The Vent with Lori R. Snyder and THE CIRCUS AT THE END OF THE SEA
In Which the Author Comes Aboard and Talks About Being a Slow Writer in a Slow Publishing Industry and Feeling Adrift When Debuting Doesn't Go As Planned 🎪
You know those people you meet and just instantly know they’ve started putting energy out into the universe for you to succeed? That’s what happened when I met today’s guest for The Vent, Lori R. Snyder. Upon getting to know her over the past decade, I’ve come to realize Lori truly wants everyone to achieve their dreams and to help in any way she can. Through her companies, Splendid Mola and the Writers Happiness Movement, Lori offers writing retreats with yoga, as well as posts creativity exercises every week through her Substack that did so much to help me get in my creative groove this spring and finally finish a manuscript after a year of no writing. And here for The Vent, Lori gives us all kinds of hope, including letting all of us know why it’s so important to keep writing, even when the world is ✨gestures around✨ Here we go!
Jason June (JJ): When you started your writing journey, what was the biggest frustration you encountered as you tried to find an agent and/or went on sub to editors for the first time that you wish you could have vented about?
Lori R. Snyder (LRS): Oh my. Well. It took me so, so, SO very long to get to the point where I had an agent and then a book deal. 23 years of serious writing and two other books I wrote that didn't sell (but took me forever to write). My biggest frustration on that part of the journey was honestly with myself. I felt like I was doing something wrong as I watched so many friends get agents and multiple book deals in the time it took me to finally write a book that someone wanted to represent and then someone else wanted to publish. I was lucky that I did get to vent about this to writer friends — and by venting, sometimes I mean crying.
JJ: How about after you got your first book deal and continued on to write more books? How did your frustrations (if you had any) change, and what would you have vented about or did vent about to author friends?
LRS: I thought I was prepared for how slow the business was, and how it might feel after my book debuted. I had so many author friends and had been around the business for so long at this point, and I had heard them all talk about their experiences enough that I really thought I was ready for it to be hard and to suck in some ways. And I was, intellectually. But I did not expect it to feel as bad as it felt. I wish I could say that my debut was everything I hoped for, but the truth is that I'd never felt more like a failure in my life as I did in the year or two after my first book came out. This is a part of things I don't think we talk about with each other enough, this sense of getting your dream and it actually making your life feel worse for a while. To be fair, my book came out during Covid, which made everything harder for a small debut author like me, and increased all the more-common feelings of "I spent forever making this thing I'm so proud of, and now it's just...disappeared."
I did finally move through that into just being proud and happy of my debut, and looking forward to the next book. And recently, three years after the book came out and I thought it was totally dead, some really cool things have happened with it! Which has also been really nice.
Separate from that, though, my biggest vent is how ridiculous it is in this day and age that authors have literally no way to know what their actual sales numbers are, where the book is stocked, or what the print run was. It's just silly to tell us that nobody knows how many of our books are sitting on a bookstore shelf and might be returned as opposed to how many have been bought by an actual person (or library or school). Of course someone knows this! The whole way the business is run is archaic and sooooo frustrating.
JJ: Tell us about your latest book! And (I bet you know where this is going) what’s the biggest vent you’ve got about the process of creating this novel?
LRS: My latest is another middle grade fantasy. It's about a girl named Zephyr who accidentally wakes up the winter wind and then tricks him into taking her on an adventure where they have to literally save time. It's a dual POV book with the girl Zephyr and the winter wind Buran as the two POV characters, and it's (I hope) a wild romp about time and winds and found families and how we fix things. My biggest vent about the process of creating it is twofold: the main one is that I'm such a slow slow slooooooow writer, and on top of that, this book kicked my butt. It's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, including every business I've started.
The second part is a standard vent most of us have: the slowness of the publishing industry.
JJ: Any words of wisdom you have for writers whether they are at the beginning of their journey or multi-published?
LRS: Yes, this: whatever it is you're writing, it matters. Right now especially, when there are so many things that scream for our attention, I find that it can be easy to question if writing is the right use of my precious time, or if it would be better spent doing "more for the world." But the thing is, art and writing change things. They change us.
Whether you're writing a cozy fantasy or a researched academic treatise or poetry or a picture book or a screenplay or in your journal or anything else, it matters. The very act of taking time to create, to honor our creative selves, to think, to make something...well, this helps to hold the shape of the future we want, helps to hold the space for that energy. It holds the space and energy of allowing creativity to be part of everyone's lives, not just our own. And what I think we need right now is to build the future we want.
It doesn't matter if you're writing something that seems related to changing the world or not, because it all does. It's all truth. And it doesn't matter if you're a slow writer so whatever you're working on now won't get into the world for maybe ten years (not a personal example, obviously!). What matters is that you, writing what you want to write, are by that act alone helping build the shape of the future you want. Helping to hold the energy of that future. Helping to renew our humanity and make the world more expansive, open, and kind. So please remember: Writing is one of your gifts to the world, no matter what or how you write.
JJ: I couldn’t agree with you more about the importance of us continuing to create, Lori! Thanks so much for joining us aboard the Ventorship. Author-passengers, read below for more info about Lori and her first middle grade novel, THE CIRCUS AT THE END OF THE SEA!
About THE CIRCUS AT THE END OF THE SEA
A vibrant and enchanting debut novel about a lonely girl who discovers a magical street circus, perfect for fans of Kelly Barnhill and Rebecca Stead!
Maddy Adriana knows that magic is real. All her life, her heart has pulled her towards things too perfect to be ordinary—not to mention her mysterious silver bracelet that never comes off. One day, the tug of her heart leads her to Il Circo delle Strade, the magical street circus hidden in plain sight among the canals and boardwalks of Venice Beach, California…and for the first time in her life, Maddy feels like she might belong.
But the circus is in grave danger, and it seems only Maddy can help. Her journey will take her to the end of the sea, where she will have to confront the frightening side of magic as well as her own deepest fears if she is to save the place she hopes to call home.
This unforgettable debut shows readers the magic of following your heart and finding where you belong.
About Lori R. Snyder
Lori Snyder is a writer of stories and a student of the world, which probably explains all the different careers and years of college. Previous careers include fourth grade science and language arts teacher, family science camp coordinator and teacher, working on a boat designing and leading programs that took kids into kelp forests and out to see blue sharks, book editor, yoga studio owner, and musical booking agent for a coffee house in Hollywood. In addition to being a writer, she is also a long-time yoga teacher and the founder of the Writers Happiness Movement (www.writershappiness.com), which offers free happiness tools and microgrants to writers.
Lori has a BA in Communication Studies from UCLA, a couple of years toward an MS in Marine Biology from CSULB, and an MPW (Master's of Professional Writing) from USC. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives at the beach in Los Angeles, near the circus that she loves. If you head out to the bike path on any nice day, you can probably find her skating there. The Circus at the End of the Sea (www.lorirsnyderauthor.com) is her first novel.
Substack: splendidmola.substack.com
Authors, the Ventorship is looking for traditionally published writers to be featured with their latest book release in a future edition of The Vent! Email me at heyjasonjune@gmail.com with the subject: THE VENT to let me know you’re interested. All you’ll need to be featured are answers to the same four questions asked above, as well as an author bio, cover image, and book description.
If you’d like to vent about anything author/writing related, write to me at heyjasonjune@gmail.com with the subject: VENTORSHIP. I’ll give you my take in a post, and we’ll crowdsource author opinions in the comments. You’ll remain anonymous, and any haters will be thrown overboard. Ultimately, I think you’re going to be buoyed up by author love and support as we realize we really are all in the same boat 🛳️