Meet Chris

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Chris a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Chris, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

Trying to find the source of a person’s resilience is a big question and I doubt anyone could truly answer it for themselves or anyone else. There’s probably some combination of nature, nurture, and luck that put a person in a place where they can even practice resilience. So I’ll start there.

I think building resilience in terms of trying to build a career or skill comes from repetitive failure and more importantly, the realization that failure is not a wall, but a ladder.

Let me talk about writing. You’ll hear authors say that rejection is part of the natural pathway to success (however one defines that in the publishing industry). And for most aspiring authors, that’s very true. But there’s hearing people say that and really understanding what it means. I didn’t truly understand the underlying message about rejection until I was living the experience of trying to become a published author.

What I learned was that yes, you can learn from rejections (especially on the rare occasions that you get feedback), but I don’t think that is the chief takeaway, especially today when editors don’t give much beyond vague reasons for a rejection. As my rejections started to pile up, I began to treat them like a clock. Each rejection, another click of the minute hand. Because what I’d begun to appreciate as I refined my craft, was that success in writing is rarely the result of some rare talent, though those certainly exist. Most often, for any skill, success comes after many many hours of work. And for me, those rejections–those little failures, if you want to read it that way–symbolized chunks of my time invested in my craft. None of the time you spend refining, even if a project ends in rejection, is ever wasted.

I had over 150 rejections from publishers and agents before I landed my first book deal. I always believed it would come once I had enough time on the clock.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I am a bit of a strange mix, professionally. I’ve been practicing law for over 20 years, but recently I’m much more focused on my writing and art. In addition to authoring short stories and novels, I work as a professional artist doing cover art for metal bands and publishers.

I suppose that my experience is a little unique in that I worked for so long as an attorney and most people don’t expect the type of pivot I took late in my legal career. At the same time as I was experiencing burnout in the law field, I was becoming interested in writing, and decided, quite foolishly, maybe, quiet audaciously, to become a novelist.

It’s funny, right? Just decide to become a novelist? Usually there’s more background to a person who wants to write novels that would suggest their eventual direction, but for me it sort of came out of nowhere. I started writing every day and after several months, began to see my craft improve. A few years later, I had my first published novel. Now I have three novels out from Angry Robot Books: THE PHLEBOTOMIST, STRINGERS, and THE REDEMPTION OF MORGAN BRIGHT. My latest releases from Sobelo Books in September of 2025, a fun horror novel called SHITSHOW which pits a latrine technician against a dark carnival.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Don’t be daunted. That’s the first thing I’d say. Don’t assume you’re not up to the task. Don’t look around and assume other people are better than you and that’s why they’re having success. I guarantee you that if you ignore the results of others and just focus on putting the time into your own craft, skill, work, then you will eventually develop the tools you need to get where you want to go.

Second, I would suggest you focus on the process rather than the end result. Process can be fun, educational, skill building. In a lot of cases, the process is far more satisfying than achieving the goal. And by the time you do achieve whatever it was you were aimed at, you might find that you’ve brought your skill to a level beyond where you’d thought you’d be. So focus on the learning and honing, rather than grinding your teeth over how quickly you obtain the goal.

Lastly, focus on your mental health. Don’t fall into grind culture or the bottomless abyss of constantly comparing yourself to others. Everyone has their own pace and their own journey. Yours is yours–and focusing on the accomplishments of others does little to change your trajectory. Candidly, this is what I struggle with the most, but I remind myself of it and can usually refocus on my own efforts instead of judging my progress against others.

Alright, so before we go we want to ask you to take a moment to reflect and share what you think you would do if you somehow knew you only had a decade of life left?

I am answering this question because I already try to live as if my time is limited. It doesn’t mean I’m checking off a bucket list and hopping around the globe. Nothing so extravagant for me. I want to have real relationships, real friendships, and make art. I want to be there for the people who need me. If I only had a decade to live, I don’t think I’d change a thing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://chrispanatier.com
• Instagram: @chrispanatier
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/chrispanatier
• Other: bluesky: @scribeofhades.bsky.social
  tiktok: @chrispanatier

Image Credits

-All images credit to Chris Panatier