on how I persevered when the publishing industry broke my spirit

I think a lot about the art of losing.

As you probably know, I’ve talked a lot on this Substack about how tumultuous my career has been—from my debut advance of $0 to the seven-figure deal for Silvercloak (which publishes NEXT WEEK, *gasp*) and the thousands of tiny failures and humiliations in between.

I wrote here about the first massive turning point (a major six-figure deal for Our Infinite Fates, my tenth published novel) and here about the journey from thousands of rejections and tanked releases to my first #1 New York Times bestseller.

Whenever I share these posts, I invariably receive a ton of messages from other writers.

How did you keep going when it felt like the whole industry was stacked against you?

How did you cling onto the joy when the market made you miserable?

Was there any particular mindset shift that changed the game for you?

I have a bucket of answers I usually give. That I view the work as the reward, not the success. That I love what I do too much to walk away. That I always had some innate sense that it was going to work out.

And all of these are true, but there’s something else. Something that’s hard to talk about without sounding like you take yourself too seriously. Yet sometimes I think the only way to survive this career is to take yourself seriously even when nobody else does, so what the hell. Time to answer honestly.

Let’s talk about resilience. Or as one commenter put it, “audacious, brazen, radioactive perseverance.”

Truthfully, I’ve always sort of had *it*. That indefinable intensity, that unshakeable stubborn streak. The kind of grit that allows me to run for three hours on a treadmill when I forget my headphones, as I had to do this weekend (much to the horror of the people in my DMs, who rightly questioned my sanity). I love endurance sports. I love the battle, the fight. I love journeys so long and arduous that you’re forced to learn things about the deepest parts of yourself. I love climbing the mountain more than I love summiting it.

Sure, a decent portion of this is simply my nature. But I also think it’s a learned behaviour, instilled over the course of a lifetime. And when I really dig down into it—while running for three hours on a treadmill with no entertainment—I can pinpoint three things that I believe built this ingrained perseverance.

1. Video games. The very premise of video games is that you can always try again. You die, you run out of lives, you fail a level, and you can simply try again. As a society we spend a lot of time hand-wringing about the impact of video games on kids, but listen, I have loved them since I was old enough to hold an original grey brick of a Gameboy, which means that I’ve spent almost three decades constantly reinforcing the psychological idea that if I fail, all I have to do is hit restart. I might lose a bit of progress, take some backwards steps, but I can always go again. That’s powerful, no? And so every time I wrote a book that died on sub, every time I published a book to zero fanfare, the mind beneath my mind thought: oh well, we failed the level, but we go again.

2. Sports. Yes, I know I’m a sports bore at this point. I talk a lot about what running has taught me about writing. Here, though, I actually mean something different. I’m talking about the team sports I played throughout my childhood and teen years—but critically, the fact I was terrible at most of them. I went to such a small school that even if you were relatively hopeless at hockey or netball, you’d probably still make the first team, because there just weren’t that many kids. As a result, our teams were absolutely decimated most weeks, and after a certain point, you just sort of stop caring about losing and enjoy it for what it is: fun with your fellow underdog friends. You bond over the losses. You learn to value the work and not the reward. You absorb the defeats without being affected by them. You laugh off every hilariously awful scoreline. (Also, if you haven’t already watched Roger Federer, the greatest tennis player of all-time, talk about how he only actually won 54% of the points he played while world number one, you should do that.)

So if you don’t already play video games or do sports, maybe give them a go. Preferably badly. Start to constantly reinforce the subconscious idea that losing is simply an inevitability, and you can always try again. Amass thousands of tiny failures over the course of any given year. Commiserate with your teammates, the writers at the same stage as you. Go again, and again, and again. It is so powerful, I promise.

The third key part of my psychic makeup, I think, is my father. I know this is not necessarily something that can be replicated in your own life/career, but I do want to share it in case you’re a parent thinking about how you can instil resilience in your kids.

Simply put: my dad never let me win. At anything. He taught me to play chess, then destroyed me in every single game until I understood the patterns. He taught me tennis, then served the ball full pelt at me (I was seven years old, and the racket was bigger than me) until I learned to a) stop being scared of it, b) manage to make contact with it, and finally c) return it just as hard. When I started actually beating my dad at both chess and tennis, I knew I had earned it, and it felt so much more satisfying than if he’d let it happen just to protect me from disappointment.

(He’s also a lifelong entrepreneur with several failed businesses behind him—a toy shop, a greetings card shop. After they both went under, he pivoted his career to insolvency and company turnaround. He now rescues other business on the brink of bankruptcy. This was my formative example of someone trying and failing and trying and failing and then turning the experiences of those failures into their greatest strength. Is it any bloody wonder I am the way I am?)

So thanks, Dad! You’re the reason I beat my own child at Mario Kart every weekend, the reason I always beat him by a few seconds in foot races. It’s not just because I’m an overly competitive asshole (although that too). It’s because I really believe that as a parent, the best thing you can do for your kid is teach them how to lose.

How does this all come together?

Back in early 2022, after my last three book releases had completely tanked, the best book I’ve ever written died at acquisitions for the final time. I sat on my confused toddler’s bedroom floor and cried hysterically for a quarter of an hour. Things were rough both financially and emotionally, my bank balance and my sanity having taken severe hits after having a baby three weeks before a global pandemic. For a very bleak fifteen minutes, I couldn’t see a way forward.

But then that mind beneath my mind kicked in—the one forged through a hundred thousand hours of sports and video games—and convinced me to go again. Told me that this was just a loss, as inconsequential as I wanted it to be. It was a Wednesday afternoon on a wet hockey field and my team just went down 10-0. It was the sound of those bleeps you hear after Super Mario dies, the default reaction of your thumb pressing the restart button.

By the time my mum had sent my brother around an hour later with emergency chocolate, I was already plotting my next book. (That, too, would die on submission. But the one after that was Our Infinite Fates. You see? We lose, and we go again.)

There’s more to it, of course. You to learn from each loss, each failure. You have to find the patterns, find a way for your racket to finally make contact with the ball. You don’t just do the same thing again and again and again, hoping for a different result. You come at it from a different angle.

A pop culture moment that lives rent-free in my head is one from the Miss Americana documentary, which opens with Taylor Swift finding out Reputation hasn’t been nominated for a Grammy. She looks devastated for a short moment, and then shrugs and says something like, “Okay, that’s good, that’s fine. I just need to make a better record.”

I’m not comparing myself to Swift, but this is where I channeled all my despair and heartache: making better work.

I read craft books, watched lectures, listened to writing podcasts. Started a reading journal, picked apart every book I read, tried to figure out how the best authors in the world did that. I learned the art of the high-concept hook, learned how to pitch my projects in a single line. I kept tweaking every book outline until every story had an immediately gripping opening chapter, a huge plot twist in the final act, the kind of things that take a book from a 3* to a 5*. I studied the indie publishing industry to figure out how the biggest successes broke through in a vast, vast sea of competitive titles. I drew mental Venn diagrams of what I loved to write and what seemed commercial, and chose projects that existed in the intersection.

I was thirty-one years old, but I was also seven years old, figuring out how to beat my dad at chess.

*

Anyway, Silvercloak comes out next week—24th July in the UK {Waterstones edition}, and 29th July in the US {signed Barnes & Noble edition}—and it would mean the world if you preordered, because I fought like hell to get here.

And if this book turns out to be another loss? Well. We go again.