We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Darcy Marks a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Darcy, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you wish you had started sooner?
Look around writing community boards and you will see so many conversations about publishing before you’re twenty or finding an agent after fifty. The obsession with age is everywhere. I blame articles like the Forbes 30 Under 30 lists.
Like a lot of writers I wrote as a kid, but when it was time to think towards college and career, practicality was king, and being a writer was not practical. I studied science and started working. By the time I got back into writing again as an adult I was fully into my career as a Forensic Toxicologist.
I’m lucky enough that I was able to transition that career to being self-employed, which allows more flexibility for writing and meeting deadlines than a regular 9-5 would allow. But do I wish I started sooner? Sometimes. Sometimes there is that wistful thought of “what if?” But the reality is, writing is unpredictable, pay is sporadic and hard to predict, and my career is what allows me stability in all of that uncertainty.
There’s no one path here. And that is so important to remember. Can you pursue writing as a freshly graduated 18 year old? Absolutely? Can you pursue it after you retire? Definitely. Writing is a business but it’s also an art born out of love of the craft, and you can do that any age.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I read for entertainment, and while I read absolutely everything, my love is KidLit, specifically middle grade and young adult. Why? Aren’t those just for kids? No way! Adult fiction, even fantasy, is often so confined by the restrictions of adulthood: mortgages and responsibilities, jobs and bills. KidLit though? That’s where possibilities are endless and the future is open to anything. And the books being published there now are pretty incredible. I’m honored to find myself in amazing company, as I also write for kids.
I’m the author of GROUNDED FOR ALL ETERNITY and the recently released THE AFTERLIFE OF THE PARTY, which features your regular everyday kids from the residential section of Hell. Yes, really.
In GROUNDED FOR ALL ETERNITY Malachi and his friends have found themselves on lockdown on what is supposed to be their epic school vacation. But on Halloween night, they can’t take it anymore and decide to sneak out for a little fun, except they accidentally slip through the veil into modern day Salem, Massachusetts. Unfortunately for them they’ve brought the soul of Samuel Parris with them and he is intent on taking over his old stomping ground. Now, they must recapture the escaped soul and get him back to where he belongs, before Heaven wipes Salem off the map or worse yet…their parents find out their gone.
THE AFTERLIFE OF THE PARTY continues their story back at home in Hell, finding Malachi finally off his nearly eternal grounding, when an invitation to an interdimensional mixer arrives. After that little snafu in Salem, Heaven and Hell better get on the same page, and what better way to do that than with a party. When Malachi overhears a conversation he shouldn’t have, he starts to wonder if there just might be more to this than a simple get together. Secret societies, interdimensional breaches, and a swing in the balance may just be a sign that something big is going on. When Anubis goes missing, Malachi realizes the big bad might be rising after all…
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
There’s a saying that goes, “What do they call a writer who never gave up? Published.”
It’s hard to write a book. It’s hard to publish a book. It’s hard to watch the book go out in the world and write the next one. Lots of people say they have a great idea for a book, they just need the time to write it. But here’s the secret, ideas are a dime a dozen.
Everyone has ideas.
If you want to be an author you have to actually commit to getting that idea on the page. That might mean joining the 5 am writers club before work, or writing during your kid’s soccer practice or during your lunch break or late at night. It’s finding the time to write a little bit whenever you can and sticking to it until it’s done. An then the real work begins, turning that first draft into something polished and ready, through however many rounds of edits it takes.
And then here’s another secret: That book might not go anywhere.
It takes time to learn the craft, even if you are a prolific reader. The first book I ever wrote, did not go anywhere. The second book I wrote got me my literary agent. We went on submission and the feedback was amazing…and no one bought that book. So I wrote another book, and we went on submission, and an editor asked for revisions, and I revised yet again, and we went back on submission and this time, it sold in a two book deal! Woo hoo!
And then you still have to write without knowing how your book is selling or wishing it was hitting best seller lists or getting that star. You have to love writing. You have to love stories, and you have to keep going if this is what you really want. Every writer out there has one thing in common, their persistence.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
Writing is often slow, but publishing is s…l…o…w. It takes time. I sold my debut in February of 2020, and although it’s true that March 2020 brought us a global pandemic, which definitely impacted lots of aspects of everything (and hopefully won’t happen to you), that book was not published until July of 2022.
And then the next week everyone I knew started asking how it was selling. Explaining that royalty statements only come out twice a year is baffling to people. Unless you’re in the industry it’s difficult to understand. Heck, even if you are in the industry there are still a lot of unknowns.
No, I don’t really know how many copies my book has sold right now. No, I can’t just send your book to my publisher and ask them to publish it. Sure, you can hire a company to publish your book, but it will definitely be a scam. Yes, you absolutely can self-publish and that will still be a business that you have to work hard at.
Friends and family are trying to be supportive when they ask how publishing is going, but honestly, much of the time there is little to say. There is lots of waiting, but I guarantee when we have news, we’ll share!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.DarcyMarks.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/darcy.marks/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DarcyMarksAuthor
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Wheresthetime
- Other: To order signed copies! https://www.phoenixbooks.biz/darcy-marks Publisher page for GROUNDED FOR ALL ETERNITY: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Grounded-for-All-Eternity/Darcy-Marks/9781534483378 Publisher page for THE AFTERLIFE OF THE PARTY: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Afterlife-of-the-Party/Darcy-Marks/9781534483392 Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/darcymarks.bsky.social
Image Credits
Headshot by Kristy Dooley Book display photo Victoria Wells Arms All other photos by Darcy Marks