This is a scheduled blog post. I am hoping by the time it publishes itself, I would have finished the first draft of my…I’ve lost count of the actual number, but what will be the seventh book I’ve completed with the intention of publishing (but because of weird scheduling issues will be the sixth out).
It’s been quite a crazy month. Jaeth’s Eye was eliminated from my blog grouping in SPFBO, with the main reason being my book was too unconventional. But at the same time, the worldbuilding was praised. In fact, even my worst critics seem to find something to like in the writing and the characters. And unofficially, Jaeth’s Eye has received praise from people like Esmerelda Weatherwax and r/fantasy’s barb4ry1.
Reactions like this cause me to engage in some serious soul-searching with regards to what I do with my craft. In times like these, I forget that Jaeth’s Eye IS my debut novel. Technically, I wrote this draft in 2012 when I was 25 years old, but that’s the final form. It’s gone through so many others. It’s the first novel I ever wrote with the intention of publishing it. I was 16 when I started planning it, 17 when I first wrote down that first line:
Amidst the hurtling of waves and the violent rocking of the ship, the box’s presence was deafening.
The image of Kefier holding on to the grief and his guilt of his friend Oji’s death has been with me for nearly half of my life. I’ve turned it over my head for years, seen it through so many windows.
After I wrote that first draft, I sought help. One of the first comments I ever received has haunted me until today. I was told by this woman that I needed to stop trying to do things my way, that I needed to do things “by the book” first before I could bend the rules. My writing was too weird, my approach…and there, that word again…unconventional. What the hell am I trying to do, anyway? Why don’t I just write like everyone else? I’m never going to find readers this way.
But you see, I did know the rules (I may have been a teenager when I first wrote Jaeth’s Eye but I’d been writing nonstop for many years), but I was breaking them because I couldn’t express what I wanted to by following them. Show the conflict, they said, in the first few pages. And so I did. It’s there. It’s all there. But it’s not an outside conflict. It’s inside. And that pivotal point of Kefier and Oji’s death–how do you create an entire trilogy around that?
There’s no easy answers. There never was. I just kept writing the novel over and over again. There’s been at least three or four different Chapter Ones. In one iteration, Kefier does make it to Akki, meets Oji’s family, and outright lies to them. I was attempting to tame the story, attempting something that my young, naive self didn’t realize is a hard thing even for seasoned writers to do. And I built up all my skills on the side. With each iteration, the world became deeper and more complex, the characters more and more real. Years and years of doing this, over and over again that I’ve learned not to even blink anymore when I throw out a 150,000-word manuscript and start from scratch. By the end of it all, I still didn’t know how to write fantasy like I’m supposed to write it. I didn’t know how to make it palatable or commercial enough. I do try, but the characters’ voices drown out all my attempts to make my work into anything else but what it is.
So I knew what I was getting into when I wrote that final iteration of Jaeth’s Eye.
Or so I thought. I was prepared for the negative comments. Unconventional. Weird. The SPFBO decision didn’t come as a surprise. I insist it’s all character-driven, but does my audience understand that? Well, it turns out enough people do.
A few months ago, when I was feeling down after receiving a flurry of 2 and 3-star ratings/reviews, one of my readers (you know who you are) told me not to devalue those of them who did enjoy my work. Their opinions mean just as much, if not way more, than the people who don’t get it.
I‘ve come to learn over the years…disjointed lessons that I often forget, mind you…that the strongest writers write from the heart.
They can tell you how to do things, and maybe many of these things are important. But the end result comes down to reader engagement. One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a writer is not seeing the forest for the trees.
Yes, you’ll lose some if you don’t do the right things. But writing is a work in progress. It’s okay to make mistakes. You’re supposed to learn. You can follow the beaten path and do great on it, but you can also push at the boundaries like a rabbit on crack and still figure your shit out somehow. And the latter–that’s all me. I’ve given a lot of reasons for how I can create as much output as I do these days, but the biggest one really is because I know what I’m trying to do. I may fail at it, and fail badly, but I’ve dug my own tunnels and I can tear my way through them blindly.
Jaeth’s Eye was my debut. For a debut (written by a teenager) to have gotten this far, in indie waters, on the support of people who have nothing to gain for helping me…it’s a big thing. It’s an incredibly big thing.
More importantly than that, though, it was the book that helped me find my voice. That helped me realize what it was I wanted to write about: that I didn’t want to tell the story of great things happening or magic or adventures. I wanted to tell the story of people. Once I conquered it, the rest of the trilogy fell into place fairly fast. There had been a sequel to Jaeth’s Eye before that bears no resemblance to Aina’s Breath…no Kefier or Sume POVs, just Enosh (I can now hear the collective groans) and Arn. But otherwise, both Aina’s Breath and Sapphire’s Flight were written straight…no meandering around. The Wolf of Oren-yaro? Done in three months, and is my strongest work to date. When I finish that third book, I’d have written two trilogies before I hit 32 years old. And as hard as these continue to be, as exhausted as I am, I feel like a seasoned athlete who continues to find ways to grapple with a tough course.
And I owe it all to the fact that I didn’t give up on Kefier and Oji’s story.
