On following your passions and finding your posse

A wonderful (and hopefully inspiring!) guest post today from fantasy/sci-fi writer DK Mok, who 'grew up in libraries, immersed in lost cities and fantastic worlds, populated by quirky bandits and giant squid. She’s fond of cephalopods, androids, global politics, rugged horizons, science and technology podcasts, and she wishes someone would build a labyrinthine library garden so she can hang out there. Her favourite fossil deposit is the Burgess Shale.' Pretty cool, yeah? Here's her website.

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I used to buy fish and chips from a shop near the beach, where a cheerful young man with gravity-defying hair would put together my order. One day, we got to chatting about sport, and he confided that he aspired to be a professional wrestler. He’d competed in high school, and he said that whenever he was wrestling, he felt truly alive, as though it were what he was meant to be doing.

I don’t know much about wrestling, but I know about passions – the kind that make you feel alive, but rarely pay the bills. Things like writing, art and music. I sometimes wonder what compels some people pursue their dreams, while others walk away, or shelve them for some nebulous ‘one day’.

One obvious factor is opportunity. An illiterate girl in rural Zimbabwe faces far more challenges than a middle-class girl in a country with free public education.

Another factor is choice. Some people make the valid decision that financial security, and being able to take care of the people who matter to them, are more important than pursuing an uncertain career that may never amount to more than a hobby.

However, the factor I find particularly interesting is the social environment. I once heard a great talk by writer and director Kevin Smith, in which he extols the importance of surrounding yourself with people who say ‘Why not?’ Whether you’re thinking about writing a novel, shooting a short, or entering an art competition, it can make a huge difference to have people around you who encourage your creativity, whose default attitude is ‘why not?’ rather than ‘why bother?’ The kind of people who get excited by your enthusiasm. The kind of people who fuel your dreams rather than hit the brakes.

I’m incredibly fortunate to have family and friends who’ve been supportive of my writing ambitions from the beginning, who’ve helped me to bounce back from rejections, and encouraged me to persist even when things seemed impossible. Whenever I flagged, they gave me the strength to keep dreaming, and keep working, and last week, I held a copy of my debut novel The Other Tree in my hands for the first time.

Whatever your creative interests, I encourage you to find yourself a supportive community of like-minded people, online or offline. Seek out mentors, allies, fellow travellers. The road for creative professionals is often slow, turbulent, and at times, disheartening. But I remember reading an article in which a musician lamented the number of artists who gave up, never realising how close they’d come to making it.

In my experience, the journey is more rewarding if you enjoy the process, rather than focusing solely on your progress, or sometimes lack of it. Don’t see time and effort as being wasted, as long as you’ve created something unique or interesting, or learned something from it. If something positive captures your curiosity or imagination, give it a go. If it’s something that really matters to you, then persist.

I don’t know if the man at the fish and chip shop is still working towards his dream of pro-wresting, but I wished him well. There are no guarantees that you’ll make a living from your passion, but pursuing something you love, something that makes your life more amazing and fulfilling, something that makes you feel truly alive, is still a pretty fantastic way to live.

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DK Mok lives in Sydney, Australia, and writes fantasy, science fiction and urban fantasy novels and short stories. DK graduated from UNSW with a degree in Psychology, pursuing her interest in both social justice and scientist humour. Her urban fantasy novel The Other Tree is available now (Spence City). Find more online at www.dkmok.com, on Twitter @dk_mok or on Facebook.

Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan

It is what it says in the title – two boys kissing (they used to be a couple, but are still friends) in order to set the record for world's longest kiss. It's narrated Greek-chorus style by the generation of men killed by AIDs – which sounds profoundly depressing and is jarring when you begin reading, but the vignettes and insights into the lives of the various kids during a single day are so expertly woven that it stops being odd very quickly and you become caught up in the story instead. As well as Craig and Harry attempting their world record, there's Peter and Neil who have been a couple for ages, Avery and Ryan who have just met and are feeling out their relationship, and Cooper, who is alone and struggling. Each of the characters are incredibly well-drawn and easy to empathise with, regardless of whether you’re gay. I am never a fan of YA novels being labelled 'issues' books – really, whose life is devoid of 'issues'? Novels totally devoid of gay characters are fairly unrealistic – but this novel manages to tackle a lot of stuff and be remarkably well-written and insightful at the same time. It is so rare to read a novel like this, especially for YA readers, and it’s such important stuff, and also a wonderful read.

Originally published in Young Vagabond.

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas

I'm not a big reader of high fantasy novels – I have trouble keeping track of tons of different kingdoms and families and creatures, and I lack the patience for multiple 500-page plus tomes (I still haven't got all the way through the Harry Potter series – they were at a Quidditch match for far too long in book four and I gave up. Forgive me!). It's the rare fantasy novel that manages to keep my attention – which is not a comment on fantasy novels at all, which I generally think are pretty extraordinary, if only I can get all the way through them. It just says a lot about my attention span. Throne of Glass did capture my interest, much to my delight! It's about a girl assassin (Celaena Sardothien – I do so love the names) who has a life sentence working in the salt mines (not fun) being offered freedom on the condition that she survives a fight-to-the-death tournament representing the prince. Girl assassins, you guys. How are they ever not awesome? There's some extraordinary world-building and lots of sinister goings on, and a legion of characters distinct and interesting enough for even I to follow. I would've liked for it to be more blood-thirsty (I'm a Game of Thrones fan) – she is an assassin after all. If you like romance there's a nice little love triangle, because you can't just not have a love triangle. Very much looking forward to the rest of the series, and what Celaena Sardothien does next.


