Blog Tour Guest Post – Ron Walters, Author of DEEP DIVE

With thanks to Angry Robot, I’m thrilled to be part of the blog tour for Deep Dive, a twisty sci-fi debut by author Ron Walters. And I’m even more thrilled to host Ron today with a heartfelt and very personal guest post. Ron gives readers a peek into the sometimes long and circuitous path to publication. Enjoy!

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Today is a good day. In fact, today is the best day, because today, Deep Dive is out in the world, and I am officially a published author.

It’s ironic that my debut novel is about a man questioning the nature of the reality around him, because there’s a big part of me that thinks this isn’t real, that thinks I’m going to blink and discover I’m no closer to getting a book deal than I was when I wrote my first novel oh so many years ago. I’ve learned a lot since then, and have become a much better writer, but I sometimes miss that naive version of myself. He was so proud when he typed The End for the first time, so convinced that he was on his way. Little did he know it would take another eight books, twelve years, and hundreds of rejections before his dream finally came true.

Every author’s path to publication is different. A lucky few break directly into the industry with their first book. Most write several before anyone takes notice. Looking back now, I’d say three of the novels I wrote prior to Deep Dive were good enough to be published, but for various reasons running the gamut from marketability to celestial alignment, none of them made the cut. Trunking a book and moving on is never not tough, but I’d always prided myself on being able to swallow the heartache and focus on the next project. Somewhere around the eighth book, though, I started to get tired. Of the constant Nos. Of the constant doubt. Of the hundreds of thousands of words that were deemed not quite good enough. In true writer fashion, however, I channeled that fatigue into my ninth book, Deep Dive, a book I wrote to prove to myself that the publishing gods couldn’t break me, even though part of me felt like they already had.

Writing Deep Dive was a strange, cathartic experience. To this day it remains unique among all my other books for the simple fact that, thematically at least, it’s the most autobiographical thing I’ve ever written–for all its sci-fi shenanigans, Deep Dive is, at its heart, a book about a husband and father whose desperate pursuit of creative success has caused him to neglect his wife and daughters. The story is fictional, but the sentiment behind it is very much real, and very much a part of my own personal journey as a writer. My family has always been supportive of me, and I love them for it, but a decade is a long time to chase a dream with nothing tangible to show for it, especially a dream that requires a substantial amount of isolation. I look at Deep Dive on my shelf now and tell myself all those lost hours were worth it, but at the time of its writing I wasn’t so sure. I’d been burned eight times before. I wasn’t relishing a ninth.

Despite my pessimism, I was happy with how the book had turned out, so once again I offered it up to the publishing gods and prayed they’d finally bestow their book deal blessings upon me. The gods had other ideas. For starters, the pandemic hit shortly after I finished the first draft, and the world shut down. That was followed by an amicable but painful split with my literary agent at the time, who did not like the book and wasn’t interested in submitting it to publishers. In hindsight a split had been in the making for a while. It’s not an abnormal thing; plenty of writers have multiple agents over the course of their careers, and this one was my second. But it certainly didn’t do anything to assuage the worry that Deep Dive was, like my other books, destined for failure.

Under normal circumstances I would have simply queried new agents in the hope that one of them would be interested in representing me. (While self-publishing had obviously crossed my mind, my heart was set on being traditionally published, and for that I needed an agent.) But querying can take months, sometimes years, and there’s never any guarantee your words will resonate with anyone. I was tired of waiting, and growing more despondent by the day, so I did something I’d never done before: I started looking for publishers that allowed unsolicited submissions from unagented writers.

In general, querying agents while simultaneously submitting to publishers is frowned upon for a number of legitimate reasons, but I was done following the rules. Of course, me being me, this benign rebellion only added to my stress. In the end I wound up submitting to just a few publishers. One of them was Angry Robot, who happened to be holding their annual open submission window geared specifically toward unagented writers. I sent them a synopsis of Deep Dive along with the first three chapters, with the understanding that if I didn’t hear anything within the next few months, they weren’t interested.

A few months passed. Agent rejections trickled in. I hadn’t heard anything from Angry Robot. Publishing is not the speediest of industries, but I figured it was safe to say that Deep Dive hadn’t caught their eye. I decided to send out one last batch of queries, but after that I was done. Done looking for a publisher, done looking for a new agent, possibly even done writing altogether. I’d given it ten years. The publishing gods had made it quite clear that I wasn’t welcome in their hallowed halls.

But then, early one Wednesday afternoon, an email appeared in my inbox. It was from Angry Robot. They wanted to read the rest of Deep Dive. Totally perplexed, I sent it to them, not daring to hope. They wrote again the next day. The new email didn’t make any sense. How could they have read all of Deep Dive overnight, let alone loved it? But love it they did, and a week later they officially offered to publish it.

Even now, some fifteen months later, I still can’t quite believe that all my hard work paid off. The stresses of writing haven’t necessarily diminished, and I still struggle to balance the time I spend inside my head with the time I devote to my family. But while I have no idea what tomorrow will bring, today at least is a good day. In fact, today is the best day, because today, Deep Dive is out in the world, and I am officially, finally, a published author.

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When your reality shatters, what will you do to put it back together again?

Still reeling from the failure of his last project, videogame developer Peter Banuk is working hard to ensure his next game doesn’t meet the same fate. He desperately needs a win, not only to save his struggling company, but to justify the time he’s spent away from his wife and daughters.

So when Peter’s tech-genius partner offers him the chance to beta-test a new state-of-the-art virtual reality headset, he jumps at it. But something goes wrong during the trial, and Peter wakes to find himself trapped in an eerily familiar world where his children no longer exist.

As the lines between the real and virtual worlds begin to blur, Peter is forced to reckon with what truly matters to him. But can he escape his virtual prison before he loses his family forever?

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About the author:

RON WALTERS is a former journalist, college registrar, and stay-at-home dad who writes science fiction and fantasy for all ages. A native of Savannah, GA, he currently lives in Germany with his wife, two daughters, and two rescue dogs. When he’s not writing he works as a substitute high school teacher, plays video games, and does his best to ignore the judgmental looks his dogs give him for not walking them more often.

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Read my review of Deep Dive