was a grind reading the slush pile. Publishing the magazine took an inordinate amount of time, too, and we weren't making any money. So we closed the magazine.

Also during this time, I began a cartoon strip called "Vic and Jane," about an independent woman and her smart-ass dog. I couldn't draw, but I did it anyway, creating these two stick figure characters. I had so much fun with them. I didn't try to get them published. Instead, I put together a book of their cartoons and sent them out to friends and family. (Much like those first books I published as a kid.) It felt so freeing not to have to go through a gatekeeper. It was freeing not to have to ask permission to put my creation out into the world. I just did it.

My work place remodeled using toxic materials, and I got very ill and had to quit work. I don't remember much about that time. I only know that for a few years, every day was a struggle. For many months I could barely walk across the room. Eventually, I started to heal. And I started to write again.

I didn't have a full time job, so I needed to sell a novel more than ever. We needed the money. I began writing almost constantly. I'd tell my agent that I had a new book, and he'd tell me I needed to find a hobby or another job. He could only send around one book a year. One book a year! That might have worked if I was selling that one book for boffo bucks, but that wasn't happening.

I insisted he at least send my current novel out to more than one editor. (The agent/writer dynamic was skewed. They were supposed to be working for writers, yet it often seemed like we were working for them.) My agent resisted sending out more than one copy of my novel for a long while. Finally he relented. I sent him several copies of the novel (whichever one it was at the time) and he sent it out to several editors. (This is now the industry standard.)

Eventually, this worked. He sold my novel The Jigsaw Woman to ROC.

That was an interesting experience. I never talked to my editor there. Ever. (This was before email.) I did have a relationship with her assistant editor, which was fine. I had no say on the cover, and when they first sent it to me, I realized they did not understand the book. It looked like a romance novel. The Jigsaw Woman was anathema to a romance novel. It was a feminist manifesto told through space, time, and myth. But I couldn't do anything about the cover, and I just hoped for the best. (By the way, The Jigsaw Woman was nominated for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.)

ROC had dibs on my next book which turned out to be The Gaia Websters. I begged the assistant editor to make the next cover more appropriate to the story and "please, please don't put any bare-breasted women on the cover. And remember, Gloria is older."

When I got the cover, I was horrified. They had some very young blond woman dressed in a skin-tight outfit on the cover. I could not understand what the art had to do with the story. I called my assistant editor. "I told you she was an older woman," I said. "What is this?"

"She is older," my assistant editor insisted. "She's about thirty."

And then I realized, of course. My assistant editor wasn't even twenty-five years old. Thirty must have seemed old to her.

I also learned that when they first got the cover art from the artist, the woman was naked. I might have preferred that to her plastic miniskirt.

I kept writing. I kept trying to have conversations with my agent about representing more than one book of mine a year. I told him that I needed to make a living. $7,500 per book per year (if I was lucky) wasn't going to feed anyone for very long. He told me to slow down and write less.

I wrote Coyote Cowgirl. I have had doubts about some of my books over the years, but I had no doubts about this one. I loved this book and these characters. I was certain this book was going to be a break-out book for me.

I sent the book to my agent. He told me if I was going to write stuff like this, he didn't think we could work together.

I had no idea what he was talking about. I was devastated. I started to doubt my critical abilities. Charles de Lint and I had become friends since he first reviewed my short stories a decade earlier. We often wrote to one another, and I sent him copies of all the books I was writing. I wrote to him and told him what the agent had said about Coyote Cowgirl. He said, "Send me the book." So I did. I can't remember if he called me on the phone or if he wrote to me. But what he told me was that he loved the book; he said it was already one of his favorite books of all time.

I fired my agent. Then I tried to sell the book myself. No agent would represent me, and no publisher would look at the book.

I had stood up for my principles and now I was worse off than before.

Unbeknownst to me, Charles de Lint and MaryAnn Harris began taking the book around to conventions and trying to get editors to look at it. Finally, an editor from Tor read it, although I didn't know it until later. On Winter Solstice that year, while I was baking cookies, this editor called me and told me he wanted to buy Coyote Cowgirl for TOR.

I was thrilled. I also knew that my last two books had not done well. The Jigsaw Woman had actually earned me some royalties over the advance, but The Gaia Websters hadn't gone anywhere. (In fact I had readers write to me and say they couldn't buy the book because of the cover. They had loved The Jigsaw Woman but "how could you have done that cover for The Gaia Websters?" Most people don't realize the author has nothing to do with the covers of her books when the books are published by traditional publishers.)

