Twenty Years Ago Today, My Life Began

Thoughts on my 20th anniversary in publishing

My first two micropress chapbooks, both released January 4, 2004, two decades ago today.

Twenty years ago today, January 4th, 2004, my first chapbook and its companion were published.

My first anything was published. (Hey, Garbagetowners, did you know I write books too? Because I write books too.)

I was living in Japan, the wife of a naval officer (a biographical fact that always stuns people who have only known me as I am now), lonely and miserable as a candle in a lamp shop, convinced that I'd never really be or do anything worthwhile now that I'd made the choices I'd made.

And these two little chaps were hardly much. Poetry, not fiction, which was honestly all I knew how to do. A woman in Minnesota (then Misty O'Brien, now Skaja Wills) had a poetry micropress, which amounted to a laser printer, cardstock, and a dream (and when has that not been the stuff of legends, plus or minus the lasers), but it was someone else. Someone who looked at my work and accepted it, put it out there, worked for it and believed in it.

It was such early days for the internet, for online publishing, for blogging, for anything. Some-bloody-how, that poetry collection up there that no one ever really should have read, that should have vanished into the great snowdrifts of good-but-weird work that gets quietly published and quietly buried by no one's fault every year, got nominated for the Rhysling and the Spectrum Awards and people noticed it.

The last uncollected copy of these books that I'm aware of recently went for about $1200 on eBay.

We even did Z as a special limited edition of the limited edition, getting very big for our micro-britches indeed. I think it was only 25 copies, and only those 25 included a very short piece of flash fiction that didn't appear in the main collection called The Oracle Alone.

And somehow, by some miracle or grace of fate or movement of cosmic tectonics, that little limited edition of a limited edition made it to Ellen Datlow's desk, who pulled The Oracle Alone for Year's Best Fantasy and Horror that year, a place it really had no right to be, being small and unassuming and almost impossible to get. That choice, and that wonderful woman, put me on a path I still walk--and still stumble on--but I still walk with head up and eyes forward.

About a minute after that, Nick Mamatas opened a massive door and showed me how to not get my ass caught in the latch. He read my weird-ass non-novel The Labyrinth and gave it to his own editor at Prime Books. My memory is a little faulty these days, but release dates don't lie: MOAPS came out January 4th, 2004 and my first novel was published in August 2004. So it must have been only a month, if that, after these chapbooks came out that I got an email from someone I didn't know excitedly telling me that Prime was going to take my book and he wanted to write the introduction. That someone was Jeff fricking Vandermeer, though in many ways, neither of us were the Big Vs we would become yet. I was no sort of V at all.

In the twenty years since I've published 47 volumes of work and I can't begin to count how many short stories, essays, non-fiction pieces, poems, and whatever the hell Z is; after all this time I can safely admit I don't even really know. It was just me. Then. Entirely. My soul on cardstock. As its always been and always will be.

I am so fucking grateful for my life.

I am so depthlessly grateful to Skaja Wills for being literally the first person to see something possible in me and in my work. There is no possible way to repay the debt I owe to Ellen Datlow, who has been my dark fairy godmother for two decades, for the support and faith and constancy with which she has treated me since someone put a little stapled thing in front of her. I can't even imagine my life without that grand, heart-beggaring favor Nick Mamatas did for me, for a stranger, for no one in particular, not a person who'd been to every con since Eden, not a work buddy, not an old high school friend, a random lonely damn kid seven thousand miles away. Jeff Vandermeer did write that introduction, and he and Ann Vandermeer have been and done so much for me over the years I can hardly see Ann without crying. The last time I saw Ann she looked at me with such joy and said: look what you've become. I'm so proud of you. And it was like my Mom said it, it meant that much. My heart grew three times its size and then popped like a soap bubble. And that editor at Prime published my books, asked for more, and when I turned in what became The Orphan's Tales, acted nothing like most editors who saw that a book could truly be something big--and sent it straight to Bantam Spectra, Random House, Juliet Ulman, and the future.

There are so many other people who have believed in me and helped me since, including every freaking person on this Patreon, every person who remembers the Livejournal days and has been with me on this journey ever since, everyone who has given a shit at any point or taken a chance on some bizarre flowery story just maybe being worth a handful of minutes and hours between birth and death, 'cause that ain't nothing.

