In which the 10 year anniversary of my being published is like renewing my passport
or "I went to Antarctica and I want to tell literally everyone all about it"
I have now written and erased this newsletter three four times, so…let’s just hope this one works.
ANYWAY.
Recently I had to renew my passport, and it was a bit of A Thing because I was traveling to the US a lot, so I didn’t have time to get it done. I needed it because my trip to Antarctica fell just within the last six months of my old passport, and most places won’t accept a passport that close to expiring. I was going to be home from December 1 until January 12, so that was my window. My local Service Canada couldn’t guarantee the turnaround, so that meant I had to go to London and stand in line for like 4 hours. The office was, I will grant, extremely well organized. There were just a lot of people there.
As I stood there waiting, I was thinking about my passport. Its first stamp is June 28, 2014, which is when I went to ALA for The Story of Owen. Its last stamp is November 30, 2023, because the airport in Lisbon still stamps passports. Most of them don’t, because the technology is good enough for record keeping. I find this kind of sad. I miss the permanence. But then I remembered that I work in publishing, which wouldn’t know permanence if it kicked us in the face.
Anyway, in 2014 I bought that 10 year passport with money I didn’t have. Yes, Lerner was sending me to Vegas, but I had to pay for things like gas to the airport, parking, food while traveling and, of course, the legal document that would get me across the border. I walked to the Kitchener office because it was close and parking downtown was abysmal. I stood in line with people from Toronto who had been overflowed to KW. I asked the woman at the desk what would happen if the Queen died, because technically my passport was in her name, and she blinked at me for a full thirty seconds before we silently agreed to forget I asked.
(The answer was: nothing. It just changes over when you renew it next. It was on my mind because I was piecing together the alternate history of That Inevitable Victorian Thing and reading articles about what was predicted to happen upon the Queen’s death. Most of it was about boring stuff like the stock market and official government response, but there was a section on extremely small details like how every post office would need new pictures, how Anglican mass would change overnight, and how long coins would stay in circulation.)
That passport took me to eight countries. A lot of it was work-related in the US (thank you, Ahsoka), but those short trips made me realize that despite my spine issues, I could still go places and do things. I just had to do it slowly. Horseback riding, blackwater rafting, modified hiking, and a lot of just sitting somewhere and looking at something I could never see at home.
Writing books has always been about telling myself stories and then working up the courage to share them. In the beginning, that was ff.net and livejournal. Now I get to build my own worlds, too, and I absolutely love doing that. Publishing books is an entirely different matter, but I’ve managed to scrape on for a decade, and I still want to write, so I count it as a win.
A lot has changed. I fixed my teeth and had spine surgery. Twitter rose and, uh, whatever it’s doing right now. The YA market boomed without solving any of its internal problems, and we’re still trying to do better. I like to imagine I got better. I know I got better at publishing books, at least. The writing is highly subjective. I bought a house. I have four more nieces and nephews. Dragon Age fixed my brain in a way I can’t explain. I watched every David Attenborough documentary I could get my hands on and I got pretty decent at cross stitch.
And then I had to renew my passport so that I could go to Antarctica.
I have mentioned before that I love beginnings and endings. They’re arbitrary, but they help us conceptualize time and remember things in their context. The new passports have difference cases, the photo page is hard plastic, and all of the pictures inside are Canadian scenes instead of people (you know, just in case). It’s new enough that customs agents and hotel employees did a double take when they saw it, and asked when it had changed. I like them, even without the Queen.
Once upon a time, during a job interview for some retail position, someone asked what my five year goal was. I absolutely did not have one, and heard myself say “I’d like to publish a book before I’m 30”. I made it by two and a half months. Ten years later, I have (almost!) 15 books, and while it never occurred to me to set a goal like “I’d like to go to all seven continents before I’m 40”, I did okay. Antarctica was an ending, and I’m excited to see what’s next.
Argentina doesn’t stamp passports anymore, so my passport is still blank. On the other hand it’s easy for me to stay in contact with the people who were on the ship with me, and we can more or less instantly share pictures. It’s a weird sort of trade off, but still a net win. I have no idea what’s going to happen between now and my next passport, but I’ve never been afraid of a blank page. I always manage to fill them up eventually.
Despite being 10 years old, The Story of Owen (and its sequel, Prairie Fire) is available for purchase wherever books are sold. You can also request copies at your library if they don’t have any. I am endlessly thrilled this book is still on shelves, and also I make royalties on both of them, which is nice too.
My 15th book, Pretty Furious, is a return to the EK Johnston Multiverse that sees five best friends get angry and get even once they’re old enough to see their town for what it really is. It will be published on April 16, 2024, and is available for preorder in the US and in Canada.
