I started this blog on January 9th 2009. My wife, agent, editor, and publicist insisted I start writing one as a means of helping potential readers discover my work.
“What should I write about?” I had asked her.
“Doesn’t matter,” she replied. “Write about anything. Write about your books, write about your day. Whatever. Just write so people can get to know you, so they can know you exist.”
That was more than seventeen years ago. I never thought much of these little posts I began doing under duress—I’ve never felt comfortable self-promoting. I struggled to come up with ideas to write each week. Some were silly, others a bit sad, revealing the mindset of a guy chasing a dream he never thought he’d catch. Looking back, I can see that all these posts are essays chronicling the experiences I’ve had as a novelist—an ongoing history of my career. Some are pretty good. A few reminded me of things I’d forgotten, but mostly they are my footprints left on a sandy beach—(a metaphorical easter egg for long time readers of this blog.)
The general theme promoted by my wife was the idea of the Little Engine That Could. To mark my progress as I chugged along the tracks, I wrote essays detailing events that I saw as mile posts—indicators that I had risen another rung. The first such essay I posted on February 13, 2010 entitled “I Must Be Someone Now” revealed how thrilled I was to find I had a Wikipedia page. About a year later, my next noted milestone was how I could finally support my family with my writing.
These posts were born from my early experiences on Internet forums where aspiring writers gathered in the hopes of learning how to turn hobbies into careers. One of the topics was "when exactly can you call yourself a writer." This had touched off a massive and contentious debate. Some said that if you write, and wrote a lot, then that was good enough. Others argued that you can call yourself a writer when you feel you are. Still more insisted you had to be published. Because of the nascent but growing self-publishing trend, this then brought forth more perimeters and arbitrary requirements saying you are only a writer when you’ve been published by a traditional publisher. Still others feel you are not a real writer until you’ve written ten novels and support yourself with your writing. As such, I suppose I felt these milestone posts might help new writers gauge their progress. At the very least, they provided me something to write about, and now look back at.
By now, you’ve likely realized, I’ve hit a new one.
When the Riyria Revelations was first published, an Amazon reviewer, who did not like my books, made the disparaging comment that the positive reviews must all come from friends and family. Robin and I laughed at that since no friends and no one in her family or mine had ever read any of my books despite my providing print, ebook, and audio versions. Obviously, this was disappointing, especially when I hit the New York Times Bestseller’s list on three separate occasions, and still it seemed my family wondered when I would stop this nonsense and do something useful with my life like maybe sheet metal wall art—not kidding, that was a suggestion.
All in all, it’s probably a good thing. Realities like this keep me from thinking too much of myself. I’ve met a few too many writers whose inflated sense of self-worth is appalling. Better to have a good solid anchor reminding me that my success still rests below that of tin-snipped sailboats welded to wire. After two decades, I hadn’t merely accepted this odd family circle authorial anonymity, but forgot about it. Then, a few months ago I hit a new milestone. The truly curious aspect is that the milestone coincided with a visit from my sister and her husband.
Robin and I moved from our home state of Michigan to Vermont when I was twenty-seven. We continued to move several more times, each one farther and farther away from Detroit. As the years ticked by, I visited less and less, and my family, being homespun midwesterners, rarely left the state. This meant I hadn’t seen my sister in years. Recently, both my mother and brother died. This reunited my sister and I—the last two survivors of the original six Sullivans—and I invited her to visit. As such, she recently came to the cabin in Shenandoah. Besides seeing her in a hospital room, I really hadn’t seen my sister in a decade.
While they were staying with us, Robin and I took my sister and her husband to lunch at a small, wood fired pizza restaurant over the mountain. We were seated in the dining area discussing what pizza to order when a man approached the table looking awkward and apprehensive. He wasn’t the waiter. Not only did he not have the required apron, I had seen him sitting at a table across the room with his wife. The two had been staring at me and speaking softly to one another for sometime.
“Excuse me, are you Michael J. Sullivan?” he asked, and our meal conversation stopped as everyone looked up concerned. When a stranger approaches you publicly and asks who you are, addressing you by your full name the immediate impression is that their next words will be, “You are under arrest or at the very least this summons is for you.” I'm all but certain that’s what was going through my sister’s head. I, however, had seen this look before on the face of many a reader at many a convention.
“Yes,” I said, and the man showed not the slightest surprise. He was pretty certain or he never would have made the long, exposed trip from his table to mine.
“I’m a huge fan of your books.”
With that sentence, there were gasps at my table. You see, one of the great milestones for any author is to catch sight of someone in the wild reading their book. It is such an uncommon thing, that few authors have ever experienced it. I still haven’t. But the rung above that is the even more rarefied event of a reader recognizing an author in the wild. As such, Robin and I were shocked. My sister and her husband were astounded. The two sat eyes wide and open-mouthed as I agreed to a photo, and the man expanded on how much he and his wife loved my books.
When he left, my sister, still looking stunned, told me, “That was like something you’d see in a movie!” That this first time event coincided with her being there was all the more incredible. I’ll admit, it would have been nice if it had happened a few years earlier when she might have told the tale to my mother and brother, delivering news I somehow never managed to properly convey: "That I could, indeed, consider myself "a writer." But I did receive a consolation prize. Before leaving, my sister and her husband requested a set of my books.
