The Process of Living the Dream

This is adapted from a keynote speech I gave at Romance Writers of Australia in 2022

The theme of the conference I gave this speech at was bedtime stories, and it made me think a lot about the stories I tell myself, both now and in the past.

I was thinking of how I told myself stories while trying to fall asleep. Fictional stories with characters I made up in my head, and then late, the way that I dreamed about my future. I’ve always been a romantic, so I told myself stories about getting married. Not the wedding itself, but who it might be. I was always hoping it was my current crush. But in my dreams, the wedding was the finish line. He would confess his love for me, we would date. AND WE WOULD MARRY. End scene.

I’ve been married to my husband for eighteen years, and I know many people reading this have been married twice as long, or three times as long. Or bailed earlier when it became clear you needed to – and good for you for looking out for yourself. But everyone whose had a long term relationship -one that has lasted or one that imploded, knows teenage Maisey was naive. Marriage is not the finish line. Marriage is just a new phase of the whole journey that you’re on in your life.

This is the same as any dream you have now. And specifically, the dream of a publishing career.

When I sold my first book, I felt like I had arrived at a destination. But no. It was just a new phase of my journey. I’ve been published for nearly thirteen years. I’ve written 165 books. I’ve hit bestseller lists, and I’ve missed them by miles. I’ve been rejected. I’m still rejected. I haven’t arrived, because like every other thing I do in my life, every other thing that matters, and is ongoing, I will never arrive. I will always be doing. And learning. And succeeding. And failing. And trying again.

Living the dream is not just a great slogan for a coffee cup or a t-shirt – though I own a few things that say that and try to pretend I’m wearing them ironically. Living the dream is not achieving something and then never doing it again. Living the dream is active. And it looks different every day.

Being an author is just like being anything else that I am in my life. I am a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend, and an author.

I’m a wife because I achieved my dream of getting married. In eighteen years of marriage, my marriage has changed. We’ve changed. We’ve weathered hardships and loss and triumphs. Our love is deeper now than when we stood at that altar and made vows. Thank God that wasn’t the finish line, because the years since then have been richer than that moment ever could have been. I’m a wife, but not in the way I was, or the way I understood it when I was younger.

I’m a mother.

We married young, and had kids young. My oldest is now seventeen. I have been his mother since I first held him in the hospital all those years ago. But it wasn’t the finish line. Now all three of my kids are teenagers and they need care in a different way than they did when they were small. They can make their own food now, but sometimes I miss when I could fix their problems with a bandaid and a peanut butter sandwich.

I’m still their mother.

What that means has changed.

I fail and succeed at being their mother at least three times a week, if not more.

I’m a sister.

A big sister, an oldest child. Things that have long defined me. My brother is two and a half years younger than I am. We are so different, and I couldn’t love him more. My brother has always been mine to protect. When his son was born he had to be airlifted to the hospital for emergency surgery, and I watched my younger brother be stronger than I could ever imagine being myself. And last year his wife was diagnosed with cancer at age thirty, and again, he is strong in a way that awes me. I am still his older sister. But the way I am his older sister has changed.

I’m a daughter.

I grew up with the most wonderful family. My parents have always been supportive of me. My dad once called me into his home office when I was fourteen and asked why I hadn’t written a book yet because that Christopher Paolini had done awfully well with Eragon. I’m sure some of my overachieving tendencies become clear. But ultimately all that was supportive, and I’m grateful that he offered that to me. My mom drove me to everything. I was homeschooled, and we lived in the country but she was determined to make sure I didn’t spend every day alone. She drove me to every drama practice, every baseball practice (good grief, I was terrible) to art and music and on and on. She took me to writer’s conferences when I was a teenager so that I could pursue my interests. I am and have been defined by how close I am to my family for all of my life.

My family changed a year ago. Nine years after she was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer, my mom passed away.

I am still a wife, a mother, a friend, a sister, an author.

A daughter.

The way I am as those things has changed.

I was her daughter the minute I was placed in her arms in that hospital thirty-seven years ago.

