My debut novel, Chronicles of the Ancient Sea Kings, is now available for purchase. It’s the first book in a fantasy fiction series, and you can find the blurb here.
Plot aside, I hope to give potential readers a better idea of what they’re getting into, and why this novel exists in the first place. I already spoke about my return to writing in another post. The short of it is that I used to enjoy it, quit writing for about a decade, then rediscovered the love of it via this book.
CASK, as I call it in my head, is a gift to myself. I do love to write, but it turns out that’s only true when it’s something I thoroughly enjoy. One of the side effects of going to school for writing is that, while you learn a lot of useful things and get great feedback, that very process shapes what it encounters into an impression of itself. If someone makes two posts of different natures on her social media account, and one gets a lot of likes while the other founders, she’s likely to repeat the behavior that earned the likes. Compound that by hundreds of interactions, and you can see how even well-intentioned feedback steers a person toward certain norms while polishing away any behaviors that aren’t widely admired. This can be a good thing in social dynamics. It’s how we settle on cultural standards and mutually intelligible relationships.
In a writer’s workshop, the same process whittles away those things that don’t quite fit. It cures new writers of some universally-annoying habits, but at the same time, it ensures they produce what interests the other eight people in the room, and what those people imagine to be the market for their work.
Some practices, such as outlining minute-by-minute beats to correspond to Joseph Campbell’s story structure, don’t appeal to everyone. The Hero’s Journey is a powerful archetype, but anyone who’s read a handful of mythology can see there are very old forms beyond Campbell’s cherry-picked favorite, and maybe more recent ones deserving of exploration.
This project began from the desire to fall in love with writing again. I knew I couldn’t do it the old way, because I tried that and failed. That said, no matter what form your writing takes, it still has to not suck. I remembered a vague quote from Isaac Asimov’s publisher to the effect that every writer has 1,000,000 words of garbage in them, and the only way to get past it to the good stuff is to write it down.
He meant that figure literally. Just as it takes a certain number of hours to achieve mastery in any field, he felt that writing required a word count of over 1,000,000 before the writer could possibly produce anything worth reading. That wasn’t the end goal–that was just the buy-in! The back of the napkin figures I came up with put me around 500,000, all unpublished, but halfway to half-decent. If I was sick of workshops, I still had to admit my shortcomings and find a way to improve. The idea of sheer volume of practice struck a chord. Feedback is useful in anything, but I’ve seen enough to know that hours of earnest work can get you pretty far. Besides, the feedback will come anyway as soon as I publish.
Though my fantasy fiction experience is mostly limited to Game of Thrones, I do like the genre, or the idea of it if not the typical execution. I figured a fantasy fiction series would be an easy way to power through to a million words. It would require little research, less skill than a more literary genre, and would afford me the leeway of a very-suspended disbelief.
I was wrong.
With apologies to fantasy authors for my assumptions, it turns out it’s hard to write anything if you aim to do it well. Where fantasy gives you a break in one place, it requires extra attention in another. I started out looking up a few things online to give a little more realism to the piece, caved in and read a book, then another, then another. A few dozen long, slow tomes of research later, I capped off my first novel with an immense sigh of humility.
Like the writing process, the story itself was spawned largely out of things I disliked. I’ll talk about what I call the Wolfram Method of writing (after physicist Stephen Wolfram) that I used to structure it in another post . The reason I don’t get into many works of fantasy, and have a few reservations over the ones I enjoy, is that I just don’t share the same tastes as most people.
I hate superheroes. Despise them. Anyone with some fantastic power bores me the moment he walks into the room–emotional troubles and gritty past aside. It just feels like cheating. Likewise, I’m not a fan of magical swords that enable some dork to swipe through an entire horde of enemies, or prophecies of a Chosen One, come to save the world. In fact, chosen or not, the world is a hard thing to save. Thankfully, it rarely needs it.
Nor do I believe in villains. People do terrible things all the time, maybe downright evil things. But they don’t do them because they awoke cackling with a desire to destroy the forces of goodness and life as we know it. Usually, they see themselves as good. If not, they still have their own sincere motivations, however misguided we may find them.
If I don’t sound boring enough yet, let me add that wall-to-wall action numbs me. I prefer a more measured pace, which is partly why the long TV show Game of Thrones appealed to me more than Lord of the Rings. Action is great, and even better when it’s rare, and built up until I drool over it. To top it off, while I understand that fantasy inherently involves unrealism, I happen to think the earthly limits of human existence provide a lot of interesting fodder for conflict that those aforementioned magical elements undercut.
So this is a long book, full of hard things that happen to people of middling character, neither saints nor devils. You can expect some action, and even more quiet moments of introspection in which people try to make sense of a strange world. The pace, rhythms, and perspectives vary with the context as opposed to a tight beat sheet. An early reader told me it was “tidal” in its ebb and flow. Beyond the circumstances that set the tale in motion, there might be little that reminds the reader of traditional fantasy. Rather, it may read as a historical fiction in a world that never existed.
Personally, I’m not a fan of babysitting people’s sensitivities with trigger warnings. That whole culture irks me with the way it assumes an ideal world and steers people like children around the dangers, removing any sense of personal responsibility from the individual. That said, I’m sympathetic enough to realize people might not want to spend a bunch of money on something that irritates them. This book will offend most people who are offendable. It contains sailors, and thus sailor language and themes. I don’t lather in violence, but it’s there where it needs to be. If you’re in doubt, just skip it. If you don’t, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Finally, I counted another 358,000 words in this volume–still short of that elusive million. Maybe it’s a writer’s duty to spare the general public from his growing pains, and to only publish once he’s achieved a fluidity of skill. I had too much fun writing this, and arguably I’m getting too old, to hide it away until the day I’ve “arrived.” There are always things a writer wishes he could have done better. Where I know I succeeded was in my effort to write something I would want to read, in a way that I enjoyed. My hope is that someone somewhere feels the same way.