Too many threads, not enough bows
What do you do when you publish a book that asks more questions than it answers? How do you bounce back from that?
Happy Writing Wednesday, friends! I hope all of you are having a lovely week. I’ve spent the last 8 days or so in Galveston, Texas where I’m enjoying an actual vacation (it’s been a really long time).
It’s been quite an adventure. Texas tried to drown me, and the beach house I rented helped. So I moved to a hotel that had burned out light bulbs and no internet, but at least it was dry. So I’ve spent the majority of my time in coffee shops and cafes, when I wasn’t walking (shivering) on the beach. But I’ve still managed to have a good time.
Last week, we talked a little bit about my samurai superhero series, and I confessed the rather large blunder I made in publishing a superhero book without an origin story in it. Oops. Well some of the feedback I get on the first book in the Reishosan series, Stan Hawthorne and the Broken Sword, mentions that it doesn’t feel like a first book. It mentions things that happened BEFORE it.
That’s because there ARE events that happen before it. Stan Hawthorne and the Broken Sword is the first REISHOSAN book. There is a book that takes place before it, but it belongs in the LIGHTKEEPERS series. And that book … let’s just say, it had problems. That’s why, today, we’re going to talk about another lesson I learned the hard way: What do to when you publish a story that’s incomplete.
To be fair, I didn’t realize it was incomplete when I published it. I thought it was just fine, and I guess if you aren’t super picky, maybe it was okay. A lot of people read it and loved it. But I didn’t.
I wasn’t happy with how the story came together. I wasn’t content with where the story ended. I didn’t feel like the story accomplished what it was supposed to do. I just couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it, until I got a little older and a whole lot wiser.
This is actually a really long story, so I’m going to do my best to keep this short. One day I’ll share the whole thing, but for now, let’s just hit the highlights.
I wrote my first book when I was 11 years old. I scribbled it by hand in an old notebook with a mechanical pencil on a trip to visit my cousins in Arkansas. The story and the characters had lived in my head for about two years by that point. They had invaded my imagination when I was nine. And, honestly, at that point my little book was glorified fanfiction that melded the original My Little Pony, Star Trek, Star Wars, Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?, and an 80s era anime called Ronin Warriors.
Basically I just took everything I loved at the time and tossed it into the blender of my imagination, and this wild story came out. What I got was something I loved ten times more than any Saturday morning cartoon on television.
I gave that handwritten story to my closest friend, and she read it. I was so scared. What if she hated it? What if she hated me because of it? What if she laughed at me? I had prepared myself for rejection. So imagine my surprise when I saw her the next week, and she handed it back to me and asked, point blank, “Where’s the next one?”
Well, for better or for worse, that question changed my life. It ignited a desire in me to tell stories. I’d never loved anything so much. Telling stories quickly became my happy place, and my brain became a sponge. I soaked up everything, every random bit of trivia, every fascinating story concept, every potential worldbuilding aspect. Everything.
I don’t remember when I created the idea of this series. I think it just developed on its own when I realized how many stories I wanted to tell. Originally, I called it The Adventures of the Rainbows of Light, because the primary hero group had a rainbow weapon, based on something out of the original My Little Pony show. The pilot episode, specifically.
The pilot episode of the original My Little Pony was EPIC, by the way. I mean, looking back on it as an adult now, it was probably too much for little girls. Maybe. But, dude, it had evil centaurs and horrifying dragons and nightmare castles and peril and it was SO COOL. And then the next episode was like Sweet Stuff’s Treasure Hunt, and even as a six year old kid, I was like, “What is this sap? What happened to the cool show?”
But I digress.
I didn’t have a plan. I just had a world full of people I enjoyed spending time with in my imagination. I liked creating their stories, figuring out what happened to them to make them into the people they were. I didn’t realize what I was doing was actually a form of therapy. We’ll talk more about that some day in the future, but basically I was teaching myself how to understand people using story.
I taught myself to type. I taught myself to write. I taught myself to finish. I taught myself character and plot structure and worldbuilding. Every element of story, I learned on my own through reading, watching movies and television, and experimenting with my own storyworld. And before I graduated high school in 2001, I think I had completed around 30 novels (some were more than 150,000 words).
I wanted to be published. I dreamed of being published. But I didn’t actually think it was possible.
Fast forward. Because this is a long story, and it’s already long enough. (If you want more details, ask!) In 2014, I got to be part of a small press that started up, and by 2017 we had decided that we’d publish the first book in this series.
That is how Meg Mitchell and the Secret of the Journal came to be published by Crosshair Press.
I was so excited. And I was so terrified. It had changed so much in all the years that had passed between the first handwritten draft and the version that hit the shelves in March 2017. I had changed the series title to be less focused on rainbows, as I didn’t want to cause confusion or distraction because of other cultural uses of the rainbow. It had become The Legend of the Lightkeepers, which is actually a much cooler name I think.
