Update: Hindsight is Always 20/20

So, you know what I did yesterday? I unearthed the complete fantasy novel I wrote in 2018 and read it. And, dammit, if I’d done that March, I bet I could have released it in, say, May, because honestly I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.

I think there were two reasons why I hated it 7 years ago.

A) I’m seeing the ghosts of revision past everywhere I look.

There are big, important scenes I remember that aren’t there. There are important characters I remember that aren’t there. I doubt I have fallen into an alternate universe, and anyway I can see why I took those scenes and characters out, but what this means is: I did a TON of major revision. A TON. No wonder I was direly sick of this book and didn’t want to look at it again.

B) There’s a divine intervention ending and I’m not sure I liked this ending, although, I mean, the metaphysics is extremely present in the story, in a very up-front, you’re-tripping-over-it kind of way, and it’s not like the characters don’t believe in the metaphysics, because that would be like not believing in, say, trees and rocks. But I think it’s probably okay, though I ought to emphasize certain elements earlier.

C) It’s a fast-pace / less-character-depth story, and I think … I sort of suspect … that I was at that time moving more toward writing books with deep characterization, and I think I wasn’t happy with this one because it’s not really that kind of story. It’s more like No Foreign Sky, with a super complicated world and a really fast pace. Which, I mean, honestly, go me, because if I wanted to pull off a fast pace, I sure did.

D) This isn’t a reason I didn’t like this book at the time I finished it; it’s just an observation: I’m going to have to dedicate this one to Doris Piserchia, because obviously the key idea for this world came from her book Spaceling. Everything about the world, the characters, and the plot is tremendously, immensely, stupendously different, except for one key element, and that single element is definitely inspired by this book, which … have any of you read it? It came out in 1978. Anyway, I read it a bunch of times. The cover for the Kindle edition is awful, totally unrelated to the story, but on the other hand, it is available in Kindle format for a mere $1.99.

Anyway, I kind of like this book now, so I’m glad I just didn’t look at it for seven years rather than throwing it away.

Here’s the first page:

***

Vích made a small, terrible mistake late one summer evening, while she was trading gossip with Mama Guè in the remedies section of the open market. Everything that came later came from that one mistake, exactly as one raindrop falling at the right moment may turn a man’s step from the left to the right and so lead him to encounter the woman he will love rather than the man who is his enemy, and thus change his entire fate.

The people of Daì told a thousand such stories: about one drop of rain or one note in a bird’s song or one chance-heard word that changed the course of nations. Vích’s whole ambition for almost the entire span of her very long life had been to avoid stepping into any story of that kind. Also, more difficult, to prevent her brother from ever stumbling into such a tale.

It was harder for Lahn because he didn’t remember their distant childhood as well as Vích did; also because his gift was not remotely as terrible as her curse. For those reasons, he took every kind of danger too lightly. Vích had tried very hard to teach her brother to live quietly, scattering no raindrops and disturbing no birds and most of all speaking no incautious words. But restraint was not in her brother’s nature: Lahn liked to play with risk and enjoyed walking the thin edge of catastrophe. Infuriating, yes, but Vích understood: her brother toyed with small dangers in order to forget great ones, and although he was afraid of her, he was not afraid she would lose her temper at him, so she could not rule him.

But that evening Vích herself made exactly the wrong small mistake, and found no way to take it back.

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