THE FOREVER SEA
I’m late to this post, I know. The Forever Sea hit shelves in the US on January 19th and in the UK on January 26th, and now it’s August. So it goes.
I had such a great time with the events and the interviews and articles, and I’m so grateful for all of it. Grateful to the teams at both DAW and Titan, grateful to the readers who read and thought about and wrote about the book in reviews and blog posts, grateful to friends and family who sent me pictures of their copies, and grateful to everyone who bought the book and gave it chance. Thank you.
I’m also happy to have had the time to rest afterward. I find I’m not very well suited to events—they take all of my energy and don’t give much back. Luckily I have lots of time to charge up before the book 2 excitement machines spark to life.
I want to write a little about what The Forever Sea means to me and what kind of process it went through to reach publication. I may fit it all into a single blog post, but I also may take a few swings at it. We’ll see.
When I was little, I used to bike to the small library in my tiny town every morning in the summer. Some days I would bring a lunch; most days I’d forget. I’d puff up the hill I lived on, glide down the next few streets, and then slalom down the hill on which the library sat, my too-big t-shirt billowing around me, hand-me-down shorts hanging down past my knees. With a wave to the librarians—all of them familiar faces—I would walk to the back corner of the library where spinning racks of Animorphs and Goosebumps books stood next to shelves holding Dr. Doolittle and the Prydain Chronicles and all other manner of good things. I’d slump down into one of the comfy chairs back there, nestled away from the world, and I’d disappear into books for as long as I could.
That little corner holds such a special place in my heart; it’s where I first met Princess Eilonwy and Frodo and Ged and all the rest. In between chapters, I used to look around at the books on the shelves—what seemed to pre-teen Josh a truly infinite amount of novels—and dream about writing my own. Who were these magical people, I wondered, who could hold so many characters and ideas and stories in their heads and then write them down? To that young kid, Ursula Le Guin wasn’t a person so much as a mythic magician, someone who existed in ways and worlds I would never know.
I dreamed about writing my own stories and publishing them, looking around the rows of books to see where my run-of-the-mill last name would land me (near enough to Robert Jordan to make me coo with amazement). When I see The Forever Sea now on shelves in bookstores and libraries, I’m still that little kid, awed by the fact that anyone could write a book. Doubly awed that I could.
This was a book of change and growth for me. I started writing it at the Odyssey Writing Workshop, one of the intensive 6-week SFF workshops run every summer. I had been working on a terrible book, one I felt I should write for the MFA I was completing at the time. It was all Important People doing Important Things and having Important Conversations of Importance, and it just sucked. I was writing the book I imagined other people wanted.
And then I met Mary Robinette Kowal, who was our writer-in-residence at Odyssey, and, over a flask of Ardbeg, we talked about that novel and how much I hated it. Mary Robinette listened, and then, with kindness for which I’ll forever be grateful, gave me permission to toss that novel in the garbage. She asked me what I wanted to write—what little bits I liked from the current draft or what other stories I wanted to explore, and suddenly The Forever Sea—looking a little different and not yet developed—was there, waiting for me, just as I’d been waiting for it.
I started writing the next day, and when I got home from Odyssey, I kept writing. My partner was pregnant with our daughter at the time, and it would only be a few months until she was born, so I used up every minute I could, writing on my computer or in a notebook or on my phone. I remember a few times when, caught in another meaningless conversation at the University where I work, I would pretend to get a text and turn just a little away while I “responded,” which is to say while I opened up Scrivener and frantically typed a hundred words.
And then my daughter was born, and the book still wasn’t done, so I wrote while she slept on my chest or late at night while everyone else in the house was asleep. I wrote during those awful morning hours when it’s not quite night but not quite day and everything—the light, your body, the world—is telling you to go to sleep.
People often talk about how difficult it is to write and be a parent, and it is. For sure. It’s difficult to be a parent all on its own. I was tired a lot—not as tired as my partner, who had to wake up far more frequently than I in order to breastfeed our daughter—but I was also ecstatically happy. Every day, even the exhausted, can’t-tell-your-coffee-from-your-foot days, was a gift, and writing felt like something extra special—not an escape from any of the magical stuff going on around me, but part of it somehow. The Forever Sea will always have some scent of parenthood about it, of leaping out into the unknown, pulled onward by the bone-deep belief that things will work out.
I also came out while writing this book! I suspected for a long time that I might not be straight, and it was while writing this book that I asked myself why so many of my characters are queer (not just in this novel but in all of the books and stories I’ve written but not published). And I started thinking again about how out of place I felt in school growing up, how I felt like I was always playing a character—one I’d stitched together from books I’d read and movies I’d watched. I think, on some level, we’re always writing ourselves in books—imagining our way into other people as a way of imagining further into parts of our selves—and it took me writing The Forever Sea to realize the self I had always been writing into my stories. And so I came out as bisexual in my early 30s, and I’m so grateful to this book for helping me see myself.
There’s more to say on this—stuff about how queer characters are shown in my book and how it says something, maybe, about my experience being queer and accepted by those around me, how narratives that show queerness not as a source of tension and conflict but simply a fact of life, untroubled and unchallenged, probably reflect my own time coming out as a relatively-happy-and-settled-with-myself-boring-30-year-old-dad-who-wears-comfortable-pants-and-is-mostly-content-with-his-life kind of person. But I’ll leave that for now.
Mostly, I just want to say thank you. We’re several months on now, and people keep emailing me about the book and apparently people are still buying it, both of are strange and wonderful. Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll continue on this journey with me. I have more for you, pinky promise.
Here’s a little round-up of promotional stuff from the book if you’re interested. I’ll try to update when there are things to add!
Interviews/Q&As/Essays
Reviews
Other Coolness
The Forever Sea was the book of the week on Writing Excuses!! Check out episode 16.17 “The Time To Rhyme.” (This is super neat to me—I remember listening to Writing Excuses on my walks in to class back when I was in graduate school and wondering what in the world I was doing with my life.)