We’re joined again by Sherrilyn Kenyon for a discussion of perseverence, at her request no less. Sherri tells us about how the struggles she’s had, even after having bestsellers and 98% sell-throughs. And many of us have heard stories like this from other authors.

We talk about breaking in, about how each of us have had discouraging spells, and how important it is to persevere throughout it all. Hopefully the advice we offer will help some of you through the grind as well. Never give up. Never surrender. By Grabthar’s Hammer, even.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Born of Night: A League Novel, by Sherrilyn Kenyon, narrated by Kelly Fish.

Writing Prompt: Somebody wrote a novel about an alien invasion. One year later the aliens invade exactly per the details in the novel.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Be the cockroach. Plan for the rug being yanked out from under you. Take your Scarlett O’Hara moment, and write because that’s what you want to do. Never give up, never surrender. Do what you love. You’ve written about the hero, going back to their strengths and winning — now live it.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Season five, Episode 27, Perseverance.
[Howard] 15 minutes long because you’re gonna have to wait a little longer than that to get your novel looked at.
[Dan] And we’re still not going to be that smart when it happens.
[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] And I’m messing with the tagline.
[Brandon] And we also once again have Sherrilyn Kenyon here guest starring with us. Author of many, many successful books in many, many awesome genres. So, Sherri, thank you very much…
[Sherri] Oh, thank you guys for having me.
[Howard] Just to make sure that I didn’t lie… Sherri, have you ever had a novel accepted in less than 15 minutes? Ever?
[Sherri] Yes. But only after I’d published many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many books.
[Howard] Okay. I feel pretty good.

[Brandon] This was actually a podcast that Sherri suggested. I think it’s something that we should very frequently be talking about on the podcast, because it’s a very important topic. You actually called it the cockroach theory of writing. Is that what you said?
[Sherri] Yes. Be the cockroach. It comes from Cher. She was doing this thing, I’m going to be the cockroach singer, I’ll be here long after everybody else is gone, not even a nuclear bomb could stop me. So that’s my motto. When I heard that, I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to bogart that because that will be me as a writer. After the bomb comes, I will still be typing away.”
[Brandon] Tell me some times in your writing career where that mindset has been important to you.
[Sherri] My entire career.
[Brandon] Even still? I mean…
[Sherri] Yeah. Well. It’s not an industry for the meek. Luckily, my daddy was a drill sergeant, and his whole thing is, “The world will not take mercy on you. Your enemy will not take mercy on you. It would not be a service for me if I took mercy on you.”
[Howard] And this was to get you to fold the laundry, wasn’t it?
[Sherri] Basically. And that was my sympathetic parent. I’ve had to rebuild my career twice, so…
[Brandon] Really? What happened?

[Sherri] Who knows? This is the stuff that keeps you up way late at night going, “Oh, my God.” The genre went down. I was writing paranormal at the height in the early 90s when it was the most popular genre going. For whatever reason, about 94, it stopped.
[Howard] You mentioned this in our cast last week, where your publisher let their whole stable of writers go?
[Sherri] Oh, not one. I was writing for three different publishers.
[Brandon] And they all?
[Sherri] They all folded up their lines and said…
[Howard] So much for diversification.
[Sherri] Yeah, exactly. I mean, one by one. I had six best-selling books. I mean, I had hit the bestseller list, I had 98% sell-throughs. One book, we sold through in a month. They wouldn’t go back to print on it. They had it in their mind the genre was ckkk and we were all left to drift. It took me about four years before I could get another contract.
[Brandon] Wow.
[Dan] But the cheerful part of this story is… you’ve done that, you said, many times now, right?
[Sherri] Yeah, thank you, God. But it sounds a lot easier than it was. I mean, we ended up homeless on the street with an infant. That is no place you ever want to be. Luckily, I had an agent at the time. But for that, I wouldn’t have been able to submit. But for three years, she didn’t get anything.

