Episode 4: Malorie Cooper on Loving Yourself

Intro

A friend recently asked me to read over a first draft for them. I’m always struck with anxiety and vulnerability in these situations. When someone invites you in to respond to their work, especially in an early, nascent stage, they’re placing a massive amount of trust on your shoulders. I might overthink it a little, but I feel very strongly about what kinds of responses ought to be given when you’re not a paid editor. Well, even as a paid editor, but that’s a whole other thing.

I almost always ask what kind of response the author is looking for. Because if they’re asking, “Does this make sense? Do my ideas connect well?” And my response is, “Your prose is clunky,” that’s neither helpful nor kind. If I don’t ask, I will tell the author what kind of response I am willing to give, which is always a reader response. I will do my best to recreate my reader experience for you. That kind of response isn’t very vulnerable for me. I state upfront that it’s just opinion, and they are willing to take it or leave it. I note things that are awesome, that bore me (I get distracted from the story or put it down), that confuse me, or that I don’t believe. I’ll link to a guide on that in the shownotes.

But the kind of response my friend asked me for was the deeper kind. I was worried about inadvertently stomping on the raw emotions that my friend was trying to convey in their piece or that I would discourage them from continuing. I couldn’t control how my words would be perceived.

That’s a raw spot for me right now. Anyone who has gone through a breakup knows that at the end, it’s nearly impossible for you to get your partner to understand what you mean. I have wrestled with being misunderstood a lot recently. I was so tempted to give a quick and kind of generic response because I was afraid of challenging my friend and pushing them and being perceived as bossy, trying to push their words in a direction they didn’t intend, or any number of interpretations I couldn’t anticipate.

Thankfully, I know this friend has some really tough skin, and that emboldened me to practice digging into my realness and vulnerability and say the things I was scared to say. They said thank you, and I may never know how my response was interpreted. I felt a little exhausted by all the mental hoops my brain put me through, trying to craft my simple but true response, but confident that I didn’t hold back, while using my words kindly and strongly. Vulnerability is a skill, and like all skills it has to be practiced.

Vulnerability is going to be a bit of a theme today. I’ve watched Malorie Cooper practice vulnerability very publicly over the last year as she’s come to understand herself as trans and share her story online. It was a wonderful talk and I hope you enjoy it.

Interview

Crys: I am happy to welcome my friend Malorie Cooper to the podcast. Malorie is also known as MD Cooper and is really known in indie circles for the book Help, My Facebook Ads Suck, and most of her books are in the Aeon 14 world, which is mostly sci-fi, but as she has said multiple times, you can write just about any genre in an 14, and she’s built it that way to satisfy her creative needs, correct?

Malorie: I did, yeah. Thanks for having me on.

Crys: Absolutely. I’m excited. I told you before we started that I wanted to read this quote from your book, which I didn’t know existed until you mentioned it. yesterday. The book that you wrote as Malorie Cooper is called How leggings Changed My Life. And I highlighted this quote because I thought it was so good for our conversation.

If I don’t know how to love myself as I am now, how will I know how to love myself when I reach my goal?

Let’s talk about that. Loving yourself and freedom… we’ve been talking a lot about freedom. How has that been problematic for you, in your life? Having to learn that lesson—what was that process like for you, that this became something that you had to write about?

Malorie: I’m transgender and for a lot of my life, I basically couldn’t stand to look at myself. I felt like the person I would see in the mirror wasn’t me, and I didn’t understand how to make it feel like it was me. It took quite a long time for me to, even though I spent most of my life dreaming of being a girl, every time I went to sleep. It took until my forties to realize that I was actually transgender because I had built up all these rules about what being trans actually meant and why it couldn’t be me.

Once I realized that I was trans, when you realize that—and this is one thing I’ve learned from talking to a lot of trans people—it makes you make your dysphoria worse, because before it’s kind of like, “Oh, there’s something wrong with me. I’m a freak. I’m weird.” And then once you realize you’re trans, you’re like, “No, it’s my body that’s wrong.”

And then seeing parts of your body—I mean, it’s always been there, but then seeing your body reminds you even more about how wrong you are and about how hard it’s going to be the way you want to be. It can kind of create a lot of self-loathing that can be a pretty hard thing to deal with.

I’m sure lots of other people have experienced the same sort of thing for other reasons, be it emotional or physical. Self-loathing. Or they’re upset with something they’ve done in the past, they’re blaming themselves for something and they take it out on themselves over and over again, and you end up stopping yourself from healing.

