I just read through my New Year’s post from last year. Wow, 2019 was a great year for me. I turned 42 and I did a bunch of special things, including a trip to Taiwan. I’m so glad I chose to do those things! That year of my life really felt like a charmed circle. The magic ended in March, on my birthday, when I turned 43. That was the week the hammer came down in Washington, travel restrictions began, I saw the videos coming out of Italy and realized what the pandemic actually meant for me as a healthcare worker. My anesthesia contracts dried up by the end of the month. Everything changed that first week of March. My magical 42nd year was over, and my 43rd year was going to suck.
But not completely. Not in every way. 2020 had some magical moments. They were just difficult to enjoy.
I keep trying to summarize this year and getting lost in the weeds. I keep deleting paragraphs. I’ll try again, chronologically –
The badness did not actually start on my birthday. That’s my brain making a story out of my life. Life is not story-shaped. The badness started in January, when I learned that my good friend and fellow creative person, Norm Sherman of the Drabblecast, was having liver trouble. Norm is slightly younger than me. Texts became increasingly dire. By February, he was in the ICU, trying to get a long-shot liver transplant. He has talked about this on his own podcast, so I’m not breaking a confidence here.
I have worked ICU liver transplant floor, so I know exactly what this looks like. It was heartbreaking. But he got his transplant. He survived. And then he didn’t die of covid (so far) as an immune suppressed person in this pandemic.
In a way, my friend’s illness was a microcosm of 2020. Terrible things happened, but the worst possible outcome was avoided. Norm beat the odds in the end. But it would have been a lot nicer if he just hadn’t had liver failure. The whole year was like that.
When the hammer came down in March, elective surgeries were canceled state-wide in Washington. I had 2 anesthesia contracts. Both were put on indefinite hold. For about 4 months, I had no anesthesia income. I was afraid I would lose my new house.
My choices for healthcare work all involved out-of-state travel, risking covid exposure. My choices were mostly limited to facilities that were playing fast and lose with covid precautions and/or facilities that wanted me to do ICU nursing for covid patients. I’ve been an anesthetist almost 7x longer than I was ever an ICU nurse. I am not currently qualified to do ICU nursing except on paper. And this would have been high stakes ICU, where a minor error in PPE usage could kill me.
Nevertheless, I would have done something dangerous rather than lose my house. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. Because of K&N. Those books may have literally saved my life.
When I realized what was happening at the beginning of March, I spend up the production schedule for those books, and I did every single correct practice I’ve learned in 10 years of publishing. Stuff I don’t usually have time to do, I did. I launched the books at the end of March, straight into the pandemic, and held my breath. It felt like tossing a sparrow into a hurricane. But I figured people were stuck at home and needed comfort.
I was right about that. Those books soared. They quickly outsold every previous book I’ve launched by orders of magnitude. I don’t know whether they would have done just as well without the pandemic. Maybe, maybe not. They made enough money to briefly replace my anesthesia income. I didn’t have to look for dangerous work or worry about losing my house.
That was pretty magical. But it was hard to enjoy. I was completely alone for most of 4 months. Lauren Harris was able to come visit me in June. I’ve rarely been so glad to see another human. Elective surgeries began again soon afterward, and I worked through the summer at a local hospital. It was weird. I usually enjoy my day job, but this was not fun. I did a lot of work in a PAPR hood and/or N95 mask. It’s hard to hear in the PAPR, hard to breathe in the N95. I was constantly worrying about infecting myself or someone else. I was afraid to chat with my colleagues in the breakroom. People I met were distant, their normally friendlessness erased by fear. This is what my healthcare job looks like in a pandemic.
I knew within a week of releasing K&N that I should write something else for the mm romance audience. I should write another gay romance right away! But…I have never felt less romancy. I couldn’t do it – not for all the money in the world. Instead, I started into The Cormorant, with an ambitious goal of tying up the entire Cowry/Refugees saga in a final book. It was comforting to spend time with those characters that I know so well. In a way, it was comforting to know that only a small number of people would read it. Even though I’ve given myself a hard problem with tying up two epics in one book, it was still relaxing. I’ve got 100K words, and I think it will probably wrap up around 150.
I had to stop working on Cormorant in fall, because I’d promised an mm romance story to the enormous Winter Wonderland promo for January. I wanted to do something with the K&N characters – something that would be interesting to new readers, as well as those who’d already read the novels. I wrote “Enthralled,” which came in at a respectable 25K. So far, readers seem to like it.
Towards the end of the year, I also began getting audio for K&N from Kirt Graves, and I began doing research on audio direct sales. This was pretty exciting. I tried to do direct sales 10 years ago, but the delivery tech was not there. Now it is. I launched my audio direct sales platform a couple of days ago. If this goes well, I will add the rest of my audio catalogue slowly, as they come off of Audible’s 7 year contract (several are due to come off this year). If it goes *really* well, I will accelerate my exodus from Audible exclusivity. But I need to see whether it’s worth losing Audible revenue and probably ticking them off.
Like all new books, K&N income drifted down from its launch peek over the course of the year, but it remains well above the waterline for my previous book income. I was able to contemplate not returning to the operating room at all. This could be the beginning of my fulltime author career.
