I’m delighted to be hosting Alma Katsu, whose debut novel, The Taker, is just out this week. Booklist calls it, “An imaginative, wholly original debut” and says “readers won’t be able to tear their eyes away from Katus’ mesmerizing debut.” Alma is a SheWrites.com friend with whom I had a wonderful in person visit in D.C. during the Four Ms. Bradwells tour. I’ve heard the story of how this novel came to print over a nice glass of wine, and am delighted to have Alma share it here. – Meg
I grew up preferring the company of books. Like many readers, I tried writing my own stories and somehow got it in my head that since I enjoyed it, I should do it for a living. My naïve enthusiasm carried me through college, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that I wasn’t going to make a living writing fiction. Around this time, I was lucky enough to be offered a position at the National Security Agency. I’d been told that writers need to experience life to have something to draw on (I think what they were trying to tell me was that I hadn’t lived enough to have anything to write about), and I figured I was sure to do something interesting there. Still, I wasn’t much for international affairs and didn’t picture myself staying for more than a few years.
I ended up staying for twenty years and eventually went on to work at CIA, too. All in all, I had a very interesting career, one that enabled me to travel overseas and to work on matters that never interested me before. For instance, I discovered that I had a knack for highly technical work—this despite hating math and science in school. But working in intelligence is incompatible with trying to get published: anything that puts your name “out there,” even if it’s not associated with your job, makes managers nervous. There are regulations governing publication outside the job, but how the various agencies choose to interpret those rules can change depending on the circumstances. After a few discouraging run-ins with the bureaucracy, I decided to stop writing and concentrated on my intelligence career. My writing was barely getting anywhere, and it was the day job that paid the bills, after all.
All that changed in 2000, when I came down with a neurological problem. As I went through test after test, I had to think about what I would do if I couldn’t go back to work, and more importantly, what I wanted to do with my life. As interesting as my career had been, I still wanted to write a novel and try to be published one day, and I realized that I couldn’t put it off any longer. Once my medical problem was under control, I applied and was accepted into the Johns Hopkins University writing program, and that began my return to writing.
Getting my MA didn’t mark the end of my journey, though. 
It still took ten years for me to turn The Taker into the book it is today. It meant writing every evening after work, taking writing classes and going to conferences, and rejection after rejection: you know, the usual stuff. I’ve been told by experienced authors that ten years and four books seems to be the average before you write your first “good” novel, the one good enough to be published, and this is consistent with research that shows it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at anything. For writers, it seems, becoming an expert is just the beginning.
I’ve been one of the lucky ones: my persistence paid off. I found an agent and he sold The Taker to Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster for publication in the US and Canada while Random House UK bought the World English rights, and both publishers have bought the next two books in the trilogy. Translation rights have sold to ten countries. Even with this great good luck, my journey between when the contracts are signed and when the book appears in stores has had many twists. As you’ve heard from Meg and others, it’s a business, and one in which I’m just getting started. On top of that, the book industry—like all of media—is undergoing a revolutionary change, making it hard to imagine what my writing career will look like, even in a year.
Speaking of careers, with the novel coming out, I had to resign from CIA. It came just a few years short of retirement, too. It was quite scary at first, but I’m getting used to living with fewer restrictions on where I can go and what I can do. The trade-off is that the safety net is gone: there’s no regular paycheck, no computer support on call, no one to pay for my sick days. I expect that once The Taker is published and revisions are put to bed on the second book in the trilogy, The Reckoning, I’ll work part-time for one of the many defense contractors in the Washington, DC area. But if I’m really lucky, I won’t need to, and novelist will be my last career. – Alma
