My Worst Nightmare

Yesterday I posted about how awesome it was to meet Terry Brooks and get him to sign my copy of The Elfstones of Shannara. What I didn’t mention was that just moments later, he brought me face to face with my worst nightmare!

Terry and his editor Betsy Mitchell were sitting a panel at New York Comic Con devoted to his career and the fantasy world in which the vast majority of his books are set in: Shannara.

Here’s the panel blurb:

1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Room 1E07
THE WORLD OF SHANNARA
The Shannara book of Terry Brooks are epic, legendary, and grand. Now, meet the man himself. Terry Brooks will discuss the origin and future of Shannara and Robert Napton, the man behind the upcoming Shannara graphic novel, will speak about adding images to Terry Brooks’ immortal words.

It started off well enough, with the prerequisite A/V problems and snarky comments about them, followed by some banter with the audience. Finally, the lights and screen came on, and things got started.

The first thing I learned was that I had been mispronouncing “Shannara” all my life. I always thought it was “shah-nar-uh”, but it turns out that it’s “shan-uh-ruh”.

That really kinda bummed me out.

But despite my disappointment at learning that a word that meant so much to me over the course of my life was wrong, the real kicker was yet to come.

Terry Brooks has had an amazing career, with over 20 bestsellers under his belt and a huge and loyal fan base. He’s made success seem effortless, with his first book, the Sword of Shannara, becoming the first work of fantasy not only to hit the NY Times Bestseller list, but going on to spend five months there.

With that kind of unprecedented success, his future seemed assured.

Or so you’d think.

After Sword, he quickly got started on his second novel, The Song of Lorelei. Don’t bother googling it. You’ll get nothing. The book doesn’t exist. Why, you ask? Because Lester Del Rey, the man himself, rejected it out of hand. Despite having a hot author with 5 months of bestselling cred behind him, LDR took one look at the book and said it was terrible and unfixable and refused to publish it. He sent it back with a long list of notes saying why it was drek.

Terry described what it was like to read those notes, and worse, to realize that LDR was RIGHT, and the book really was bad. I can only imagine how that felt.

But I can imagine it pretty well, actually. I imagine it just about every day, and sometimes it wakes me up in a cold sweat late at night. Apart from death, disease and dismemberment, that is my worst nightmare.

I spent years working on The Painted Man, pretty much in a vacuum. I had test readers, sure, but they were also all friends of mine, and they brought their own biases to their comments based on that. I never really knew what a truly objective reader would say or do, and I honestly didn’t know what was going to happen when I put the book out into the hard, cruel world for evaluation. I put it off for a long time out of fear.

But the response has been amazing. A major literary agent picked it up right away. Before long, several US publishers were bidding not only on it, but on two unwritten sequels to boot. Not long after that, there was similar bidding for three books in the UK, even though my agent had never sold a book internationally before it saw press in the US and press time was a LONG way off. Then there was an all-out auction in Germany. A publisher in France snapped the series up, saying he would have been “devastated” if he hadn’t gotten the rights to it. A publisher in Japan put the book on his PDA before boarding a plane, and bought it right after the flight. A publisher in Greece wined and dined me on the beautiful Greek Isle of Kos before buying the Greek print rights. And other markets are still showing interest all the time.

It’s a dream come true in every way. Writing fantasy professionally has been my dream ever since I was a kid, and I keep pinching myself when I think about how this is my job now.

But what if it’s a fluke? What if I’m the fantasy equivalent of Tommy Tutone and this is my 867-5309? What if I accidentally stumbled upon some magic formula that captured a capricious and momentary public zeitgeist like a literary one hit wonder? What if I can’t replicate the success and no one likes my next book? What if people realize I’m just some chump from Westchester who’s making up a bunch of shit?

I know it’s crazy in a lot of ways. I worked really hard to learn to tell stories, and deep down, I have a lot of stories left to tell. But I still get wracked with anxiety whenever a little doubt creeps in.

But I take comfort that after Lorelei was canned, Terry Brooks went on to write The Elfstones of Shannara.

And we all know how that turned out.

Posted on April 21, 2008 at 10:58 pm by PeatB
Filed under Musings, Writing
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