Right now, that doesn’t seem as attractive as it has in the past. Sitting alone at home for unbroken months is uninspiring. I feel like I have fewer ideas and less to say. I canceled 2 vacations this year (Hawaii and Scotland). I was trapped in my house both by the pandemic, and, at one point, by deadly smoke from wildfires. It felt like my world shrank and shrank.
Around the middle of the year, I decided to get a Japanese bobtail kitten. I adopted one of these unique cats while living in Taiwan 20+ years ago. She died in 2012, and I have always wanted another one. Nim likes other cats, and the old man could use some excitement. I knew Nix would have to get used to it, but she would. I needed something to look forward to, so I signed up for a kitten, and watched via video as the litter grew up. Taro was the only one available initially, but his brother, Mochi, was relinquished by a family in ID, because pet shipping was canceled during the pandemic. The two brothers were very bonded, and in the end, I decided to go full cat lady in the apocalypse. I took both of them! They have provided something to look forward to for me, and many of my family and friends. My 93 year old grandmother gets excited about receiving pictures of them every week. Yes, I have 4 cats. Nim will be 18 this year, Nix 13. I won’t have 4 cats forever, but I’m happy with my feline family for now.
In fall, my mother came to live with me, and while that was probably the right decision, I had to make the jarring switch from constant aloneness to constant (human) togetherness. Neither is ideal. Hopefully she will find a house soon.
I keep telling myself that this is not actually what fulltime author would look like. I would be able to travel, see friends, go out to eat, shop in a store, walk downtown. My mother will not be living with me forever. Fulltime writer doesn’t have to equal sitting in my office with my days and nights blurring into each other, and no idea what day of the week it is.
Of course, my healthcare job isn’t what it used to be, either. I shouldn’t compare pandemic-authoring to pre-pandemic anesthesia. Pandemic-anesthesia isn’t fun, either. Nothing is normal right now.
I’ve got another anesthesia assignment with a new hospital starting in Feb and booked through April. I hope to be vaccinated soon. I know things will get better. I’m not making any big life decisions right now.
Some numbers –
I wrote more words this year than last year. No surprise there. I did not attain the record highs of 2016 and 2017, but I did alright - 137K words for the year. I finished the K&N second epilogue “Spring in the Haunted Forest” in January and the “Romance in Necromancy” prequel story shortly thereafter. I worked on Cormorant for most of the year (did not finish) and then wrote and finished the Merek story (Enthralled) in November. I published the paper and audio versions of “Burn,” along with the paper versions of all 3 K&N books. I also got illustrations for Malachi and the Dragon (book 6 – the final volume) from Aki in Sept and released the ebook and paper in October. I got audio from Kirt Graves for all of the K&N content, except Enthralled, which I should be receiving soon. I researched audiobook direct sales and put that research into action a few days ago.
Production-wise, that’s a fairly normal writing year for me. Here’s the startling part –
My books made nearly 4x as much money this year as in any previous year. They made a solid living wage. Not even a poverty wage, but decent money. They eclipsed my usual anesthesia income for a few glorious months, although they’re back down below that now.
Here’s a bit more breakdown.
86% of my income came from Amazon ebooks and paper books.
9% from Patreon
4% from Audible (yes, that’s pitiful, considering what I spend on audiobook creation)
1% from other sources, such as website sales
Obviously ebooks and paper make the lion’s share of my book income. I can easily break down stats from that number in order to compare pen names and series. I can’t do that with Patreon, and it wouldn’t make sense to do it with audio, since K&N isn’t there yet. With that in mind, here’s a breakdown of that 86% ebook/paper -
A. H. Lee titles made 75% of that money. For those of you who wonder why I’m focusing more on this pen name – here’s why! I have far more Abigail Hilton titles in existence, but all those books combined are only bringing in 25% of my ebook income. If you were to lump Patreon and Audible in, I’m guessing it might be 30% of the total. Maybe. Probably a little less. The audience for my Abigail Hilton books is very loyal, but much smaller. In spite of this, I’m writing Cormorant for you folks!
More details: K&N brought in 56% of my ebook/paper income all by itself. Incubus brought in 19%. And then all Abigail Hilton titles combined, 25%.
It is very obvious that the mm romance market is the largest, and the hungriest for my work. I love writing mm, and I’ll write more of it. I have a great series in the works that takes inspiration from the Silas/Percy dynamic and allows me to return to ships (my true love, haha). But I can’t write only mm. I can’t write only romance. I’ll run out of things to say. I need variety. I don’t want to repeat myself. I don’t want writing to turn into a dreary job or a slog.
Flow state has always been my magic place, where the story unspools in front of me, and I just chase it. When the characters start talking in my head and seem to have minds of their owns – that’s magical. I can see how putting too much pressure on that process would turn into a grind. It’s important to me that that not happen.
2020 is over. It’s been a year of bright lights and dark shadows. No everyone made it. For some people, the worst happened. My colleagues in healthcare have suffered. Politics have been hell. The fallout is ongoing. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. It’s not a train. It’s daylight.
Courage, friends. Onward.