What I realized, it was actually during that event that I wrote about, was having to look at myself naked while I was shaving to go for laser, which the first couple of times I did, it usually had me on the floor crying through the process. But I realized that if I don’t understand how to look at myself and love myself the way I am now, I just don’t know how. Because you always hear stories with people who always get everything they want and they’re not happy. And I realized that the happiness that I wanted to have had to come inside of me and had to be there all the time. It couldn’t be something that I would get only when I reached a certain point. I had to do know how to do it now.

Crys: This was about a year ago, right? That in April 2019, that all of this kind of culminated for you. And at that point, you were very successful already as a writer, correct?

Malorie: I was, yeah.

Crys: Do you think that having kind of reached some of these writer goals could have freed up your mind to think about this more or… I’m just curious…

Malorie: Yeah. I think it did. Because what happened in 2018, I put out 44 books in that year. And I knew it wasn’t something I could do long term. I knew I was going to need a break and I sort of scheduled a break for myself in January and February of 2019 where I only had to put out, I think, one or two books in that entire span and one of them was coauthored, so it was going to be cake to get that one done. And I took almost a month just sort of to reconnect with myself and spend some time getting to know myself.

And what I realized as I went through all of that was that I had been suppressing a lot of who I wanted to be. I sort of started feeling it out with some friends, talking with them and kind of going out, presenting a lot more gender queer, kind of like it was hard to tell if I was a guy or a girl for a while the way I was dressing.

And I found that, one, people didn’t abandon me and run off, and two, it was, it felt more freeing. And that sort of kicked off this journey. So yeah, it definitely was. The fact that the success of that I had as a writer gave me the opportunity to spend more time reflecting than I’d be able to do in a long time.

Crys: Do you think that you would have unable to come to this understanding of yourself if you’d stayed in software development?

Malorie: I don’t know for sure. I mean, I actually knew a couple of trans people who worked in the same companies I worked in, over the years. So software development, especially in Boston, there’s no problem at all with being trans. But I don’t know if I would have had the time to do it because, I’m sort of the kind of person where I throw myself into something all the way. Like when I, when I start a new job in software, I’m working like 70 to 80 hours a week kind of thing. And I don’t know if I would have had the time for reflection or if I would have had the freedom to experiment. I hadn’t even thought of it until you mentioned it to me. I’m trying to think of how I would’ve done this if I was still working a nine to five job, and I can’t even imagine how I would have pulled it off.

Crys: There’s definitely a lot of extra side freedoms that come from the whole writing full time gig. How long have you been writing full time now?

Malorie: January 1st 2017 is when I went full time.

Crys: So you’ve been going hard for just over two years now. That’s really intense. How quickly were you putting books out in the beginning?

Malorie: Well, I only put out four books between 2012 and 2016, and then 2017 I want to say I did like 14, maybe 16 books, and then ramped it all up to 44 books in 2018, then 2019 I was back down to like 24 or so, and that’s something roughly when I do this year too, I think.

Crys: With the massive amount of output that you have maintained, how do you deal with the idea of burnout, or have you hit burnout before? Is it something you’re concerned about?

Malorie: I think I’ve… I totally burned out one time. I’ve just evolved. I’ve come close once or maybe twice since, and I’m better at recognizing the signs of it now.

One of the ways that I deal with it though is by having co-authors. Co-authors, the way that I work, coauthors don’t really accelerate the writing process so much as they give the opportunity for new story ideas that I don’t have to come up with. I find that sometimes when the creative juices just aren’t flowing, having a coauthor to work with, to bounce ideas off of and to, to come up with exciting ideas or just to take something that they wrote and just go through an editing process, it’s a lot easier. So that’s saved me a couple of times when I didn’t have anything to come out.

And I think sometimes too, it’s just a matter of burnout is just your body and your mind saying, you just gotta take a break. You know? You just gotta take a step back and do something else for a little while.

I am lucky in that because I do all of this speaking as an author, I go—I mean last year I think I went to 10 or 12 different writer conferences, and I would have again this year. But that’s sort of changed, unfortunately. But that gives me some breaks too, because whenever I go to a conference, I don’t write while I’m there, I’m not the sort of person that can bang out a couple of hours in the morning and then go to the sessions in the afternoon. That’s pretty hard for me. So I do have a lot of those opportunities to recharge as well.

Crys: And you’re one of the most extroverted authors I know. So those are total recharge points for you, aren’t they?

Malorie: Oh, they are. Yeah. It’s weird. I don’t know very many authors are extroverted like me, like maybe a handful or we’re pretty rare group.

Crys: It’s not a bad skill though.

Malorie: Yeah. I should say, by the way, I used to be super introverted when I was a teenager. My friends used to have to come to my house and drag me outside.

Crys: What changed?

