Happy New Year

It’s a new year, and that means a new blog post. My debut fantasy novel comes out in less than two months now (UK release first, then Germany in March and the US release this Fall), and my head is still spinning a bit from the fact that something I’ve spent over a decade building will soon be in people’s hands. A world I’ve spent a third of my life creating will be devoured in the space a few days (for those who read quickly), and suddenly thousands of people will be exposed to a world I create out of whole cloth.

What does that even mean? “Whole cloth.” Obviously a tailoring reference but it bothers me not to understand its origin better.

Anyhow, I’m getting distracted. My point was that something very intimate and personal will soon be shared with many, many people. Some of those people will like it — if I am lucky, most of them will love it — but there will also be some who hate it. Among those will be some who felt the book wasn’t dark enough. Others will probably say it was too dark. I’m wise enough to know I can’t please everyone, of course, but it makes me want to apologise before the book has even been released to the public.

You see, when I wrote Master of Sorrows, my goal was to write the story of a hero who might also be the villain, depending on the lens with which he was viewed.

That’s an important distinction. Despite what publicists and marketing folks may say, I’m not writing a story about someone who is good and becomes evil. Life isn’t as simple as all that. Real life — authentic life — has each person believing they are the hero of their own story. So how do you represent that? How do you tell that story in a personable way and still remain objective? And how do you do it justice without either giving away too much too soon or else withholding too much of what the readers came there to read?

So these are the things I think about when I wait for the reviews to roll in for Book 1. These are the questions I weigh as I write Book 2. They are exciting questions — they are the very reason I want to tell this particular story — but getting them just right can be incredibly difficult, and I’m painfully aware that, no matter what choices I make as an author, someone out there will feel I’m doing it wrong.

And yet, I trust that I am not. I believe in this story — The Silent Gods series specifically, but more generally in Annev’s tale and what it represents — and I believe I can tell it in a way that will satisfy most readers (far more than the majority) so long as they stick with me to the end. I believe that everybody (or almost everybody) will get what they want and what they expected, but not in the way they are expecting to get it.

And isn’t that the best kind of story? One that is surprising yet inevitable?

That’s my hope for the New Year, anyway. I’ll be doing a lot more blog posts in the future — some fun ones about the magic system in The Silent Gods, some more Q&A’s with bloggers, plus my general thoughts on outlines and my personal writing process — but I thought I’d start the New Year with something a little less rigid. Something less planned.

I wanted to start the New Year with hope.

I hope that everyone who reads Master of Sorrows enjoys reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

I hope that readers stick with the series and enjoy its four books along with the four lenses it brings to the protagonist, Annev de Breth.

I hope people will share the story with others because, as my agent has so tenderly pointed out, “If your first book doesn’t do well, that’s it — you’re finished. You’ll sell some copies, sure, but if you don’t make a big splash, people will move on to the next big thing.”

So I sincerely hope this is the next big thing, and I hope I can earn people’s trust enough to have them liberally share my book with others that may enjoy it.

I hope to finish writing Book 2 this spring, and I hope it will be as good or better than Book 1.

I hope to make a lot of new friends, both fans and fellow writers, and that I can meet and speak to as many as possible, both online and in person.

Most of all, I hope people will find resonance with the stories I write.

Because if I can do that, it means I’m doing something right; it means I may have a future in this creative writing business (something I’ve aspired to do since I was five years old), and hopefully it means I’m providing something meaningful to the people who read my stories.

Happy New Year.

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