[Brandon] Wow. I sound amazed, and in part I am, but at the same time, I’ve heard this story from pretty much every major author I’ve talked to. That at some point in their career, the rug gets yanked out from underneath them, and you’ve got to rebuild from scratch. Which, I’ll be honest, completely terrifies me. But that’s partially… I mean, this is not really may be all that useful advice to you listeners, but if it ever does happen to you and you are writing, save like there’s no tomorrow is what I’ve heard from all authors. Try and get… try and save during the fat years because there will be lean years. All right. Let’s talk advice to our listeners. When you started, did you have a tough time breaking in or were you one of the…?

[Sherri] No, I had a very hard time. Well, I had a couple of personal setbacks. I lost somebody who was very close to me. It took me a couple of years to… it was my older brother. It was one of those things where I had… I had sold a ton load of short stories, and I had decided I was going to tackle the novel market. Even though I’d finished novels, they weren’t really publishable. So I was going to do the one publishable manuscript. I had spent… I was in college at the time. I took my entire Christmas break between two jobs that I was working to type up a manuscript on a typewriter I’d borrowed from my brother’s roommate. When my brother came to get the typewriter, his last words to me were, “Honey, I know it’s going to be a winner. I can’t wait to see it in print.” He died right after that. So it took me a long time. Ironically, that’s the first book of the League series. It did end up being the first book that I sold. But it took me four years after that. Took me two years before I could even submit it anywhere. It just… yanked that rug.

[Brandon] Dan, during the years that you were trying to break in, were there ever moments that you just said, “I just can’t do this” or that you were close to giving up?
[Dan] Actually, the close to giving up moment came more recently. After I had already sold and did not hit the level of success that for some reason I thought that my first book ever should have hit… which was basically just unrealistic expectations on my part. I saw that come out and I thought, “Yeah, it’s selling and yeah, I’m supporting my family, but man, other people are selling so much more. What am I doing? Why am I even trying to compete in the same genre with these guys?” I got pretty depressed, actually, and just decided, “You know what? Forget this. This is what I love to do, this is what I’ll end up doing with my free time anyway even if I give up and get a real job, so I’m just going to keep doing it.” And got through it.

[Brandon] Howard? You were working a full-time job at Novell and publishing your comic on the Internet for free, having had no drawing experience. Was there ever a moment doing two full-time jobs that you just said, “What am I doing? I should give up on this.”
[Howard] This is going to sound weird, but for the first five years I was doing it, I never had any doubt that this thing was… what I was doing was the science fiction comic strip to end all science fiction comic strips. I had an ego the size of Texas… and Alaska… and Utah. I mean, I just had no concept that it would be possible for me to fail. The first time I was really discouraged was when I looked at the royalty agreement with Steve Jackson games before I decided to self publish. I looked at those numbers and realized… I had already quit the day job because I couldn’t do it anymore. I looked at those numbers and realized if they sell according to their projections, I will be bankrupt before the book hits print. I told Steve Jackson that, and he said, “You need to self publish.” Bless his heart, my publisher told me you need to self publish. Sandra and I were very discouraged for a while there because that was terrifying. We need to tackle an aspect of the business that we didn’t want to. Then we knuckled down and we did it. Now I’ve got six books in print, all of which are doing a great job of feeding the family.

[Brandon] For me, I think I may have told this story before, so I’ll be brief on it, but for me, the worst time was after writing my 12th unpublished novel and being very dissatisfied with it. Getting in a heap of rejection letters off of books that I had thought were quite good, and a heap of rejection letters off of the ones that I had tried to write to the market that I didn’t think were that good, but I thought, “Oh, they’ll like these because this is what’s selling quote unquote.” So I had been rejected in both piles. That was a very hard moment for me. That’s when I… I was working graveyard shift at the hotel. I had just graduated from college with a pretty useless English degree because I had spent all my time writing instead of doing anything else. I had no job prospects other than the graveyard shift. And I had 12 unpublished novels.
[Howard] 12 unpublished novels and a “would you like fries with that” degree.
[Brandon] Yes. That was the moment for me. For me, what turned it around was exactly what Dan said. When I realized, “Well, what else am I going to do?” I mean even if I go get… say I go become an insurance salesman or whatever. I’m still going to spend all my free time writing books. So what does it matter if I publish or if I don’t publish, if I’m writing the books that I love to write, that’s what I’m going to keep doing anyway. That moment turned it around and it was five months after that, that I sold a novel.
[Dan] You know, you talk to published authors and there are very few if any who don’t absolutely love it. I think that’s very telling. You can’t make it in this field unless you absolutely love it.

