The Black Dagger Brotherhood_ An Insider's Guide - J. R. Ward [103]
And I was . . . about to have a nervous breakdown.
See, one year prior to all this, I’d assumed I was never going to be published again.
When I went to Atlanta, I was losing it. I had no clue why the Brothers appeared to be working in the marketplace, I had no control over whether they would continue to do well, and it was incredibly difficult to go from being myself (grotty little writer in her boxers and her slippers) to being J. R. Ward (this, like, wunderkind thing).
Now, I’d had the good fortune of meeting Suz Brockmann through the New England chapter of RWA a couple of years before, and was, like most people I knew, in awe of her and her success. I was also a total fangirl over her work, having read it for years.
Plus, she was (and is), as they say, wicked nice.
By some stroke of luck, Suz agreed to see me for a quick one-on-one at that RWA in Atlanta, and my mom and I met her in a quiet hidey-hole in the hotel’s massive lobby. As we all sat down, I wanted to make a good impression and try to not show how clueless and terrified I was. And I was terrified. Good news is in some ways harder for me to deal with than bad news because I trust it less . . . and at the moment I truly was at the end of my rope from self-doubt and fear and disorientation.
So Suz and I are talking and she’s giving me all this great business advice and everything . . . and in the back of my mind I’m thinking, Don’t lose it, don’t embarrass yourself. . . .
I almost made it. Until she sniped me with kindness.
Toward the end of the meeting, Suz puts her hand in this little cloth bag she’d brought with her and takes out this book. Leaning forward, she says, all casual no-big-dealy, “Hey, I brought you an ARC of my new book.”
I looked down at what she was holding out to me. To this day, I remember precisely what the cover of it looked like: shiny white with a little red pattern, the title in bold with her name underneath.
I reached forward and carefully took the book.
The thing is, I’ve read Suz for years. She’s like Elizabeth Lowell to me. She’s the author I curled up with at night and read until my eyes went double from exhaustion . . . and I still kept going. She’s the one who I can remember seeing at a conference with a hundred people standing in line just to meet her—for two hours straight. She’s the gold standard for being kind and nice to readers. And she’s the one who wrote the book that I read and then walked around my condo for hours in tears over because I was convinced I would never be as good as her on her worst day.
I fucking lost it. Took that damn ARC to my chest, curled around it, and cried all over myself.
In. Front. Of. Suz. Brockmann.
And my mother.
On the third floor of the lobby of that hotel in Atlanta . . . so it was in public.
I still cringe.
Suz, of course, handled it graciously, and listened as I blubbed on about the fact that I was fricking losing it and I didn’t know if I could keep the quality of my writing up and I wasn’t sure whether I would be able to meet the deadlines and I was worried about not doing the very best job that any author now or in the past or in the future could do with the opportunities I’d been given.
Suz let me go on and on, and when I’d worn myself out like a hamster on a spinning wheel, she looked at me and said she knew exactly what all that was like. She knew precisely how it was to want to be perfect and do a perfect job and somehow earn the success you’d been gifted with. The thing was, she said, as time passed she learned that if you shoot for absolute perfection, you’re going to fail by definition—and that “perfect” simply cannot be the standard, because you will burn yourself out.
Doing the very best you can with where you’re at is what matters.
When I was younger, particularly when I was doing the lawyer/corporate America thing, I nearly killed myself trying to be perfect, and I