JR Creaden

I’ve been dreaming of this day since I was four years old when I wrote my first story, pecking at the beige keyboard with serious concentration. In words I found a magic that seemed impossible– words could stop time and hold it still, could turn reality inside out, making the invisible visible, able to be dissected, studied, and absorbed. Words could teach or wound, and they could spread emotions from one body to another without losing energy in the passing. That first five page story was uninspired crap, but I was hooked. I had felt FLOW.

I decided I would have to practice that magic to make it work right. I needed to learn all the words, to understand how they worked and why. I became that kid who memorizes the thesaurus at recess and diagrams sentences for fun. Whether I learned it all or simply enough to satisfy myself, I’ll never know, but my own early words began to leak out, in journals and lists, then budding stories and poetry. To summarize two decades of those collected words, I asked “Who/what am I?” and “Why is everything so broken?” with as much intensity as I could muster.

Poems grew into songs, which introduced a new challenge for the word magic I’d learned. Not only must a song sound good, it must bend to form, delivering a singular message or emotional theme at its core. Folk music allowed me a hint more flexibility, because I could tell a story surrounding a theme, interchanging verses by mood or weather. But I came to learn that when one writes and plays music, apparently, people expect them to keep doing that in increasingly larger and louder settings until it’s no longer a conversation between artist and audience. Instead the songs become “commodities,” the artist becomes “performer,” and the magic of words becomes unreachable for me. The stage wasn’t for me, the page was.

I needed to learn more, to get my words heard without a pretty melody, and I needed to human better, because the magic obviously required me to have a clearer message than my own angst and awe. So I gathered several higher degrees and padded my mind palace with facts and theories, turning my words toward arguments for interdependence and entreaties for the deconstruction of modern myths. When I became a mother, the magic of words returned along with whole worlds worth of stories. I finally knew my place in the world and had a word for what I was: mom; I was ready to write without endlessly searching for a ground.

When I started pursuing publishing seriously though, I heard the same warnings I’d tried to run from in music and academia. THIS IS BUSINESS, everyone said. To earn an audience, to be “publishable” means sacrificing artistic ideals to the whims of market. Be original, they said, but conform that originality into these rigid boxes. Be fresh, they said, but not so fresh that you don’t fit neatly alongside expectations. Your identity is Product, and your personhood’s value lies in how amenable you become to commercializing it for public consumption. Take risks and break rules, they said, but only after you’ve gained approval and proven your monetary worth.

Readers, if I could have run away like I had before, I would have, but the magic of words had already transformed into Stories. I had to try anyway, so I braced myself for the inevitable compromises of the industry and barreled ahead, directly into the brick wall that is publishing. I’ll reserve most of that struggle for other posts and simply say that the closer I came to the finish line, the more it looked like the industry was crumbling to the very pressures I’d railed against all along, and that it would break itself before I got the chance to break in.

It was then, when my book died on submission, and my agent dropped me, that I appealed to the magic again. Hadn’t I been faithful to the art? Hadn’t I bent and sacrificed enough to fit into at least one of the boxes? I called every bit of courage I had left to keep going, to finish another story then another, to query agent after agent, to sub just one more press. Today, as I announce my debut, I am ecstatic, and even better, I’m uncompromised.

I know Mythic Roads Press has big plans, and so do I. Together we’re going to work to do this process differently, and we’re going to tell different stories while we’re at it. This is only the beginning.

(Publishing, take note: this is how writers should feel about their deals–confident in the collaboration and commitment of their partner, thrilled to be participating in the journey ahead.)

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If you’re interested in getting your hands on a copy early, before it officially releases on April 19, 2024, sign up now – https://www.mythicroadspress.com/arc