[Sherri] Well, I think we all have what you touched on, what I call the Scarlett O’Hara moment. In the case of mine, I had written… I had been trying to break in for years. After the big lull, after the six books, and my turnaround moment came… I got a lovely rejection from a publisher. After I had written the marketable book, two of my critique partners at the time were New York Times best-selling authors, they had signed off on it, my agent loved it. Then I get back the wonderful rejection… anybody ever gets a worse one, dinner is on me. It was, “No one at this publishing house will ever be interested in developing this author. Do not submit her work to us again.”
[Brandon] Wow.
[Dan] Okay. You win.
[Sherri] Yeah. That is my trump card on any conversation. Now, after I had scraped myself up off the floor, my moment came and I’m like, “You know what? If I’m going to fail, by God, it’ll be on my terms. I am not writing a marketable book again.” That’s one of the things that worked for and against me. It worked for me with the readers, but it really worked against me with the publishing…
[Howard] Well, now you have a goal. Which is to make millions of dollars for a publisher who competes with this jerk.
[Sherri] Oh, no, actually I write for that publisher. And that editor. I hope they never remember that. Oh, no, I stay up at night going, “Oh, dear God, don’t ever let her find that.”
[Brandon] Oh, boy. Because I would have told her about that. I’d be like, “Hey, you see this?”
[Sherri] Oh, no-no-no-no-no.
[Howard] I framed this one.
[Sherri] Well, I did, but no-no-no-no-no.
[Howard] I have another discouraging moment, but let’s plug one of Sherrilyn’s books.

[Brandon] Yeah. Sherri, would you tell us about the League… the series?
[Sherri] The League… they’re science fiction. Assassins. Ironically, the main character, Nykyrian, was my imaginary friend when I was a kid. Says a lot about my childhood, right, my best friend was an assassin?
[Brandon] Was an alien assassin? Or is that optional
[Sherri] Well, he’s part alien, part human. It’s set in the Ichidian universe where it’s martial law. The League is the big bad guy. Nykyrian sets up a counter agency, the Syntela, who… what they do is they protect the innocent victims that the League has targeted.
[Brandon] Okay. That’s excellent. What’s the first book in the series? Is it called…
[Sherri] The first one’s Born of Night.
[Brandon] Born of Night. Okay. How many books are there in the series?
[Sherri] Right now there are three. There are three in the stores. The fourth one comes out in April.
[Brandon] Excellent. You can go to audiblepodcast.com/excuses, start a 14 day free trial, and download a copy.

[Brandon] All right. Let’s… for the few minutes left in the podcast, let’s try and give some advice. Maybe some hoorah moments, maybe some… what do you say to new writers who are maybe having some of these moments where… can I really do this? This all looks daunting to me. Or I’m finding rejection around every corner. Or I’m exhausted mentally and physically. What do you say to them?
[Sherri] Never give up, never surrender.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Sherri] It’s true.
[Howard] By Grabthar’s Hammer…
[Sherri] Exactly. My favorite quote of all time, another one I wish I had thought of. But it’s true. Reach down deep. We’ve all had that moment where… I actually have put my computer back into the box, and taped it. I’m done. But one $.25 stamp saved my life. It turned everything around. That one submission.
[Howard] The stamp you stole from your husband?
[Sherri] The one I stole from my husband. That’s what I tell people all the time. If you don’t submit it, they can’t buy. So, whatever you do, submit it. Because it could have been that one time, you should’ve stole that stamp.
[Brandon] Do you want to tell us that story?

