GYDO: Josin L. McQuein

Josin L. McQuein, Author of Arclight

WARNING: Copious metaphors and similes ahead. Proceed with caution.

It’s no secret that I’m a nerd. Actually, a nerd wrapped in a dork, who’s fluent in geek, and when I try to explain things, it’s often in nerd-speak, so bear with me as I attempt to sum up the debut moment for writers in two words: Schrödinger’s cat.

(I could be really mean and end my post there, but I’ve already made Nikki wait far too long for this post, and I think if I left her with a single paragraph, she might spontaneously combust. No one wants that, so I’ll explain.)

I’m running on the assumption that most people will have heard of the aforementioned feline at some point, but as a quick summary, it’s quantum-ish and physics-like, and deals with the idea of multiple possible realities coexisting simultaneously.  That is likely the worst phrasing of the principles involved ever typed, but it really does apply to being a new novelist, I promise. To be accurate, quantum physics is about the only way to actually describe the process, because if you ever go through it yourself, you’ll end up feeling like you’ve fallen into another dimension apart from reality.

Having a book published is an odd thing. (Not as odd as spending massive numbers of hours postulating on what would happen if you locked a cat in a box with a cyanide pellet, but odd, none the less.) It’s both a destination and a starting point, making it an endless journey taken in a single step, and in that single step, you travel so far that you can no longer see the place you were standing in the moment before your book went “live.”

The book is done. It’s edited and published, and you feel like you should be at the end of something, but you’ve actually only scaled a wall. As you stand there on top, you occupy this tiny little space that you thought was the goal you wanted to reach, but you’ve not actually started, yet. You’ve gone so far, and you’re still at the beginning because the book is in stasis. It hasn’t interacted with its environment. No one’s read it. It exists, but it doesn’t, because a book isn’t a book, and a story isn’t a story, unless the words have eyes and ears to enter. They can’t live until they’re processed through a human mind.

So, it’s the eve of your “debut” and… nothing. Literally nothing. It’s an equilibrium so perfect that it becomes sensory deprivation. All of your emotions cancel each other out – you’re excited, but terrified; you’re happy, but anxious; you hope people will love your story as much as you do, but you’re worried they’ll hate it. That’s when you look around and realize you’ve become the cat in that ridiculous box – a theory, waiting to be proven.

Then suddenly, the box is open and the book is out there where people can see it and touch it and make their own determinations of its worth. You’re flooded with data based on the observations others have made about this thing that - to them - is new, but to you is so, so old. And while all this is going on, while the focus of your world is being quantified by people you’ve never seen or met, it’s Tuesday to everyone else on the planet. Nothing special, at all. They’ve not been locked in a box, waiting for someone to pull off the lid.

The thing that you made, your creation, which was shaped by your experiences and references is now being subjected the perception of others who have experiences and references of their own.  There’s nothing you can do about it – it’s alive, now, and a living thing won’t always behave in the way you think it should. Assumptions will imbue lines with meaning you never intended, and the familiarity of a character you think you made up will hit chords with people you’ll never have a name or face for. A throw-away detail you added for texture becomes the obsession of someone who insists it must have purpose.

Your story starts to change; it’s not only yours anymore. It belongs to every reader who absorbs the words. It’s gone airborne, mutating as it’s passed along, but it’s alive – definitely alive – and that’s what matters. That’s what having a novel debut is like – it begins as a cat sealed in a box with something that could kill it, and turns into a contagion infecting the imaginations and emotions of those who set it free by reading it.

Maybe that’s daunting. Maybe that’s terrifying. But what is writing if not creation? And creation is a daunting and terrifying prospect.

I’ve already said it, but being published is just plain odd. You’re putting something into the world that’s never been there before. It feels like going insane and welcoming the madness. And it never stops.

I’ve got two books out this year – both YA, but in vastly different genres. One’s got monsters, the other has something truly scary: humans who act monstrously. So, in effect, I’ve got two debuts. I never really planned it that way. The fact that they’re coming out so close together is a quirk of publishing schedules, but it’s proven to me that the strangeness of waiting for the book’s release isn’t just novice jitters.

I’ve been asked what’s behind the trend of authors putting out more than one book their debut year, and honestly, I didn’t realize it was a trend, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a matter of momentum. Back to the geek-speak: With each new book, you climb back in the box and watch it fill with infinite possibilities until it bursts into reality. All of the expectation and anxiety have been building up like potential energy stored for the moment and then BOOM, you’re in motion, and you don’t want to stop.

It’s easier to keep going because then you don’t have time to think about all those things that make the process feel so weird. Eventually you’ll get your legs under you. All that motion, all that speed, has created the inertia of a new world populated with your ideas. The uneasy tilt will equalize again, and the process starts over. New idea, new book, new journey, and you’re still standing there, at the beginning and the end on the cusp of every possibility.

So what’s it like to be a new author with two books coming out in one year? It’s slaying the dragon and flying off into the unknown. It’s being the hero and the villain at the same time. It’s a fantasy come true and a fiction that’s edging its way into reality. It’s the best and scariest and most confusing and awesome thing in the world.

Basically, it’s really, really cool.

Arclight Blurb
(Check out her other book, Premeditated which releases in Oct.)
No one crosses the wall of light . . . except for one girl who doesn’t remember who she is, where she came from, or how she survived. A harrowing, powerful debut thriller about finding yourself and protecting your future—no matter how short and uncertain it may be. 
The Arclight is the last defense. The Fade can’t get in. Outside the Arclight’s border of high-powered beams is the Dark. And between the Light and the Dark is the Grey, a narrow, barren no-man’s-land. That’s where the rescue team finds Marina, a lone teenage girl with no memory of the horrors she faced or the family she lost. Marina is the only person who has ever survived an encounter with the Fade. She’s the first hope humanity has had in generations, but she could also be the catalyst for their final destruction. Because the Fade will stop at nothing to get her back. Marina knows it. Tobin, who’s determined to take his revenge on the Fade, knows it. Anne-Marie, who just wishes it were all over, knows it.
When one of the Fade infiltrates the Arclight and Marina recognizes it, she will begin to unlock secrets she didn’t even know she had. Who will Marina become? Who can she never be again?

Author Bio

Josin L. McQuein was born and raised in Texas. Now she and her three crazy dogs live in a town so small the buffalo outnumber the people, and things like subways or consistent Internet access are fictional creations of a faraway fantasyland known as civilization. Arclight is her first book.

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