Confessions of a Former Neurodivergent Baby Author

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Audra Winter situation and how it overlaps with my experience as a ND writer. If you’re not already caught up, there are a lot of very long YouTube commentary videos you can watch for a comprehensive deep dive on the topic. TL;DR: 22-year-old indie author goes viral on TikTok and gets a bananas amount of preorders on her debut novel. The book comes out and gets very bad reviews. The author is now very publicly trying to revise the book and win back readers. When advised by many commenters to chalk this one up as an L and work on writing something new, she says that this world is her special interest and she literally can’t step away from it.

This has been a tough situation for me to follow. Though I recognize that Audra did a lot of things wrong in her journey to publication, or at least did them in a way that I personally wouldn’t advise a friend to do… my reaction to hearing her speak about her world is, Boy, can I ever relate.

I was fourteen when I started my first novel. I can actually tell you the exact date (February 1, 2004) and where I was (in a boring church meeting, pretending to take notes in my black notebook with pink gel pen). It wasn't the first thing I'd ever written; I had a handful of short stories to my name by then. But that was the date when I became A Writer(™). 

The story I was writing was based on a world I'd started to build in my head. This world was quite literally my escape fantasy. As a young teen with undiagnosed autism, I had severe social anxiety, which was not really helped by the fact that I was being raised in a high-control religion. My brain was in the process of teaching itself to dissociate, and it did so by creating a utopian planet that I could float my mind up on a cloud to inhabit whenever things were too much on planet Earth. 

For a year or two, that imaginary planet remained my secret. And then I read Eragon by Christopher Paolini, a book that I instantly became obsessed with. When I flipped to the author bio and discovered he'd written it in his early teens—my age!—I was captured by the idea that I didn't need to wait to be grown up to be an author. That I could start now.

So, in that boring church meeting in 2004, I wrote the first scene of what would become my first novel, The Queen of Trilia. A blatant self-insert who was more cool and graceful than me in every way (she had a castle, a fantastic wardrobe, a private library, and a tiger BFF) gets transported by lightning to an evil sorcerer’s lair and loses all her memories.

Yeah. It was not good. 

The book hit about 30k words total, which is technically in the range of a novella. I was insanely proud of it. I printed it out and put it in a binder. I asked my English teacher to read it (she lied and said it was great). I wrote my OCs into Eragon fanfic (I know, cringe, but it made me happy, shut up). I collected pictures of actors I wanted to play my characters in a movie. I drew art of them. And I wrote sequels—four total, expanding the world beyond my self-insert OC.

And then I rewrote book one. And rewrote it. And rewrote it. 

You might think that each individual rewrite was better than the last, and you'd actually be somewhat correct. I was learning. I was writing fanfic on the side, learning to accept feedback. I was reading A TON in my genre and applying what I learned to my writing. (Let us not speak of the draft that I wrote while in my Georgette Heyer phase.) 

But none of those drafts were ready to be published. And I sort of knew that, even though being a published author was the one thing I'd dreamed, hoped, and wished for with a fiery passion since writing the first sentence of that first draft. 

It was all the worse because Christopher Paolini's success had gotten in my head. I thought that because he had written a book by 13 and was a bestseller by 19, that I should be able to do the same. So it was a huge letdown when I just…wasn't. 

I branched out from The Queen of Trilia, even though that story was my one true love. In college, I wrote a handful of new ideas, including a historical Medea retelling. I submitted it to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards in 2012 and made it to the semifinals. I didn't win. I sent that book to a bunch of agents, which, back then, I had to do by printing out sample pages and mailing them with a self-addressed stamped envelope to New York. I got a bunch of rejections. I slipped into a creative funk.

To pull myself out of that creative depression, I decided that I would stop showing my writing to other people. I would embrace my passion project, write and rewrite The Queen of Trilia until I really, truly thought it was ready. And then I would submit it again. 

That was in 2013. It would not be until around 2019 that I was ready to share that draft.

It had morphed into an early version of The Halcyon Universe. It had gone from fantasy to space opera, my true-love genre. I had rewritten it and its sequels about 3-4 times.

And it was still. Not. Ready.

That was hard for me to hear, but hear it I did, from multiple kind beta readers and literary agents. In another creative slump, I put Halcyon aside and began working on what I thought was a short story set in the same universe.

That book turned into Adrift in Starlight, which I queried in 2021 and eventually published with a small press. I enjoyed writing in the sci-fi romance format so much that I reworked my Halcyon Universe characters and plots into three romance books, of which my publisher took on two. I chose to independently publish the third and final of the “trilogy”, The Taste of Lies, this year.

So here I am. Thirty-six years old, and finally the books that I cared about so deeply and worked on for so long are out in the world. They're definitely making a ton of money, right?

Hahahaha.

The thing is, me caring so deeply about this world, loving it to pieces, putting in a mountainous amount of effort to learn to write it well, shopping it to agents and publishers, and finally getting it out there DID NOT equal wild success. Yeah, a couple of people read my books. Some of them weren't even related to me. Not a lot of them read beyond book one, which is ironically the one I'm least attached to. And now that I'm close to finishing a draft of the last book I plan to write in the Halcyon Universe for awhile (another side-project standalone like Adrift), I'm looking back at all that effort and going, “Was it worth it?”

And the answer is HELL YEAH. 

Because I accepted long ago that I wasn't going to get to be a full time writer who makes enough to justify not having a day job. I accepted that although I wasn't good enough to publish at age 19, that didn't mean it was over. And now I'm accepting that the world I love, that carried me through my anxiety-ridden youth, is not the world that catapults me to authorial fame and endless money. It means so much to me, but it doesn't have broad appeal. And that's okay.

I still love it. I still plan to commission art in that world (as my meager budget allows), market it a bit, refer to it in my also-bys in my future novels. It will always be massively important to me.

But now I get to move on, try out writing to market for once (lol), and see what else I can do with my career.

All of this is to say that I wish I'd had an autistic big sister to sit me down and hit me with the realism at age fourteen. I don't know if it would have even changed what I did. But I want young writers to know that you don't have to make it big when you're young. It happens every now and then to huge acclaim, but it's WAY more common for authors to debut in their 30's and 40's. At a young age, you can still have interesting life experiences and things to say about them, but you'll keep gaining so many more of them the longer you live. Don't rush to debut with something that isn't ready. Let it marinate. Write other stuff. Swap with betas who don't know you and will give you decent advice. (Never take advice from someone whose writing you don't enjoy!)

And the world that you deeply love, that you can't put down no matter how hard you try, might not resonate for everyone else. That doesn't mean it's not worth writing. The joy it brings you is well worth the work, in my opinion. What it means is that, if your dream is to be a successful author, you will have to know when to put that passion project aside. For me, that time has now come. I can’t and won’t make that call for anyone else’s career. But I will say that I completely empathize with how hard it is. How much these worlds mean to us. How disappointing it is when others don’t love them the way we do.

You loving it, though? You caring? That can be enough, if you let it.

<3 Mindi

P.S. For fun, and because I spent way too much time compiling this data simply because it makes my ND brain happy: here are my all-time writing stats to prove that it does, in fact, take a long-ass time and a lot of work.

Novels:

Longest original fiction: 139,000 words

Average novel length: 54.2k words

Total novels finished (excluding revisions & drafts): 17

Novels published: 4

Years of writing it took until a novel was published: 18

Shorts:

Total short stories finished: 16

Short stories published: 6

Years of writing it took until a short story was published: 11 (not counting the one published in the newspaper when I was a teenager)

Fanfics:

Longest fanfic: 53,000 words

Average “full length” fanfic length: 31.5k words

Total fanfics finished: 34