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AutobiographyHow I Found Myself Here, or Why I Became a WriterI didn't set out to be a writer. I always wrote, you know, but it was just this thing I did; what I intended was to become a terribly famous artist, perhaps with a stopover as a singer. And I can't say I made much of a go at that. I got out of high school, and didn't go to college. My folks had spent most of their lives telling me that college was a waste of time and money, and that what I needed to do was get out of school and get a job. And in spite of the fact that I graduated in the top ten in my class (not top ten percent -- top ten) and had taken all college preparatory classes, I believed them. Which turns out not to have been the only stupid mistake I made in my life that turned out well. For the record, college is a good idea for most people, and if I still had my heart set on being a professional artist, it would have been important for me. Singing ... well, that takes more talent than I have, and I never wanted it enough to fight for it anyway. I had my moment in the spotlight there and that was enough. But getting out of school and getting a job is what you do when your life has other plans for you, and just hasn't let you in on them yet. I discovered that the world is not panting in breathless anticipation for eighteen-year-old high-school-graduate artists. So I started to work at a newspaper, selling advertising. I found out quickly that I don't like working for other people---but I also acquired a little Vega station wagon that had to be paid for. When selling advertising turned out not to be my dream job, I dumped it for the first art job that came along. I began painting signs for a commercial artist, and discovered that that entailed working in a cold warehouse and dealing with people who hadn't been paid by this guy in months, and smelling kerosene all the time, and getting chapped fingers and chapped lips and paint in the cracks that the turpentine and the cold made in my hands. So I started teaching guitar at a local music shop, and while I was at it, picked up a couple of gigs at local restaurants as a singer. What I found from these jobs was that I was working lots of hours for not a lot of money, and if I ever wanted to move out of my parents' house (and I did, let me tell you) I was going to have to do something that paid regular money, and a fair amount of it. I added McDonald's, so that technically I had three jobs at the same time, but while I was sure as hell employed, I wasn't making enough money to feed a dieting cockroach. My mother (who also wanted me out of the house sometime in her lifetime) was working at a local hospital. She ran into some of the nursing students there, and came home from work one day and told me I ought to go to nursing school. It was cheap, it was local, and the uniforms were cute. (They were also polyester and hot as hell, but they were, indeed, cute.) So I went to the community college, boned up on algebra, and took the test. I passed easily, and found myself at the very top of what was for some people a two year waiting list. And with about that much forethought, I started into two years of hell as a nursing student, where I discovered that the uniforms might have been cute but the work wasn't. I discovered more than that, though. I discovered the enormous variety of humanity, and life and death, and pain, and hope, and love and hate and fear. Ten years of nursing following that put me in touch with the basic themes of my life. That people matter. That love and our time are all we have to offer each other that means anything. That death is a mean bastard, and that he comes for all of us. That life is worth living, no matter how painful or scary it sometimes gets. That magic is real. That I hate the assholes who gravitate to administration. Yeah, well ... not all themes are uplifting. I had to get out of nursing. The patients and the actual work were wonderful, but the paperwork was bullshit, and I don't know where hospitals dig up the creatures who end up as administrators and head nurses, but I swear, they need to bury them back where they found them and hire humans for the job. I'd been writing all along. Short stories, poems, twenty-page "I'm going to write a novel now" false starts. I finally got serious. Writing was how I was going to make my way out of the increasingly bitter world of nursing. And to make a long story a little shorter, I sold my first fantasy novel, Fire in the Mist. I sold a couple more. And I quit nursing. I quit too soon, and I've had to run like hell to keep in one place most of the time since then. But I did it. I'm out of nursing. I work for myself (and I really am about the only person I willingly take orders from). And writing, for all that it's harder than nursing ever was, is also more joyous, and more fun, and a lot less dangerous. And the major themes of my life have become the major themes of my writing, too --- so it has all worked out pretty well. And everything I ever did prepared me better than college ever could have for what I do today. Like I said, this has been a long, hard road, but skipping college was one of the best dumb mistakes I ever made. Some Biographical DataI'm an Ohio native, born in Salem in October of 1960. I grew up all over the place -- Gnadenhutten, Ohio; in a Moravian children's home a bit north and west of Kwethluk, Alaska; in New Philadelphia, Ohio; in San Jose, Costa Rica where I attended an English-speaking private school and was the youngest student to that point ever accepted into the Instituto de Lengua Espanola (was thirteen or fourteen at the time); in a Quaker mission in Chiquimula, Guatemala; in East Liverpool, Ohio. My family moved a lot and I got pretty good at starting over, a skill that has stood me in good stead in later life. I graduated from Beaver Local High School in 1979, and from Richmond Technical College in 1981 with an Associate Degree in Nursing. I sang in restaurants, sold newspaper advertising, taught beginning guitar, did commercial artwork, sold burgers at McDonald's, and worked as a registered nurse until 1993, when I was able to leave nursing to write full-time. I quit my day job too soon, though, and have spent subsequent years scrambling to make ends meet. I have three children and several cats, and have been married twice and divorced twice. I won the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel, was a finalist twice for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and have had a number of my books hit the Locus Bestseller List. Diplomacy of Wolves also spent two months on the Waldenbooks Bestseller List. I think writing novels is the best job a human being could have; I hope I'll be writing productively and selling my work for the rest of my life.
