by Leslie Vedder
I’ve always wanted to be a writer. This has taken a lot of different forms for me over the years. Illustrator/author of stapled together grade-school masterpieces. Closet fanfiction writer. (Only in the sense that I wrote from the closet; my fanfiction was always slash!)
Then I got into original work, learning to put the worlds and characters I’d imagined in my head down on paper. My first attempts were mostly epic fantasy stories that hit all the familiar beats I’d read so many times—you know, nine guys go on a quest, and none of them are even in love with each other!
Still, they lit my imagination on fire like nothing else. There’s a certain magic to reading and being transported into the shoes of a character battling a dragon or rescuing a princess. There’s even more magic in being the wizard behind it, scheming up all the dastardly villains and angsty love triangles and perilous fights.
I really loved writing, but I often found it hard to stay interested in my own characters. Something I can now look back and admit was probably because they weren’t all that interesting. (Pro tip: Don’t write gritty, unromantic, dark heroes—unless you love gritty, unromantic, dark heroes. Then go nuts!)
A few projects ago, I finally had a revelation. I love girl adventurers and heroes and f/f pairings and fairytales, so why wasn’t I writing those? For the first time, I let myself write the stories closest to my heart, the ones that my young self would have adored: stories about dashing girl rogues, genderqueer knights, non-binary witches, and even some cis princes waiting to be rescued!
After a few false starts, I stumbled onto a project that felt like it could go all the way: a genderflipped Sleeping Beauty story starring two girl treasure hunters, mashing up the basic prick-your-finger, three-good-fairies story with a whole lot of witches and some Indiana Jones style ruins and riddle-solving. Right away, I fell in love with one of my two MCs: a queer ax-wielding warrior girl with a big mouth and a bigger personality, who was loud and proud from her very first line.
I’m not going to lie. Working toward being a published author can be brutal—it’s full of a lot of rejection and heartache. Worse, you don’t always get to know why. Is it me? My writing? My characters, which I now love…but maybe nobody else does?
Luckily, I have a partner who is my first reader, my editor, and my biggest fan. She never stopped believing in me, never stopped encouraging me. Never stopped pushing me to keep going—even when the going was rough. Even when I would lie dramatically on the floor after my nth rejection, saying it was all over, she’d just keep typing away at the Excel spreadsheet where we kept track of everything, saying: next moves, let’s go. There would honestly be no book without her.
(She’s also been my best friend since high school and once wrote me a novel-length fanfiction on request. If that doesn’t sound like true love, then you don’t know that it was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles novel!)
After years of waiting, and hoping, and occasionally crying into my pillow, and revising (soooo much revising!), the news that my book, The Bone Spindle, was finally going to be published came very suddenly. An editor had read my book and loved it. I was going to get to share my genderflipped Sleeping Beauty and my queer ax-wielding huntswoman with the world!
I could only read the first lines of the email before screaming for my partner and making her read the rest. I spent a whirlwind half hour talking with my new editor on the phone, while my partner kept circling me, taking pictures of my ridiculous grin to capture the moment.
Sharing that joy with her was a dream come true. But nothing is more of a dream come true than knowing I get to put my stories out there into the world, and some younger version of myself will hopefully find them and fall in love with them, just like I fell in love with so many books. There were days, while I was on submission, when I wondered if I should give up writing the stories of my heart and write stories I recognized—other people’s stories. But now, I’m proud to say I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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Leslie Vedder (she/her) is a queer ace author who loves fairytale retellings with girl adventurers and heroes! Her debut YA novel THE BONE SPINDLE is forthcoming in Spring 2022 from Penguin / Putnam Young Readers. She has a B.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Her climate fiction won the Aftermath Short Story prize, and she has been a speaker at the Northern Colorado Writers Convention and the SCBWI Letters & Lines Conference. She lives in Colorado with her girlfriend and two spoiled house cats. You can find her at leslievedder.com.