Originally published in Young Vagabond.

Shadows by Paula Weston

There are numerous things I love about Shadows – that it's a paranormal romance novel without an entirely insipid heroine (Gaby is actually pretty kick-ass), that it's set in a fictitious Australian coastal town (for some reason, even Aussie authors can't imagine angels or vampires outside of the US – seems like a dangerous place, what with all these supernatural creatures. It’s the main reason I haven’t visited), that it manages to be both absolutely extraordinary and remarkably authentic (for instance, it’s about angels who fight evil beasties – which is absurd – but maintains believability by the fact that there’s a lot of politics and infighting, like in any non-angelic organisation). It's about Gaby Winters, who believes her twin brother died a year ago and has horrific nightmares of killing evil beasties – and who gradually finds out the truth about herself, the Rephaim and her brother's death when Rafa comes to town. You’ll like Rafa. I rather enjoyed to snappy dialogue and magical teleporting (teleportation is the greatest). I know, I know, angels are the new vampires and there’s an utterly ridiculous number of angel novels out right now – plus they’re all series, so you have to commit to a trilogy, or longer. Let me assure you that Shadows is well and truly worth it – as well as being delightfully Australian and featuring teleportation, it’s fast-paced and well-written and I’m very much looking forward to reading the next in the series.

Originally published in Young Vagabond.

2014 still sounds like it should be the future. I want a jetpack.

It's the third of January and I still feel stuck in last year, in that weird no-man's-land between Christmas and New Year. It is swelteringly hot in Queensland at the moment and that combined with the way all the days bleed into one another this time of year means instead of finishing my novel, I'm sitting around being reflective (something I do too much of all the way through the year) and binge-watching The Walking Dead.

(Unfortunately this post is not about The Walking Dead.)

Last year a bunch of wonderful things happened: All This Could End was published! I had an essay published in the Destroying the Joint anthology! I went to New Zealand for the first time! I went to a couple of festivals and I visited a ton of schools, including going out to Western QLD with BWF's Write Across Queensland tour! I was a nominee in Cosmo's Fun Fearless Female award, despite the fact that I only fulfilled one of the criteria! (Female. Just, you know, FYI.) I went to Melbourne for a bit, which is always wonderful! I gave a TEDx talk! A whole bunch of other things happened which I have already forgotten about because I failed to keep a journal, despite my last year's resolution (a writer should really keep a journal, I feel, but I'm terrible at it. Always ripping the pages out and starting again). A nice little end to the year was All This Could End appearing on BuzzFeed's 13 Best Australian Books of 2013.

But a laundry list of my random successes last year is not what the year was really about (okay, All This Could End being published was the highlight of my year. That book was a lot of hard work) - rather what made 2013 extraordinary were all of the wonderful people I got to meet. I cannot express in words how utterly amazing it is to get to do what I do - to go to schools and meet kids and makes jokes and chat with them about writing, to be so welcomed and feel a part of the community of writers (Australian kids & YA writers are some of the loveliest people you'll ever meet), to make stuff up and write it down and have heaps of fun and have that be my career. All of my success has been the result of opportunities offered to me by amazing people who decided they liked what I was doing.

Have you any idea how hard writing acknowledgments for novels are when everybody is so wonderful?

I have a super-intense academic year ahead of me, so it's really a matter of balancing that alongside 1) writing, 2) speaking, 3) business-y business stuff and 4) not going insane and being a super-intense workaholic who is Vitamin D-deficient (the combination of my tendency to over-commit and perfectionism results in near disaster sometimes). Wish me luck?

Some exciting things I get to be part of this year, on the writing/speaking front:

• Presenting a Young Writers Boot Camp at the Queensland Writers Centre from June 30 to July 4, for 14-19-year-olds. I'm incredibly excited about this, and I love basically everything the Queensland Writers Centre does.
• Being attached to a Novel Writing Retreat in Taroona, Tasmania from July 5-13. My first writing retreat! My first trip to Tasmania!
• Visiting lots more schools! Overusing exclamation marks! Etc!

Of course as the year progresses I'll be able to share more with you. As always feel free to email me if you want to know whether I'm visiting your part of the world at any point - who knows, I might manage to organise something. You can just email me to say hi, too. I don't mind. Let's be friends.

I hope that 2013 was good to you, and that 2014 is even better. Thanks a ton for reading my words, and letting me be part of your life in a small way. The reason I write is not, in fact, for the money or glamour (of which there is little), but to connect with other humans, and writing is the best way I know how. So, again, thanks for being here. You're marvellous.