The editor from Tor offered me a $10,000 advance for Coyote Cowgirl. My heart sank. I knew if they were only offering me that much money, they would not be doing any promotion for the book. It would die on the vine like The Gaia Websters had. I told him that. My career was flagging (dead) after the poor sales on my last novel. I couldn't afford to have another novel get lost in the shuffle. Would he promise to stay in touch with me? Would he promise to do all he could to get the book noticed? He promised.

Then he told me he wanted me to find an agent to negotiate the contract. I argued with him. I didn't want an agent. I was good with contracts. I wanted to do it myself. He said it was up to me, but he would prefer working with an agent when negotiating the contract.

I knew that now that I had an offer, I could get an agent. I decided I would do it on my terms. I started calling around. I wanted an agent who didn't just do genre. I wanted an agent who could represent teen books, juvenile books, nonfiction, genre, mainstream. And I wanted them to send out more than one book a year.

I found agents who did genre and others who did mainstream. At first I couldn't find anyone who could represent all of these types of books. I hated this whole process. I didn't like the idea of giving someone 15% of $10,000. It wasn't a lot of money to begin with, but then I'd pay an agent 15% and pay another 20% in taxes. (I don't mind paying taxes; I'm just saying it wasn't much money.)

Finally I found an agent I thought could represent all of my interests. I asked her to negotiate a cover consult, at least, so that I didn't get another terrible cover.

After the deal was set, I expected to hear from my editor regularly. I wanted to make certain that advanced reading copies (ARCs) went out to reviewers. I wanted to make certain the book had a good cover. Months went by, maybe even a year. I didn't hear from my editor again. I called my agent and asked her what was going on. Soon after that call, I learned I had a new editor. I hadn't wanted that. I just wanted to be in touch with my first editor. The new editor called me once. I don't know if he had even read the book. I never heard from him again. In fact, I never heard from another editor from TOR again before (or after) Coyote Cowgirl came out.

I did receive communication from TOR/Forge. They sent me the beautiful cover art. They sent me my copyedited manuscript. I proofread the sheets and sent them back. I tried to find out if Forge had sent out ARCs before publication. I was either told they hadn't send out ARCs or they did it at the last minute. This meant the novel wouldn't get reviewed since most publications wanted a copy of the book months in advance of the book's publication.

I knew before it came out that Coyote Cowgirl would probably sink like a stone. I could only hope that word of mouth would help since the publisher did no (or very little) promotion of it. It was as if they bought the book and then completely forgot about it. (Coyote Cowgirl was a James Tiptree, Jr. Award nominee, too.)

I sent other books to my new agent. She approved of some and disapproved of others. For one book, she thought the romance was too easy between the two main characters. I needed to throw a monkey wrench into the mix.

I didn't want to do that. It wasn't a romance novel. Yes, two people loved one another, and yes, they would stay together, but that wasn't what the book was about. It was about a group of women (and one man) finding their place in this old world. But I did what she asked. I shouldn't have. The whole book crumbled for me after that. She sent it out, as I had rewritten it, but it didn't get published.

By this time, I hated the whole publishing construct. It seemed half-ass backward. Foremost among these half-ass backwardnesses was the fact that so many writers couldn't make a living unless they were working like dogs either at other jobs or at writing. Why could the agent, editor, publisher, printer, cover artist all make decent livings, but the writer couldn't?

And why did we have to go through an agent to get to a publisher? I understood slush piles. I had had to read slush piles when I was an editor in college and later when I was the editor of Daughters of Nyx. It was gruesome. Yet, for the writer, at least, there had to be a better way. How had agents become the arbiters of what everyone in the country could read?

I started to think back to my friend on the Oregon coast who talked about an East coast conspiracy. It wasn't that I thought there was a conspiracy. But I did wonder about what was getting published. So much of it seemed alike in tone and subject matter. How to explain it? So much of what was being published had the same sensibilities.

What about the kind of books I liked to read and write? Nature was important to my experience as a human being, yet Nature wasn't a factor in much fiction. And out here in the West, we cared about the environment, about good healthy food, about peace and justice. Some of us contemplated the universe in our belly buttons or in the night sky. Yet, for the most part, that kind of subject matter was belittled, and it rarely showed up in any kind of serious fiction.

It wasn't that it wasn't getting written. It just wasn't getting published.

I often thought of Joanna Russ's book How To Suppress Women's Writing. In it, she talks about how the writings of women and minorities are suppressed. I wondered if it went beyond that. If most writers couldn't make a living, how many of them just stopped writing all together? Or how many amazing writers were out there writing but who had no idea how to navigate this bizarre publishing world? For the most part, we were getting fiction written by middle-class white people or those who could afford to write as a hobby.