On Religion, Nursing, and Sympathy for the DevilSome of the mail I've received on Sympathy for the Devil has asked about my religion or encouraged me to explore someone else's. I don't discuss my beliefs, because I feel anyone's relationship with God is personal and private, but I thought I would tell you a little about the story behind Sympathy for the Devil. I was an RN for ten years -- twelve if you count the two years as a nursing student, which I often do. Most of that time I worked in the ER, which I loved, but I was a nursing supervisor for a year and I staffed a med-surg floor before I quit, and for a while I worked in a couple of ICUs. When I worked ICU, I saw the things that Dayne saw. I did the things she did. I kept alive people who wanted to die because their families wanted them to live and refused to honor their wishes or their living wills. I felt brittle old ribs crack under the heel of my left hand when I did CPR on people who were beyond hope; I suctioned and cleaned and turned; did range-of-motion exercises on comatose people to prevent contractures; read heart monitors and studied EKG's; fought with IV lines and Swan-Gantz lines and titrated cardiac drips and all the other thousand things medical technology makes possible but not always right. Sometimes what I did helped. Sometimes people got better. Almost as many times, I think, they didn't. People who go into ICUs today are a lot sicker than they used to be, and while nurses can do plenty of things to keep them alive, many times they can't do anything to make them better. Many of my patients suffered the tortures of the damned. And because I was the one inflicting much of that pain, I took it home with me. Worse, I saw human beings reduced to lifeless objects of contention between family members eager to prove each was more devoted to Mama than the other. I saw children whose families neglected them until it was too late. I saw the victims of abuse and violence and self-indulgent stupidity. And while I saw shining examples of love and compassion in patients, families, nurses and doctors, I also saw the worst side of humans and what they can let themselves become. Families really do stand beside the bed of a comatose parent and argue about who is going to get the couch or the jewelry or the house when Daddy dies. Everything I saw and everything I did changed me. I don't look at people in the same way, I don't look at religion in the same way, and I don't look at God in the same way. After comatose, elderly, never-going-to-wake-up vent patients, end-stage renal patients who wanted to die, end-stage AIDS patients who wanted to die, terminal cancer patients in wracking pain; after doing a code on a ninety-year-old woman who had been completely unresponsive for more than a week but whose daughter couldn't let go; after fighting with one doctor about patients' rights to death with dignity, and with another one about not giving up (because there were also patients who weren't ready to quit even though the doctors were); after too much pain and suffering and sickness and death and grief and greed and ugliness---I prayed the prayer Dayne prayed, word for word. I remember now exactly how I felt when I prayed it. Dayne got an answer directly from God---a physical manifestation of Hell---in answer to her prayer. After several years of no apparent answer at all, I got a book---Sympathy for the Devil---and any comments I have to make on religion or faith or God or Satan or Heaven or Hell, I've already made in that book. The second half of the book was written over the couple of weeks immediately after my kids told me what had been going on at their father's house, when the DSS and the police were still trying to piece together the full extent of the abuse. For the kids, things got better as soon as they told. I, however, felt like I'd been plunged into Hell. I had to get the book finished, so I wrote when the kids were in school. I buried myself in the story and tried to make sense of what had happened. I never could make sense of it, but I did work my way to some conclusions ... and if you look, you'll find some of that working-through process in the book, too. Finally, a response to the people who---with the best of motives and the kindest of intentions---have offered to introduce me to their religion, my thanks for your offers, and for your caring. However, after a long and painful, often-angry struggle, I've made my private peace with God. I'm satisfied with that. Thank you for understanding.
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