How I sold my book—despite the brain injury that nearly stopped me from writing it.

The following is pulled from my newsletter, Mix’d Thoughts, with some minor tweaks. I debated putting this up online; I know it opens me up to judgement. But the open honesty of other TBI survivors are what carried me through the last year and a half. After all of the stories and hope they gave me, this felt like the least I could do. I don’t expect you to think any of this is special; I just ask you be kind.

-Becca

From the Mix’d Thoughts Newsletter, originally sent on 2/6/2021:

Guys! It’s happening! I’M GOING TO BE AN AUTHOR!

THE ONES WE BURN will debut from Simon & Schuster in Fall of 2022, and I could not be more thrilled.

(for those wondering, yes, this IS the sapphic witch book formerly known as Bloodwinn! she's got a shiny new title, folks, and she's going to be a REAL BOOK.)

excuse me while I go pass out.

I couldn't be more excited. (And terrified. And baffled. And every possible emotion known to humankind.) I'm thrilled to be working with the brilliant Alyza Liu, who has encouraged me to ramp the angst and heartbreak in this book up to a fifteen out of ten, and I couldn't be more floored."

And I also am aware how lucky I am that this is even happening. Put aside the five years I queried; the three books that went nowhere, the hundreds of agent rejections, the late nights and sob-fests and dead-eyed stares, convinced this was going nowhere. 

Because even without those, I still nearly lost my chance to do this writing thing at all. 

The day I first spoke to Alyza on that sunny October afternoon that I was in the moment of something special. Alyza loved the book, but it needed work. She offered me a chance to revise and resubmit it so she could consider it a second time.

I remember thinking, finally. This book and I had already been through so much. I knew that I could revise, and revise well. I could give this book a shot.

What I didn’t know was that it would be nearly eight months before I turned that book in.

It would be five months before I could write at all.

#

In early November, on the way home from the grocery store, I slipped on ice getting out of my car. The first thing that hit the pavement was my left temple.

I was no stranger to injuries. I’d been played sports my entire life and grown up tromping through Michigan’s wetlands, falling out of pine trees and tripping down hills. I was familiar with that paused-flash-of-a-second before the pain hit. That frozen moment where everything is numb and all the sound stops. But this time felt different. This pause was longer.

And this time, lying in the dark, sprawled across the ground of a frozen parking lot, all I remember thinking was this is going to be bad.

The hours after I hurt myself were a blur—I convinced myself I was fine, despite the fact that I couldn’t make it up the stairs of my apartment unless I crawled. When my boyfriend came to check on me, and asked if I was okay, and when I answered, the words came out slow and unsure, like my mind was wading through mud. He asked me what my middle name was. I answered, and burst into tears.

The ER doctor joked she was surprised the c-scan was clear of broken bones because my eye was so swollen. She said I was fine; I had simply fallen very, very hard.

I was not fine.

I slept for three days straight, waking only to eat. I saw my primary care doctor and got a week off. I did not get better. I saw the same doctor and got two weeks off. I did not get better. I slept, and slept, and slept. When I was awake, my head hurt so badly I cried, which only made it hurt worse. I couldn’t hold a conversation without getting confused. Showering made me so dizzy I wanted to pass out.

For nearly three months, I could drive, read, or write. Texting made the screen blur so badly I couldn’t read. Walking outside or being around other people would leave me so out of it I could not speak or think. I was sensitive, scared, depressed, and paranoid. I cried randomly, with no idea why I was crying. My moods flipped from anger to depression to freezing terror with little rhyme or reason.

I saw a neurologist, who said my symptoms were normal. I just needed to rest. I just needed time.

I didn't have time.

I could tell when people started to lose patience with me. I looked fine. I sounded…well, mostly fine, save for the long pauses, the longer silences, the sometimes slurred words. The outbursts of crying. The mood swings and anxiety and eerily blank look that would wash over my face when my vision went so blurry I couldn’t read the words on my phone.

Still, I could feel people wondering. What was the deal?

It had been months! Why was I still having issues? Why was I being so weird, so moody, so quiet? Why did I cry so damn much?

I didn’t know what was going on, much less what to say.

So I said the only thing I could, over and over again: 

I still have a concussion and I’m sorry.

I missed Thanksgiving. I missed Christmas. In January, having burned through all of my PTO and the extra time they’d given me to recover, I tried to return to work. I made it an hour before I was in tears from the lights. Two weeks later, I checked my bank account, did the math, and checked it again. Three months after I hit my head, I walked into my boss’s office, and resigned from my job of three years. I smiled and beamed through my last day because I didn’t want my coworkers to worry despite my vision being too blurry to make out most of their faces. I told them I was excited. I told them I’d miss them. I carried my things out and noticed the the parking lot was, of course, blurry.

I went home, and I sobbed.

It was then it really hit me—I was not going to get better quickly. This was not going to be a funny anecdote like most of the sports injuries of my childhood. And if I didn’t take this seriously—if I wasn’t careful—I was not going to get better.

And through all of this, was an undercurrent of terror about my book. I was losing time. I was losing months. I was so close to my dream—an editor liked my book, enough to let me send it back in to her, and I could not work on it. I couldn’t even read it. I sent a panicked email to my agent, and another, one of the emails so riddled with errors it looks like it was written by a kindergartener, asking for more time.

Writing had been with me my entire life. It was my anchor and my refuge when things went wrong. I had written through trauma, abuse, and heartbreak—but I could not write through this.

Not at all, not even a little, all because I’d slipped on ice.

#

February, and with it my 25th birthday, crept around the corner. I was not healed -- but time, and a break from working, had allowed my brain to calm down. I could handle screens in bigger doses. I could write if I took breaks. I accepted a job offer that wouldn't start until March, and stared at the calendar in a mix of exhausted determination and dread.

