I Didn’t Know.

I’ve never written a book before. Not really. I’ve written dozens of shorts, but they’re easy for me to write. Especially if they’re in an established universe. When I wrote Reclamation (delisted), the premise was simple; tell a story of revenge that brought the Castlevania formula to literature. There was one point of view. A character battled his way through ever-changing landscapes, contending with his former comrades, until making his way to the ‘final boss’ where they both faced a reckoning. It was not a difficult book to write. My (gracious) editors did most of the work. But the truth is, I didn’t let it in.

Namesake is different. I’m almost a third of the way through this book. I thought that if I did all of the right things: listened to the right podcasts, applied the right lessons, and did the right planning, I could somehow dodge the difficulty of writing a book and simply let the words flow out of me. I was wrong.

What began as one point of view turned into three. What began as a simple task, writing two to three thousand words per day, turned into writing a set number of pages because tracking word counts were too overwhelming. The first act alone required more research and fleshing out than I ever imagined, which in turn resulted in rewrites (something I wanted to avoid during the first draft) that brought more cohesion but caught me time.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve leapt up in the middle of the night to record a thought or passage that had to get out of my head. The story has literally threatened to explode out of my brain, causing insomnia and the strangest sleep cycles. I find myself both looking forward to and dreading getting up in the morning, that first cup of coffee, and the blank screen.

I didn’t know writing a book would be so many things, all at once. A crashing wave of euphoria and exhilaration that also threatens to drown and consume you. I didn’t know what the cost of writing this book would be, how my sleep schedules would be thrown so completely out of whack I barely know what day it is.

I cannot wait to finish this book, and I cannot wait to go through all of this again.

Thanks for reading.