So much had changed in publishing just in the decades I was involved in it. It had once been a "gentleman's business," intended to support the family who owned the business and their employees. As long as they made a modest profit, life was good. Once huge corporations began buying up publishing companies, publishers were beholden to stockholders whose main goal was to make money, not support anyone's family or employees or publish great stories. Soon enough editors couldn't make an offer on a book unless they first ran it past their sales team, which was often made up of mostly young men. (At least, this is what I was told by people working in the publishing industry in New York.)

If a writer couldn't appeal to that mainstream audience, if she didn't have the potential to be a bestseller, her chances of being published plummeted.

Was this why so much of what was being published seemed so the same?

Of course what I've just written is a simplification and a generalization about publishing. And this essay is about my experiences. I'm an expert at my life; I'm not an expert on everything else that has happened in the publishing world over the last thirty years. I can say that this writing life, trying to work with the mainstream publishing construct, was not sustainable for me and for many writers.

I had several friends who were successful writers. Over the years, they admonished me that writing was a business and I should think of it that way. I acknowledged I wanted to make my living writing, but that was because I loved writing. I loved telling stories. It wasn't just a business. If that were the case, I would have chosen something more stable and more lucrative. No, for me it was a way of being and living. I wanted to walk, play, dance through life in beauty, the beauty way. Telling stories was how I did that.

Coyote Cowgirl came and went, and once again my writing career was in the dumpster.

I went to the coast with Mario for a short vacation. Years earlier when we'd been on the coast, I had gotten an intriguing image of a girl with wings in my mind's eye. Now, unexpectedly, she came to me full blown and told me her story. I sat in the hotel room on the Oregon coast and began to write Mercy, Unbound. The main character was a teen, but I didn't intend for the book to be a teen book. I didn't intend anything at all. I just wrote her story. It turned out to be a short book. I sent it to my agent. She assigned me a new agent, one who specialized in teen books.

My new agent and I got along immediately. He loved my writing. And he loved Mercy, Unbound. He was able to sell it fairly quickly to Simon & Schuster. They also bought my next book, Broken Moon.

On a dime, my career and my publishing experiences changed. I loved working with Simon & Schuster. Every part of the experience was wonderful, at least what I remember of it. I loved my editor. She kept in good touch with me at every step of the process. She also loved my writing. I felt like I could breathe again. I felt like I had allies who respected me and my work. When I had a problem with the first pass at a cover for Broken Moon, they changed it. (By the way, Broken Moon got a starred review in Publisher's Weekly and is in its sixth printing now, I believe.)

I loved writing Mercy, Unbound and Broken Moon. They are short passionate novels. My writing is often fiercely passionate and emotional. With teen fiction, I was allowed to be emotional, to be fierce. I loved that!

I thought I was set for life. I would have been happy making a career at Simon and Schuster. Soon after I wrote Broken Moon, I wrote one of the most amazing and beautiful novels I had ever read or written: Ruby's Imagine. My editor liked it and wanted to buy it. But at the last minute she backed out of the deal. She was leaving the company and going somewhere else.

This was the third time an editor had pulled out of deal at nearly the last minute, before the contracts had been written but after I had been told that the book was sold.

I was crushed.

Sometime later, my former editor bought Ruby's Imagine at her new publishing house. But things were different. I couldn't get in touch with her. She didn't return my emails or my agent's. It was Tor all over again. The cover was strange and not very effective for their intended audience. As far as I could tell, no marketing was done. I'm not even sure they sent out ARCs. Probably not. I never heard from my editor during the whole process, so I didn't know.

In 2007, I wrote Church of the Old Mermaids. I showed it to my agent. He said if he couldn't sell this novel, he would quit being an agent. It was a beautiful, mystical, gentle, meaningful novel. It was American magical realism--or mythic fiction. Which was exactly what I wanted to write.

He tried to sell it. It probably went to fifty editors. A couple of times we were this close to a deal, but each time the sales department nixed it. We never knew why. Was it because a group of young men (and women) couldn't fathom the idea of a novel about a woman over fifty?

I didn't know.

I believed this book had to be published. We had put together a Lulu edition of the book and sent it out to thirteen people for a holiday gift. The people who read it loved it. Charles de Lint was one of the recipients of the thirteen, and he told me it was now one of his favorite books.

Two years later when it still hadn't sold to a major publisher, I decided I wanted to publish it myself. The publishing industry was rapidly changing. Amazon was helping writers publish books through Createspace. Mario had already put up several of his poetry books. (Poets have always been allowed to self-publish without detriment to their careers.)

