I found the original opening to Jaeth’s Eye, which I wrote a good decade or so ago.
It’s kind of amazing how much growth a writer can go through over the years. Back then, I felt that after eleven years of writing, my prose was pretty polished enough, but I didn’t realize how much yet I had to learn. Stringing words together was just the beginning–part of storytelling is creating structure and knowing what to show, how to show it, and bringing all the scenes together so that they follow each other as smoothly as possible. Easier said than done.
Thereafter, the beginning went through so many iterations. The original draft, as shown here, has Kefier returning to Akki with Oji’s ashes in a box. Along the way, the ship he’s on is nearly destroyed by Ylir’s men, who have been looking to stir things up in order to mask their activities (similar to what Gaven’s men later does in Gaspar under Yn Garr’s orders, when they pretended to be Gasparians and attacked the border towns in Jin-Sayeng). He arrives safe and sound in Akki to tell Sume of her brother’s death. We then get a secondhand account of the events in Hartmur.
SPOILERS FOR OJI’S DEATH (Hinted in Book 1, revealed in the end of Book 2): In the original draft, Kefier only finds out that he accidentally killed Oji after Yn Garr tells him. I thought that in handling it this way, the impact of this storyline was lessened, especially as there was no reason for Yn Garr to toy with a mere mercenary’s feelings. It worked better from a character-driven narrative to have Kefier know what he did all along, and deny it every step of the way. Kefier’s life, after all, is shaped by all the bad things that happen every time he tried to go after what he wanted, and this plays a big part in the guilt he feels.
That’s just one of the many decisions I’ve had to make with this series. It is interesting to see, looking back now, what worked and what didn’t work, and how I could improve future novels with what I’ve learned. Even after eight years of struggling, the end result of Jaeth’s Eye was still a little rough–clearly a “debut” novel, although chronologically I finished my YA Horror Birthplace first. But Birthplace is not epic fantasy and didn’t suffer from my epic fantasy growing pains…trying to show one person’s journey is very different from trying to tell this big, giant story. It’s no accident that between Birthplace and Jaeth’s Eye, I also wrote two iterations of a different epic fantasy novel that I had to scrap because I couldn’t rein the story in.
I should also note that this was the opening of the manuscript that got me a handwritten rejection note from Tor, urging me to “try them again.” Of course, having no fucking clue what I was doing right or wrong, I screwed that all up…
Anyway, that’s just my rambling for today. Go get Jaeth’s Eye if you haven’t yet so you can participate in r/fantasy’s discussions on September 10 (first impressions) and September 24 (spoiler-heavy).
