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This is the story of a story and how it grew up with me over the years I've been writing it.
I stand by the book as a whole. I really do. I think I took the unwise tropes that were the foundation of the story back in '02 and '03 and really turned them on their heads and set the story up for a really positive and uplifting ending. But there's... a lot in there that's not exactly fun. Or good.
It's a war story, and it's a story about toxic masculinity at its worst, and it's a story about making mistakes and accepting that they were mistakes and how to move on from there. It really drags people through the muck and in a lot of ways I think it needs to.
I guess it's partially because the book is an example of what it's about that I struggle with how to be positive about it, how to promote it, how to recommend it to people.
"Look at all these mistakes I was ready to make! I hope I did enough to fix them!"
Okay. Listen. It was back in college with my friend William that the seed of this book was first planted, and this was a conservative Christian college. We were unaware of a lot of things. We had a lot of ideas that we didn't understand the implication of.
A lot of the prospective plot, at that point in time, was based on fridgings.
Not that I knew the word for that at the time. I was just enjoying writing my star-crossed lovers and crime lord villain while William figured out what could possibly cause Jacan to do the things he was supposed to have done. And neither of us knew exactly how to go about turning it all into a proper book.
So we took years to poke at the project, trying this and trying that, filling out plots and settings and cultures. And that ended up being a really good thing, because my self-realization as a writer shed a hugely different light on the material that we had.
I became immersed deep in Tumblr culture from spring of 2012 through the end of last year. It's full of pitfalls, but it taught me so much that I am grateful to know. It's informed who I am as a writer and as a person, and it's brought direction to what was a whole mess of artistic skills that I enjoyed practicing but didn't know what to do with.
And it showed me how young we were, when we first sat down and created the Half-Dragon world.
When I decided on the shape of The Red Glade Peacemakers, I took out the stories and characters that leaned most heavily on fridgings as motivations. When I went back to them, to build something out of them, I don't know that I fully realized what it meant in terms of showing the world all of that youth, all of that twisted, wrongheaded ignorance.
I went into the shaping of The Red Glade Peacemakers with the conviction that those young ideas were a good foundation for a beginning, and that I could reframe and subvert those ideas by my writing of the end. I liked the way that turned out. And I used the same principles when I wrote The Movrekt Warmongers.
Looking at it as a whole, it feels... scarier. The Red Glade Peacemakers was my first book, but this, in some ways, feels like a bigger step.
It preserves the worst of our mistakes, and I think that in some ways, that may make the ending more meaningful, more relevant.
Or at least I hope so, because otherwise it won't be worth the journey.
I stand by the book as a whole. I really do. I think I took the unwise tropes that were the foundation of the story back in '02 and '03 and really turned them on their heads and set the story up for a really positive and uplifting ending. But there's... a lot in there that's not exactly fun. Or good.
It's a war story, and it's a story about toxic masculinity at its worst, and it's a story about making mistakes and accepting that they were mistakes and how to move on from there. It really drags people through the muck and in a lot of ways I think it needs to.
I guess it's partially because the book is an example of what it's about that I struggle with how to be positive about it, how to promote it, how to recommend it to people.
"Look at all these mistakes I was ready to make! I hope I did enough to fix them!"
Okay. Listen. It was back in college with my friend William that the seed of this book was first planted, and this was a conservative Christian college. We were unaware of a lot of things. We had a lot of ideas that we didn't understand the implication of.
A lot of the prospective plot, at that point in time, was based on fridgings.
Not that I knew the word for that at the time. I was just enjoying writing my star-crossed lovers and crime lord villain while William figured out what could possibly cause Jacan to do the things he was supposed to have done. And neither of us knew exactly how to go about turning it all into a proper book.
So we took years to poke at the project, trying this and trying that, filling out plots and settings and cultures. And that ended up being a really good thing, because my self-realization as a writer shed a hugely different light on the material that we had.
I became immersed deep in Tumblr culture from spring of 2012 through the end of last year. It's full of pitfalls, but it taught me so much that I am grateful to know. It's informed who I am as a writer and as a person, and it's brought direction to what was a whole mess of artistic skills that I enjoyed practicing but didn't know what to do with.
And it showed me how young we were, when we first sat down and created the Half-Dragon world.
When I decided on the shape of The Red Glade Peacemakers, I took out the stories and characters that leaned most heavily on fridgings as motivations. When I went back to them, to build something out of them, I don't know that I fully realized what it meant in terms of showing the world all of that youth, all of that twisted, wrongheaded ignorance.
I went into the shaping of The Red Glade Peacemakers with the conviction that those young ideas were a good foundation for a beginning, and that I could reframe and subvert those ideas by my writing of the end. I liked the way that turned out. And I used the same principles when I wrote The Movrekt Warmongers.
Looking at it as a whole, it feels... scarier. The Red Glade Peacemakers was my first book, but this, in some ways, feels like a bigger step.
It preserves the worst of our mistakes, and I think that in some ways, that may make the ending more meaningful, more relevant.
Or at least I hope so, because otherwise it won't be worth the journey.