Even so, Mario was reluctant for us to publish Church of the Old Mermaids. He was afraid it would damage my career. Generally speaking, the industry curled its lips in derision at the thought of self-publishing. I had done a little of that curling myself when I had seen or read self-published books. I thought, well, there's a reason they weren't published by someone else.

But then, who was I to decide what was or wasn't appropriate for the reading public? I wanted to read new voices. Maybe those voices wouldn't come from traditional publishing.

I wanted radical stories. I thought of all of my writing as radical, subversive, resilient. My books were all inherently feminist, humanist, mystical, harsh, beautiful, and/or disturbing. I was trying to figure out how we can live together on this planet in beauty. I loathed nihilistic fiction. Why bother to tell a story if it was all futile, if it was all worthless? Unless the writer could do it in beauty--and beauty was definitely in the eye of the beholder. There should be more "beholders," not just a relatively small group of people deciding what does and doesn't get published.

I wanted women and girls to feel uplifted, inspired, and empowered when they read my stories. I wanted boys and men to see men and boys in the media who weren't jerks, rapists, or sexually aggressive assholes.

I wanted Church of the Old Mermaids out in the world.

I already had the cover, and it was perfect. I had taken a photograph of my wooden Old Mermaid standing in front of the dark blue wall of our Napa store here in town. I'd made a sign to hang on her: "Church of the Old Mermaids, Kim Antieau, novice." (We didn't know how to put titles over photographs on our books yet, so that's why we did that.) We published the book on Createspace. Then I kindled it, put it on the nook, and all the other e-devices that were out in the world then.

I kept writing books, and then I would send them to my agent. He wasn't happy with one teen book, so he asked me to change some things. By this time our relationship was deteriorating. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was because I was frustrated. I didn't understand why he wouldn't send out more than one novel of mine at a time. (Even after he explained to me why, I disagreed with him.) When he wouldn't do it, I started sending out my books on my own.

At first I told him I didn't want to make changes on the teen novel he didn't like. Why couldn't he send it out the way it was? But I relented. At least twice I rewrote the book. Until I couldn't stand it. Whatever vision I had had of the novel was gone.

When I write a book, it's as though someone has told me their life story. Making major changes feels like I'm messing with history. The story becomes a lie.

I urged my agent to send out all of the novels I had sent him. (In other words, if he had four of my novels, I wanted each of them sent out to a bunch of editors.) But he wouldn't do it. He had other titles from other writers at these publishers and he didn't want my books to compete with them--and vice versa, I'm certain. He would send out one book a year, essentially. I realized then something I should have realized earlier: No matter how hard he was working for me, he wasn't thinking of me first. He had a whole bevy of writers he was juggling.

We had a conversation about money. He told me he had seventy writers (I think that was how many he said) and only one of them was making a living. In other words, it just wasn't in the cards for me.

Again I said, "How come you can make a living, the editor makes a living, the artist, the printer, the sales team, but not the writer, not the person who is creating the work? Something is screwy about this entire set-up."

It may have been then that my agent and I split up. He was (is) a good guy. But he couldn't look after my interests the way I wanted.

Only I could do that.

I didn't know if I wanted to write any more. I had been trying to write commercial fiction for so long that I didn't know what stories I wanted to tell, if any.

I stopped writing. I went into a depression.

Then Mario went to a workshop with Dean Wesley Smith (a dear old friend from way back) to learn about e-publishing. I came with Mario, but I walked the beaches while he worked.

It was an exciting and scary time in publishing. Lots of writers--not just me--were having trouble selling their books. Publishers were being more and more cautious about what they bought. Plus they were being more demanding. They wanted huge percentages of e-book profits forever. Most writers were caving into these demands but some were not.

I got an offer on one of my teen books from a small publisher. I read over the contract and wasn't happy with some of the clauses. I sent the contract to the Authors Guild and they concurred. One of the problems I had with the contract was that they wanted e-rights forever. I'm not exaggerating when I use the word "forever."

Normally a writer gets between 7% and 12% of royalties off the cover price of a book. One could argue that the publisher has to pay the cover artist, the copyeditor, the proofreader, the editor, and the printer, plus they've got to make some profit, so 7% to 12% of the cover price of the printed book makes sense (maybe). But why should the publisher get a big percentage of the e-book cover prices forever? (Normally the percentages on e-books are more equitable in the writer's favor, but still: forever.)

When the publisher wouldn't change the terms, I turned the offer down.

After the e-book workshop, Mario and I went to lunch before leaving town. He told me he wanted to go full steam ahead on e-book publishing. I was still tired and depressed. It seemed like so much work. But he was excited.