But it was not the finish line.

I will always be my mother’s daughter. I will always carry her love, the confidence she had in me, the energy she put into driving me to everything on earth, the way she cared about what I care about. Even death was not the finish line. It was part of the journey.

I will always be her daughter. The way I am her daughter has changed.

This is life.

Everything we are, everything we do, shifts.

And this is good news.

There is no bus you can miss, no moment you can squander and never come back from. Life shifts, so do we. We can get very trapped in thinking of things in very black and white ways.

One project was a success, because it sold a lot of copies, one was a failure because it didn’t.

One succeeded because it sold to a publisher, another didn’t because it didn’t.

We didn’t  get where we wanted to by a certain timeframe, so our careers are failing. We had higher sales once, and lower sales now so we are failing. Or we had lower sales once and higher sales now so we’ve made it, as if that peak in the graph is a point to stay at forever. That’s not how success works. Or failure. Because it’s not how life works.

Thomas Edison said - or at least several sites online said he said -  “I did not fail a thousand times, the light bulb was an invention with 1000 steps.”

The steps matter. The steps are part of living. The steps are the work, and there has to be joy in taking those steps.

Because that truth remains: the destination is not the most important part of what we’re doing.

That doesn’t mean we can’t have goals. But when you sell that book or you hit New York Times or you get the agent you want or the editor you dreamed of, there is more on the other side.

And the truth is, I am a writer, a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter, and while my place in those relationships change, and even I change in response to them, I am still me.

Success doesn’t and can’t transform everything about you, which means you bring you, and all your baggage into success. Even more importantly, you bring all that you are into the lows. You have to practice finding peace with who you are, separate from all these things. From labels. From external markings of ‘success’.

Because dreams, success, don’t ever feel quite like we imagine it to.

Maybe because it’s not uncommon for success to happen while you’re failing. We all know that graph that shows success is not a straight line, but what if it isn’t even peaks and valleys? What if – often – the lows and highs happen together, or overlap. Or the minute something good happens, you start looking for the next thing. Sound familiar? I think that often keeps us from feeling our own achievements. From stopping and appreciating the moment.

I got my 125^th book milestone with Harlequin a year ago, for a book that was delayed a month because of a paper shortage. This book had already been rescheduled after issues finding a title and cover (it went through three of each!) and I was already suffering from pretty extreme fatigue with ‘issues’ surrounding that title. Having the milestone post up online for a month when the book was no longer coming out… That felt like a metaphor.

Highs and lows together.  

And this is the conclusion I’ve come to after nearly thirteen years. That this dream – and it is my dream, please don’t misunderstand -  which in many ways came in and transformed my life, must still exist with my life, and with the world around me. That it is not exempt from changes, shifts, highs and lows. And that one thing can never, and will never bring satisfaction.

But these are things you can only learn as you experience them, or as someone shares them with you.

I’m still a published author, because I love it, and I’d choose it again, even though it can be a hard business.

Some of you reading this are new. And some of you are like me. A bit of a velveteen rabbit and sort of worn and a little thread bare with it all, but pushing on all the same.

But it’s the push that matters. It’s the steps you’re taking now, the air you’re breathing now, the pain you’re feeling now, the hope you’re feeling now. That’s what’s real. It’s the substance of it all, not just publishing, but being human.

If you’ve learned one thing from this, I hope it’s this: that all the magic, all the joy, all the creativity, is in you already. You don’t need someone else to give it to you. You don’t need someone else’s permission to be proud. You don’t need someone else’s permission to look around and say: I deserve to be here.

And you do. In this moment. Regardless of where your path takes this.

It’s okay to have goals, but to recognize that the goal is a stopping point in the road, not an end.

I’m still working on this. On the fine art of loving the path I’m walking on, even when it’s rocky. The fine art of realizing that the CS Lewis quote is true: “The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’ or ‘real life’. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life.”

Because this is your journey. So it gets to be what you want it to be. It’s okay to shift, and change and dream, and to be proud of yourself. Here and now, wherever you are.

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