Okay, Becca. You've got a month, I said. You are injured, and you are sick.

But you've got a month.

I hunkered down, and I wrote.

I filled my notebook. I filled my whiteboard. I paced back and forth and called anyone who would listen to talk out story problems and then laid on the ground afterwards, too dizzy to think. I would think about my book as I ate, as I curled up with a pounding head, as I had another random crying fit over something as small as the litter boxes being dirty. On nights when my head hurt too badly to think, I stared at the ceiling and listened to my boyfriend breathe, mapping out how my main character would escape through a series of underground salt mines I’d based on the mines below Detroit. On the endless days where I was stuck at home, unable to leave the house, I’d lie on the couch, eyes tracking the off-white walls of my apartment, building and rebuilding the magical plague I’d crafted to tear my character’s world apart.

I approached my healing the same way I approached writing—an unguaranteed, intangible thing that would take hope, patience, stubbornness, and time. I could not control my brain, and I could not control the outcome of my book. All I could control was the now.

My symptoms got better. My symptoms got worse. Through it all, I clung to my story. I wrote in pieces, in stolen moments when my brain would let me, and then accepted the inevitable crashes as they came. Piece by piece, my book inched towards the finish line, and my brain inched back towards normal.

I took an odd solace in reworking my main character’s story again and again. When I pitch THE ONES WE BURN to people, I usually give them the pithy Twitter pitch I’d crafted for Pitmad years ago: it’s a YA Fantasy about a seventeen-year-old blood-witch’s mission to assassinate her betrothed, a gentle human prince, gets complicated when she uncovers a plague that’s killing witches one by one with synthetic blood-magic—and in her race to stop it, falls for the prince’s sister.

But TOWB, at its core, is about a girl who keeps going at all costs.

It’s a story about a young witch who is caught between worlds, burdened with power, trauma, and pain. Ranka keeps fighting not because she wants to, but because to give up would mean all of the pain would have been for nothing. It would haven’t had a point.

Ranka keeps fighting because survival is the only option.

Ranka’s anger and fear and hope were a comfort, a normal to return to when the rest of my life seemed so uncertain. I didn’t know if I would ever be able to work a normal job again, but I knew this story. I didn’t know if I’d ever get go grocery shopping without getting so dizzy I had to lean against the aisles, but I knew this world.

I didn’t know if my old self would ever come back— but I knew Ranka.

And yet, the entire time, the same questions seem to spin in the back of my mind.

What if I couldn’t write anymore? What if my skills had suffered, and I was too injured to see it? What if I’d somehow lost that special thing that made me a writer?

What if, after everything, I didn’t get better?

The pandemic hit, and suddenly we were home again, and I had more time to sleep, more time to heal and work and write. I turned TOWB into my agent, dithered about her notes for two weeks, and finished them in one sitting the night she checked in. I took the medication the neurologist gave me and tried to heal. I start running, and was mortified to learn that no only did it help, but I liked it. And I waited.

If you’ve gotten this far, bless you. I promise I am almost done.

#

The rest of the story is more obvious: by some odd marriage of luck, timing, and a little bit of magic, this strange story I cobbled together got the thumbs up of an editorial board, and we got an offer.

I wish I could wrap a bow on this, and tell you I'm magically better, and that my life is perfect now. Let me be clear: I am doing world’s better than I was in November of 2019. But my brain is still healing. Some days are worse than others—a week after I got my offer, my symptoms were so bad for three days straight that at the end of each work day I would curl up in bed and sob, tired of the dizziness, the mood swings, the way I slurred and mixed up my words on calls.

But I can say is this: I am alive. I am still figuring out what it means to live in a fundamentally different body. Music causes me pain most of the time, I wear sunglasses indoors on bright days, prism lens to correct the misalignment in my left eye from striking my head so hard. I am slowly, painfully rebuilding a body that regressed to the muscle mass of an 80 year old, thanks to the growth hormone injections that are working to repair the damage to my pituitary gland. There are days where I feel mostly-me, and days where I feel like a cruel flicker, of an echo of what I once was, and I think for now I have to be grateful that echo is here at all.

And until then?  I am grateful to have my words back. And I’m grateful I get to share them at all.

THE ONES WE BURN is slated out from Simon & Schuster in Fall of 2022. You can add it on goodreads here, and join the preorder waitlist here. If you’d like, you can follow me on twitter, instagram, and subscribe to my newsletter for updates on the book (and my subsequent mental breakdowns about my inability to revise it, lol.) I promise my regular newsletters are more fun than this one.

I've poured everything I have into this book. I love it, truly.

I hope you will, too.

xo,

Becca

A note:

I’ve spent the last year and a half months thanking every person that has stuck with me while my brain figured it’s shit out a dozen times over, but I want to say it again: thank you, to every single person that was there with me.

I owe a special thank you to my boyfriend, David, who has been here from day one, and who took the lead on finding my doctors and getting me better. You are my best friend, and I love you, almost as much as I love the cats. Thank you.

There are so many people I love, that showed up for me when they didn't have to. Thank you:

Natalie, Aimee, Andrea, Wendy, Sarah, Grace, Rosiee, Kiki, Alyza, Sierra, Hanna, Roselle, Mara, Victoria, Brittany, Miriam, Skye, Ruby, Meryl, Katie, Amelie, Tressa, Kristin, Suzie, Jim, the Word Garden (but especially Jasmine, Marisa, Amanda, and the entire mod team, my heroes who hold down the fort), the Unearthed crew, and so many others.

If I forgot your name, I'm sorry -- but my brain is a little broken. (Too soon?)

Thank you for loving me, for giving me time, for all the calls, texts, food deliveries, and hope.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

This book would not be here without you, and neither would I.

I love you all to my bones.