It feels strange to be writing a blogpost after a hiatus of over a year. I’m afraid that 2020 saw all my activities as a writer grind to an almost complete stop. The pandemic was partially to blame; as someone who worked in education, having to switch to a fully-online service was difficult. I ended up working more from home than I had when I was at the college and by the end of the day I was usually too mentally exhausted to be productive at my creative work. On top of my demanding new work schedule, I was struck by a massive setback in my writing career. I had finished writing my second book, The Many Antlered Crown, and had done a preliminary round of editing. Satisfied for the moment, I submitted the book to my editor. After a brief review, the publishing company declined to publish The Many Antlered Crown or any other further books in the series. The primary reason given was that the book was simply too long. The Wind from Faerie was around 100 thousand words long, whereas The Many Antlered Crown ended up being about 162 thousand words long. Given in more concrete terms, The Wind from Faerie was 272 pages in print, so The Many Antlered Crown would be around 440 pages in print. I will grant that it is a long book, but I don’t think it would be considered long by the standards of the fantasy genre. Nevertheless, Authors4Authors is a small company which simply does not have the capital to invest in printing a book that size. I’m sure the lack of significant commercial success of my first novel was also a factor in their decision.
I was extremely disappointed that my sequels would not be published by the same company that had handled the first book. The publisher and I hadn’t had a conflict-free relationship, but I hated the idea that the series was going to be broken up between publishers. To add salt to the wound, I would now have to query and find a new publisher for the second book in a trilogy. It didn’t seem like the kind of deal that a new company would want to get involved with. The current plan is to finish writing the third and final book of the series, then to buy back my rights to The Wind from Faerie and then market the whole trilogy to a new publishing company. The publication of The Many Antlered Crown would have to be seriously delayed and I felt like I was failing my faithful readers. My publication woes combined with the difficulties of the pandemic and a little writer’s block to make a perfect storm of compounding guilt. Writing had turned from an enjoyable, if sometimes arduous, pastime into something that really only made me feel guilty and depressed. With the joy of writing largely drained away, I almost completely stopped any sort of creative writing. I did some world-building for a D&D game I was running and I wrote a few poems, but that was about the sum of my production for a long time. For a significant part of 2020, I hardly even read.
Eventually, the unsolved mystery of my third book coaxed me back to the page. I scribbled in notebooks, talked to myself on long walks, and even managed to write a few lines. The pull to write has grown stronger and stronger so that now my motivation to write this final book in Kellan’s saga has outshone my guilt and apathy. I still haven’t plunged back into a writing routine as focused and productive as I once had, but writing again feels like a magical process to me and I’m once again excited about the stories that may one day flow out of my pen.