Malorie: I think a lot of what I had when I was younger is I didn’t have a lot of self confidence, and so I wasn’t willing to put myself out there. And it caused me to retreat into books and into my own imagination. As I got older and I started to build up more self confidence and get wins under my belt, I realized, Hey, I have no reason to hide. I guess somewhere through that process, I don’t know if I’ve always been an extrovert and I was just in hiding or if just feeling confident around other people, maybe want to be around other people more might be a combination of those two things.

Crys: I wanted to talk about like your writing speed as well. One thing I have been impressed by, and we’ve been doing sprints together, is that you aren’t ashamed of writing slowly in sprints.

Malorie: It’s true. I’m probably consistently the slowest person in our sprint group.

Crys: And then you pretty consistently have some of the highest daily word counts. Have you ever felt pressured to write faster or have you just always accepted that that’s how you do things?

Malorie: I mean, it works for me, so I certainly don’t want to mess with it too much. But yeah, I’ve never, I’ve never felt the pressure to write faster because, I guess I have this empirical evidence that I get a lot of books done and I see my daily word counts and I hit them every day.

So I’m even though I’m the tortoise, basically, you know, tortoise and the hare, I’m going to make it across that finish line. It’s just going to take me a little bit longer. But also on the flip side, a lot of them today will be an example of that, because I was falling asleep while I was writing. But a lot of times what I write in a sprint—so if I’m doing 600-700 words an hour—I can hand those words directly to my editor without ever looking at them again.

So I feel that even though I write slower. I have a pretty good quality product, at least I think I do.

Crys: So I’m really curious about this innate confidence, because I know a lot of people—I don’t know if it’s an extrovert introvert thing or, you’ve mentioned in your book that you think that you’re probably somewhere on the autism spectrum, so I don’t know if it has to do with that—but a lot of people who have processes that work, still have this sense that they ought to be doing things differently, that they ought to be measuring up faster, to be faster, to produce more. Why do you think that you haven’t necessarily struggled with that as much?

Malorie: I grew up with an evangelical Christian background. I don’t really keep a lot of things from that with me, but one of the things I learned from a pastor that I had was that, most of what we think about ourselves is very subjective.

Humans are not particularly good at objectively measuring ourselves on a daily basis. We have to have external objective measurements to that are unchanging. Of course, in Christianity, they would say that’s the Bible. But I’ve sort of applied that to other things. I look at my, the number of novels I produce, and I look at my daily word counts. And that’s my objective measurement.

That, despite the fact that I’m slow, tells me that I’m doing a good job, and then I’m able to do this. And I do that with a lot of things. I really make sure that I make my decisions based on things outside of myself that I can look at and that are consistent and say, okay, this is how well I did last month. This is how I did the month before. I’m a little bit above, or I’m a little bit below because it is really easy to, without sort of those, those, those north stars things beyond yourself that you can look at in the horizon to tell where you’re going. It’s very easy to get led astray or worried or tangled up.

So I focus a lot on things like that to make sure that I’m always going in the right direction.

Crys: As we were setting up this meeting, we talked about how we’re both numbers people. We like knowing, how much did I make? How many sales did I have? And those are good information and data points, but not necessarily things to pin your success on a hundred percent completely.

You have a very clear vision of the next few years of the books you want to write. In that quote I read at the beginning, you have clear goals. How do you set those goals? What do those look like for you?

Malorie: This is actually something I learned from several years in software development. And I was sort of everywhere in software development. I was managing big teams. I was part of the product team. I was in daily meetings with developers and I was writing code myself.

I was kind of all over the place all the time. And one of the things that I learned with my exposure to the management side and the product team where the people are setting goals and visions for multi-year product builds is that you need to set a big hairy audacious goal. You need to go out there and say, this is the crazy thing that I want to do. And then you need to break it down into smaller point pieces and say, how am I going to achieve that crazy thing? And you break it down into pieces so small that they fall into almost daily goals, but they’re all still building towards that big, they’d be called the “bag” or something like that… Big hairy audacious goal, BHAG. I guess it’s kind of how you would pronounce that.

I always sort of keep that in mind, that this is my goal, to have somewhere between 400 and 500 books by 2030 and that means that I have to produce 20 to 25 books a year to hit that goal. And that means that my daily output needs to be a certain amount, but at the same time, I don’t beat myself up for it because I know that that’s a crazy goal.

So if I slip, I’m still doing really well. You know, I still stand a chance of being one of the most prolific science fiction authors of all time. Even if I missed that goal. That’s not my, my driving force. It’s part of it, that I want to do this thing that hasn’t been done before.

