Musings and Reminiscing on ToR
I’m not really sure what I want to talk about in this post. I thought about how I’ve been spending a lot of time with some old friends. That is, talking about how the characters in tears of rage are like old friends, but it’s more than that. In reimagining these latest books, I’ve learned a lot about myself. Who I am. Who I was. What kind of relationships I had when I first wrote these books and all the ways those relationships have changed over the years—both professionally, personally, and literarily.
I wrote the first sentence of Tears of Rage on my 30th birthday. (Fun fact: the original first sentence does not appear anywhere in the series.) The stories and characters had been bouncing around in my head and heart for several years before that in various iterations and incarnations. Once I started writing, I wandered around this story for eight years or so before self-publishing the first bit of it. By the time I did self-publish the first book, I had over 1400 pages of a manuscript. (Fun fact #2: I originally thought those 1400 words were all part of the same first book in the series.) Luckily, I’d written it in such a way I could break the story down into more digestible chunks. Sometimes less is more.
Four books and several years later, a small press took over publishing the series. We got one book out… and realized it wasn’t a great fit. Not for them. Not for me. Not for tears of rage. Discontentment, discouragement, grad school, other projects, divorce, and COVID kept speed-bumping and stalling me from getting back to work on the reimagined additions of these stories. With everything, they lingered (Juliana, Phelan, Xander, Damian, Grandfather Shadow, and all the rest), lurking in the back of my mind.
Sometimes, the time is just right. Sometimes, the motivation kicks you in the butt and gets you going. Enough of the right people — old friends and new, real and imaginary — poked me at the right time, synchronizing my life and imagination, synapses fired off, and the road opened before me. I got down to the business of reacquainting myself with these old friends.
Bringing these new additions to life has been both awesome and bittersweet. I may be a weirdo (Okay: I am, but not just for this), but when I go back over a piece of writing, I get flashes of what my life was like when I wrote those words. In a deep dive into irony, seeing some balance and parallels to the writing the first version of Once We Were Like Wolves and this new one. As much as my life has changed, I’m definitely seeing reflections in parallels. That’s life for you. Sometimes it forces balance upon you. I can imagine Grandfather Shadow’s self-satisfied and smug chuckling.
Feels like I’m rambling a bit. Luckily, it’s my blog, and it can be whatever I want or need it to be for any given post. Perhaps this morning, I needed it to be a place to wax nostalgic about continuing the journey of this fantasy series that’s taken up part of my brain space for half my life. I realized the first version of the Lord Morigahn was the Lord Morgan and he (yeah, it was a he) came along when I was 25.
I guess this is reminding myself not to give up an idea, no matter how awkward or bittersweet returning to it might be, and let it simmer until the right time is right to dive back into it. After all, Spellpunk began when I was 22. Now, it has become something greater and crazier than I could have imagined back in my youth. It needed literally 30 years to ferment. I’ve tried returning to spell punk a few times over the decades, but mostly it was me cleaning up the sentences, not exploring the depths of where the tale could go or the seismic activities the story could bring to speculative fiction.
This gives me outrageous levels of optimism for HUSH and Manuscript X once my subconscious finally figures out what’s really going on with those two stories. I just need to chill and trust my imagination to take care of things. It’ll let me know when it’s time to go back to work on either one of them.
I suppose the essence of this blog post is that I should follow the advice I give to other writers: it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