"Kim, you were doing this before anyone else was," he said. "You went ahead with Church of the Old Mermaids when I thought it was a bad idea. But you were right. We can publish all your books. And mine. We can put up all of our stories. We'll have freedom."

His enthusiasm was contagious. I was tired of years of failure, sickness, rejection.

We started home, driving from the coast to the Columbia River Gorge where we lived.

"What will we call our publishing company?" I asked.

We bandied about different names. None of them worked. I said, "At the heart of everything I do is Nature. How can we work that into the title?"

Years ago, Mario bought me a small green rubber snake that sits on our dashboard like a guardian for our travels. I looked at the snake and said, "How about Green Snake Publishing?"

"I like it," he said.

Once we got home and started this new venture, I tried to be enthusiastic, but I was still discouraged. I wanted a big advance from a big publisher so that Mario and I weren't constantly struggling financially. (Because of my health issues and my inability to work a full-time job, we had struggled mightily over the years.)

I kept hearing bad news from the publishing front. Publishers were demanding that "their" writers cease and desist any indie e-publishing of their own. (And there were more draconian measures some publishers were taking to try and protect their bottom lines, but I won't get into that here.)

I watched this and wondered why innovative publishers weren't stepping up and saying, "We realize we haven't valued writers before. You are the creators! You are the storytellers. How best can we serve you and the story?" Those would be the publishers who would survive this upheaval, I believed. Embrace the new world. Make the world better instead of gaming the system to make you more profits.

Over the year, Mario kept putting up his short stories and selling them for 99 cents. Then we decided to put up my novels that had gone out of print. Fortunately I had gotten back the rights to all three of my adult novels before the e-book revolution was in full swing.

We first published a new Coyote Cowgirl. That was our first "big" cover, and it was torture for Mario. He came up with several covers he liked, but I didn't like any of them. I knew what I wanted and I wouldn't stop until I liked it. Finally I came up with a concept I liked and we were able to create it.

I wrote an afterword for Coyote Cowgirl. I enjoyed talking about the history of the book. I was glad it was going to be out in the world again.

We published my teen novel Deathmark next and then reprinted The Jigsaw Woman with an extraordinary new cover. Next was The Blue Tail. As we worked on each project, I started feeling more free. I woke up in the morning feeling enthusiastic instead of depressed.

I loved working on the covers; that was now part of my creative process. I no longer had to worry about big-breasted scantily clad women on the covers. Unless I wanted them on the cover.

This summer I started writing on my novel Butch. I didn't want it to be a long book. I loved writing shorter novels. Now that I didn't have to worry about a publisher wanting me to pad the story so that the book was longer, some of my writing stress dropped away. I could just tell the story I wanted to tell: My characters could just tell me their stories.

A few weeks ago, I finished editing The Desert Siren, the novel I had written last winter in Tucson. It is long enough that it could be a commercial book. The subject matter might even be commercial. I don't know. I don't care. I don't feel depressed now that it's done, as I often did in the past when I'd finish a novel, anticipating sending it to my agent or sending it out to publishers.

I realized that if I wanted, I could publish it myself. No matter what, this novel was not going to get lost. My job was to get my stories out into the world and let the world decide what they thought of them: And now I could do that.

That knowledge made me giddy with pleasure.

I realized liked being an indie writer.

I like being an indie writer.

I stay away from the arguments about the pros and cons of indie writing. It's like talking politics. Thems that gots it don't want to change nothing; thems that don't gots it want a revolution.

Occupy the Story, man.

I don’t want publishers to go away. But I want to be treated with respect; I want my work to be respected. I am not a commodity; my work isn't a commodity. I deserve to make a living from my work, just as everyone deserves to make a living from their work.

I ain't no slave to the corporation.

When we were telling an artist friend of ours that agents and then editors often ask writers to rewrite their work, he frowned and said, "Isn't that kind of like someone looking at one of my paintings and telling me I need to take this chunk of paint off here and paint this part of the canvas with a different color over there? And if I do all that, they'll pay me for it."

"It is like that," I said, "only it's worse. Half the time they'll ask you to make those changes but they don't pay you for it. They end up saying, 'geez, I guess I still don't like it.'"

I am an indie writer. I am happier with my writing and my publishing than I've ever been. I'm not making a living from my writing now, but I wasn't before. At least now I feel a sense of freedom and peace.

I may not be making a living (yet) but I am living happier.

We'll see what happens next.


(For more about what's happening in the indie (and beyond) publishing world, check out Dean Wesley Smith's website and Kristine Kathryn Rusch's website.)

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