I think everybody has to have something like that. Maybe it’s a volume of books. Maybe it’s telling a certain type of story. Maybe it’s like trying to mesh two worlds together. Two ideas together. But I think it’s important to have some sort of goal that you feel is unique and is, is something that really expresses you in your work and then make sure that you’re constantly driving towards that.

Crys: So what would you say is your big driving force?

Malorie: I want to tell a story that is as big as an actual human life. Normally, when you read a book, you’re reading something that would take like, say, six to ten hours to read aloud and it’s snapshots of life strung together in an interesting way. But it’s not really so much of a person’s life, really get to see them go through decades of evolution, you know? And be with them the whole time. And to be honest, it wouldn’t be a very interesting story because most of our lives are pretty freaking boring. But what I wanted to do is want to try and create a story that is about multiple people that is kind of that big, that you could actually spend a decade reading everything I put together if you’re a more casual reader. And sort of see, not just from my eyes, but from maybe a dozen other authors all put together what this vision of the future could be like. And in doing so, tell a lot of really human stories about people and how they deal with things.

One of the subjects we tackle a lot is the emergence of AIs in my books.

A lot of the stuff about AIs is very analogous, analogous to human freedoms. Things you can do to people. What is privacy really? Sstuff like that. We build it all into this massive framework about humans and AI as the two dominant species, sort of butting heads with each other as they evolve.

It’s not deliberate, but because it’s a human story written by humans, it has a lot of connections to things that go on in our world all the time. So I kind of hope to create a tapestry that is so big, that could actually be a real human tapestry. Cause I don’t feel most books have the time to do that. That’s that’s kinda what I’d like to pull off. It’s a crazy goal. And who knows if I’ll actually pull it off well, but I’m going to try.

Crys: It’s a beautiful, crazy goal. I love it.

Malorie: Thank you.

Crys: What does it look like after? You’ve mentioned, 2025 or 2030 as being the point of which you have a vision until then. What does life look like after that?

Malorie: Oh God, I have no idea. I mean, it could be anything at that point. I’m going to be my fifties, so I probably won’t be a pinup model anymore at that point. I don’t know. I actually have enough stories in my head that I could tell stories in the Aeon 14 universe until I die, to be honest.

There’s, there’s enough going on in there because I created a setting large enough that I could write any story in it, so I don’t have to worry about world building a new place or anything like that. I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind like taking a year just to travel. Just to go around the globe and see a lot of different places.

I think that’s gotta happen sometime at the end. I got make a big reward for myself at the end of all of this.

Crys: Your daughter will be a late teens, early twenties at that point. So it’ll be delightful.

Malorie: Yes. Yeah. She’ll be older, so either she’ll be able to come with us really and really enjoy it or she’ll be off to do her own thing if she doesn’t want to come.

So yeah, we’ll have some options for us. But I don’t mind living a simple life. We have a relatively small house. I’m kind of happy with that. I used to dream of a bigger place, rooms like they have. That’d be kind of a fun goal too.

Crys: So I have a question. I have plenty of questions actually, but what is the most joyful part of your day?

Malorie: Oh, I don’t know. That’s a really good question. I kind of, it’s funny since since quarantine has come into play, our family mornings have been a lot more enjoyable than they used to be in that we all just kind of hang out together for like an hour or so in the morning. And that’s really nice. It used to be everybody was rushing off to go do their things, but Jill gets up first and she usually starts making some eggs. I get up shortly afterwards, brcause I don’t like cold eggs. I like warm eggs. She knows this about me. So she’s making sure that it all happens on a schedule. And then Eva gets up and wheedles, “Can I sit in the living room and talk?”

Eventually we started to go off in our various ways and then we always have supper together. Which something that we’ve done most of the time, even before quarantine. And then after supper we all play a game together. Right now it’s Overwatch. We actually have three Xboxes and we all have them all set up together and we’re all playing Overwatch together.

And then at the end of that, my daughter demands tickles and I usually tickle her for like 10 to 20 minutes, and she’s loud and screaming and driving Jill nutts. You know, and we’re all having a grand old time.

Those things are my favorite parts of the day. They bring me the most joy.

I mean, I love writing and I love creating and whatnot, but you know, those times of my family, I think are the types of stand out the most.

Crys: That’s beautiful. Well, thank you so much for sharing your time with me. This has been so delightful.

Malorie: Thank you. It’s been great.

Crys: With my past guests, I asked them to share a book, but because I read your, your memoir, just before this interview, I’m going to recommend to anyone listening that they pick up How Wearing Leggings Changed My Life.

and you’re working on the sequel, How Wearing Catsuits Changed My World, correct?

Malorie: I am. Yep.

Crys: Excellent. So people look up for those.