And, like I said above, it’s not that it was bad. A lot of people read it. A lot of people enjoyed it. But even with its beautiful cover and beautiful interior and several fans getting really excited about the series, I couldn’t escape this pit in my stomach.
I don’t actually remember what sparked the idea in my mind to re-read it. I don’t even remember when I did it. I just picked it up and thumbed through it and suddenly I realized what was wrong: There were too many threads and not enough bows.
The story was so complicated, so intricate that it diminished the parts of the book that were actually compelling. And by the end you had more questions than answers. Not great for the first book in a big series.
I knew going into it that the story would be complicated, but I let my love of complexity become more important than the main story. The worldbuilding in the book was extensive. The character background that was necessary to make the whole thing make sense was also extensive. The characters were complicated, and there were many of them (more than eight primary POV characters). And the plot itself was complex, multifaceted and intricate.
Re-reading it, I realized that I could make three books from everything I had crammed into that single book. Not only that, it was so complicated, so busy, so chaotic that none of the characters got the chance to shine (well, one or two did, but they weren’t even the characters who mattered!).
So, the Writing Wednesday Takeaway is to remember that you can’t have everything. You can’t have a complicated plot with a complicated character and a complicated world (unless you’re Brandon Sanderson, and even then, I think he’s reasonable about it). It’s like making chili. You want to have enough spice to make it taste like chili, but if you put too much in, all you’ll taste is the spice. And nobody will eat it.
As far as Meg Mitchell and the Secret of the Journal? Well, it’s still available. I have it on Amazon still, but it’s really up there as more of a lessons learned kind of thing. I joke and say it’s an example of what NOT to do.
I have been in the process of rewriting her story for several years now, and she has been thwarting my efforts. She’s very Irish. Very stubborn. Although the truth is, it’s not her fault; it has been my own (I am also very Irish and quite Scottish, which makes me even more stubborn than Meg is).
Meg Mitchell and the Secret of the Journal is being rewritten, and it will become two different books. Both of them are untitled as of now, but the first one will be from Meg’s perspective. The second one will be from Danny, her younger brother’s perspective.
If I have my way, the new version of Meg’s book should be releasing at the end of this year. That’s the plan at least. We’ll see if it happens. But that’s also the benefit of this Substack, where paid members will get raw chapters as I write them (as soon as I start focusing on fiction again).
But, until then, there is another book in The Legend of the Lightkeepers currently available. It’s called Barb Taylor and the Russian Dolls.
So let me do a quick overview of that series while I’m thinking about it, so you can know what you’re getting into. As I said last week, there are three separate series in this one massive universe, and The Legend of the Lightkeepers is the first series.
At its core, The Legend of the Lightkeepers is a portal fantasy, where the majority of the stories take place in an alternate dimension with an Indian/Persian vibe. The concept is that an entire civilization of people live in this other world, unseen and invisible and right under the noses of the “real” world. It’s not an alternate reality, nor is it an alternate timeline. This is a complete, fully functional “other world” under the skin of the world we know. And this interdimensional theory is actually what builds the entire technological foundation of the whole Heirs of the Mazzaroth series.
Earth is layered in worlds upon worlds, worlds between worlds, that we can’t see, but just because we can’t see it doesn’t make it not real. In fact, what we can’t see is more real than what we can.
So it’s portal fantasy, but it incorporates elements of mystery, suspense, heists, quest-style storytelling, and superheroes. Not to mention laser swords and lots and lots of Indian food. And, of course, all of this is told against the backdrop of an enormous fantasy world with multiple different races and species with their own unique cultures and histories.
Eventually, Meg and five other young people will become the Lightkeepers, the guardians of this other world (who happen to pop over to our world to help the samurai guys every now and then).
It took me a long time to realize it, but while the Reishosan series is very much about found family, the Lightkeepers series is about navigating imperfect family relationships and breaking the cycles of trauma in your family.
In the new version of Meg Mitchell’s book, she meets three very important characters: Barb Taylor, Jim Taylor, and Reena Ellis. While Reena is most important in The Dragons of the Diamond Throne series, Barb and Jim Taylor are essential Lightkeepers characters.
Meg, Barb, and Jim are my Golden Trio. They are my Harry, Ron, and Hermione. My Kirk, Spock, and Bones. My Percy, Anabeth, and Grover.
The greatest mistake I made with Meg Mitchell and the Secret of the Journal was not to keep the primary focus on the three of them. So, the new Meg Mitchell book will be the story of how they meet. Immediately following that story is the Barb Taylor novella, where we get to follow Barb and Jim (teenage detectives) on a human trafficking case in Moscow.
As with everything I write, even though the stories will make mention of events from previous books, you don’t need them to enjoy the individual stories. So don’t worry that you’re missing anything.
Thanks for hanging in there on this really long post, my gosh. I just can’t be succinct when it comes to the Lightkeepers, I guess. Anyway, watch this space next week for a post about The Dragons of the Diamond Throne and how our adorable little Reena Ellis fits into this craziness!
Amy