I try to trumpet the names of those who made everything I am possible whenever I can--but this was how it began. Twenty years ago today. Having no idea whatever of what was to come, of who I could be, of what I could say, of how many stories and worlds were inside me if only I could be given a chance to let them out. Twenty years ago today was my chance. I tried to take it as hard and as far as I could.

And every day from today on is also my chance to keep being that person and saying those things and making those worlds, and I am so horrifically conscious of how lucky I was, of how easily it could have gone the other way. Every word in a story is a chance. And I'm still trying. to pay out the promise I had. To be better. To grow and evolve and keep making enough pages to build the real and actual world I live in.

I remember one of my first real reviews, in a literary, non-SFF venue, of all things. It said exactly this: If Valente ever calms down, she may make a historically great prose writer.

At the time I was full of piss, vinegar, and fightin' words, and my response was: GET FUCKED I WILL NEVER CALM DOWN RILED UP FOREVER METAL TIL I'M 60!

And now...I think it's probably time to admit that was an entirely fair assessment, and honestly maybe I still need to calm down some. Maybe that's all this time has been, a slow calming down that never quite completes to inner peace.

But ironically, twenty years down the track, the challenge is less embracing calm than not losing the freewheeling sense of fuck it, I can do anything with a page and 26 characters, there's no rules, let's put on a show, it'll be great in the end, watch.

No matter all the crazy miracles that have happened since 2004, including the bad miracles (what do you call a bad miracle) that destroyed me and my pride and that daredevil feeling of fuck it we'll do it live, I still mostly feel like that kid, overjoyed that someone thought I was good, even for a second, even for a moment. I think I always will.

Twenty years from now is 2044, a year that looks fake to me even as I type it. But then, so does 2024. I'll be 64. My child will be 25 (not really, because that's impossible, that little moppet will never be 25, time is a lie and age doubly so). Only a few months older than I was when those chapbooks came out. I've no idea who or where or what I, or my kid, or the world will be then, no more than I had twenty years ago today. Maybe I won't make it.  Maybe none of us will. But I have hope. I have a keyboard and ten mostly-functional fingers. I have a good working heart to wear on my sleeve like a shield.

Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64...

This is entirely true: Back in the spring, I was on one of the swipey apps (calm down, just trying to make some damn friends in this blighted post-pandemic dystopia) and suddenly a message popped up from a stranger: you're the labyrinth. I blinked several times. There's no surnames on the swipeys. To connect me to my books people would have to know my face. Pretty damned well. And this stranger typed out: I'm sorry I'm not actually in America I'm in France, I changed my location so I could practice English but you're the labyrinth. Your book. I read your book in school. It changed me.

It just lays waste to the heart, what books can do. How they can connect. How they can travel forward and backward in time to change people and lives and minds, even when they're small press or self-published or weird as hell and niche-among-niche. They go out into the world like our children, and like our children we have no control over what happens to them once they do. Once they run off and live their own lives, meet their own folk, have adventures, get damaged and dog-eared and brokenhearted, get mixed-up and lost and even come home occasionally before winging off again to do god-knows-what when we're not looking.

And in the end, I guess I am. I am the labyrinth. And the orphan, and the city on the other side of love, and deathless, and the girl who circumnavigated fairyland, and the space opera singer, and a million other things. But always, I am those early days, calmed down a little and refined, but still a girl in a maze or a maze in a girl or not-a-girl and not-a-maze, changing colors and dealing with monkeys and fishing in the street and running from doors that lead to dead-ends and closed loops and false walls and the thousand other mistakes of living a life on this spinning rock in the dark.

Hoo.

Thank you for coming with me on this twenty-year road, whether you were there when it began or only recently decided to see what lay down its length. Today is so emotional for me, and I wouldn't have made it this far without all of you. I think if you look at the title of that little unassuming chapbook, you can see exactly where I thought I'd end up--and it wasn't here, it wasn't this, it wasn't us. I found, or made, I still don't really know, a light. And clung to it. And lost it, and found it again, and lost it again, and found it. But I'm here to talk to you about two decades of singing into the void and watching the song fly further than I ever thought possible.

Thank you so much.