[Sherri] Well, after we had been homeless, and we were… had scraped up and were living in a roach infested dive of all time… I always tell everybody we need a violin to play when I tell my story. I had promised my husband… I had been chasing the dream at that point for 10 years. I’d had a little bit of success, but at that point, we didn’t have the money, and my husband made… I don’t ever want anybody to think my husband is not supportive… but living with a writer sometimes is like living with a cutter. I mean, really, you’re watching them go through these horrible lows. He was like, “Enough. I can’t stand what it does do you. I’m watching you crashed every time you get one of these rejections in. Enough. You took food out of your babies’ mouths.” He’ll deny he ever said that. It’s like, “No, you really did. It’s burned forever in my memory.” But I promised him I was never going to submit again. And then, it was one of those… after about three, four months after I got that lovely rejection, and I had written another manuscript that I lost my agent over. She’s like, “You know, I’ve been trying for three years with marketable manuscripts. You handed me something I can’t touch. I’m done.” So I was walking out to the mailbox, and I got a writers magazine in there, and it had updated editors. One of the editors in there was somebody I’d worked under early in my career. I’m thinking… I hear that voice, “Submit, submit, submit.” Then I hear the other little angel on the other shoulder. “Are you out of your mind? No-no-no-no-no. Your husband will kill you.” I debated for about a week, then finally I found the nerve to steal one stamp out my husband’s wallet and to submit what had to be the worst query letter of all time. The editor and I joke about it to this day. It actually started out with, “You probably don’t remember me…” and I was one of the first writers she ever worked with. So… I submitted it to her, and I ended up with a three book contract.
[Brandon] Excellent.
[Dan] That’s awesome.
[Brandon] Dan!

[Dan] What I always tell people is, no matter how awesome you think it’s going to be to be a full-time writer, it’s way more awesome than that. Once you actually make it, once you achieve everything you been waiting for … not because there’s scads of money, or you get to hang around with famous people all the time, or whatever, but because doing what you love for a living is the best thing. It’s so wonderful to be able to do it. So any amount of work you can put into it, will be paid off.
[Sherri] That time that first reader comes up to you and goes, “I loved what you wrote.” That is what you live for, that’s what you do it for. There is no other high greater.

[Howard] I’m going to hearken back to last week’s podcast. We have… we create characters who have a weakness, they have an incompetence, there is a power imbalance somewhere. Often what ends up resolving stories for these protagonists is that they are able to go back to something that is a strength for them. Submitting and getting a rejection letter is something that is out of your control. That editor is out of your control. There is a power imbalance. They can always say no. The only thing you have control over is your ability to steal stamps, your ability to write another manuscript, your ability to keep doing this. So if you are going to be the hero of your own story, then you have to go back to your strengths and act like a hero. Submit another manuscript, or write a better manuscript, or… but you have to keep doing it. It’s what you’ve been writing about, so… live it.

[Brandon] I guess what I’ll say to just end this off is if you are feeling low, if you’re feeling like nothing is happening, remember that I felt that in 2002 after writing 12 novels. That’s where I was. One year later, I sold a book. Three years after that, I was number one on the New York Times bestseller lists. So, it can happen to you, too. I’m willing to bet that you, listening right now, are a better writer now than I was when I started.
[Howard] I’m sure that if you are listening now, you’re a better artist than I am today.

[Brandon] Let’s go ahead and give a writing prompt. I’ll make myself do it this time because I’ve made everybody else do it. Let’s do… you are writing a story, there is a world where someone wrote a novel about an alien invasion. One year later, that he exact alien invasion happens on Earth for undescribable reasons exactly as the novel predicted.
[Dan] Awesome.
[Brandon] That’s your writing prompt. This has been Writing Excuses. A very big thank you to Sherrilyn Kenyan again for sitting in with us. You’re out of excuses, now go write.