I wrote Jaeth’s Eye when I was 17 years old.
It wasn’t called Jaeth’s Eye back then. It was called The Lion’s Tracks. The first manuscript was finished at 150,000 or 160,000 words, I believe. I wrote it in the span of 6 months during a long vacation in the Philippines. This was back in the days when Christopher Paolini was making a name for himself and I wanted to prove that he wasn’t the only young writer capable of writing epic fantasy.
I had a copy of Eragon beside me at all times while I wrote this. Every time I turned away from the computer in exhaustion, Saphira’s eyes would be staring at me, daring me to walk away.
After I returned to Canada, I went through the process of finding representation for my manuscript. I learned that 150,000 words was too long and whittled the story down to 125,000 or something. I sent it out to all the places you could reasonably send out a fantasy manuscript to. Tor sent me a handwritten rejection note, saying, Try us again. I’ve since misplaced it, but that note meant a lot to me because everyone was complaining about form rejections and here I was, getting a hand-written one from Patrick Nielsen-Hayden. I’m not sure if this is something he did with everybody, but it gave me heart.
I rewrote the novel, all 100+k words of it. I tightened the storyline and fixed the prose. I read everything there was to reasonably read about writing and publication. I made query letters. My novel still wouldn’t sell. I got one harsh letter from an agent, lots of form rejections, and one kind of seedy acceptance letter that I didn’t follow through because I couldn’t reasonably tell if it was a legitimate agency or not. An editor for a local Filipino newspaper wanted to represent me, but I wasn’t sure if he knew what he was doing or not, either, and I was leery of being called a “prodigy”. To me, the rewritten novel still wasn’t quite right.
I shelved it and worked on other projects. Two drafts of The Wanderer’s Gift (another enormous novel), the completed, finalized version of Birthplace , a pile of rejection notes, and a number of unfinished works (including a 50,000-word sequel to The Lion’s Tracks, entitled The Eagle’s Requiem) later, I realized I was 25 years old, an adult with a family, one child, a mortgage, and a corporate job that was starting to take the wind out of my sails.
I re-wrote my first novel in 2012, titling it Jaeth’s Eye. This time, I think I knew what I was doing and what was wrong with the original first few drafts. The story was there, but it didn’t flow. There was no immediate urgency–I had fallen into the trap that plagues many epic fantasy writers and wrote a story where the characters journey from plot point to plot point. It was difficult stitching together as much of the story as I could, salvaging decent scenes so I didn’t have to fully start from scratch. Most importantly, I allowed the story to develop to the point that I was able to quickly pick it up again when writing the sequel, Aina’s Breath, in 2014.
Aina’s Breath and now, Sapphire’s Flight, are probably the most effortless novels I’ve ever written. Despite their length and complexity inherent in this genre, everything seems to fall into place, even when I’m not fully aware how or why. I think I owe it all to the hours I’ve spent on this craft. Years of writing and rewriting things until I got them reasonably right. None of this would have ever happened, I think, if I had gotten published at 18 like I wanted.
Do I still have a long way to go? Of course. I’m only 30 and there’s still a lot I want to accomplish in the craft. But it feels good to look back and see the mountain of manuscript carcasses I’ve had to climb over to get here.
Watch me put my foot in my mouth in The Agartes Epilogues.
I started in a similar fashion, though at age 50 instead of 17. My first book was a tome that I cut from 189,000 words to 128,000 words. Painful, but what a learning experience and I never lost my love of the process. Happy Writing to you. The path of discovery will serve you well.