We are now a week out from the release of Another Time, Part II: Watchland. I recently reflected in hindsight that the naming system for these books is more that a little wordy, but there it is. There are plenty of lessons I’ve learned in the time since embarking on writing this series, good and bad. Things I’d change? I’m sure, and yet I’m not sure. The choices we make along the way matter for where we are now, for the good and the band. It took a video game to teach me that (Finding Paradise). But there’s still that sense of excitement, that newness to this whole thing, that sends me over the moon when I really sit and think about what’s coming.
I’m celebrating another book release!
Yes, it’s self publishing, but you know what— so what? There’s a lot of work that goes into this stuff! Telgora, the world and the entire Freedom and Control series, has been the grounding force of my creative life for so long. In the years since I’ve started writing it, which holy hell the first draft was written in 2014 and the first draft of the last book was finished in 2020, I’ve talked about there being editing years versus release years versus rewrite years. My other projects revolve around Telgora’s schedule, even as those characters whine about being neglected or my friends wait impatiently for other, newer projects to begin. At the current pace of writing and editing, the last book of Telgora will probably be released in 2026. That’s a long time from now, and a full twelve years from when the first book was finished.
A Place I Have Never Been is the first novel to bear my name, and that’s no small feat. It was six years from draft to first release. In that time I learned to design cover art, file for ISBN’s, set up a website, blog, organize a newsletter that I never actually did anything with despite multiple promises, format margins in Word and Kindle Create, deal with Amazon’s self publishing regulations, form and manage an LLC, and a host of other things. That’s not even counting writing the book. Editing, line by line, words I’d seen hundreds of times. Even a work you love gets boring after that. What helped most was listening to the same playlist that inspired those scenes over and over (up to over three-thousand plays as of writing this blog post).
The book is very much a product of its time, and for that I can still say I remain proud of it. Was it released a little early? Sure. But I was excited, and I’m still excited about it as sheepish as I may seem when I tell people, still, that I am only an aspiring writer. Masochistic self-depreciation seems part and parcel with any kind of creative life. I am forever reminded of Dorothy Parker comparing herself to Edna St. Vincent Millay, all that following in the footsteps of others in my own well worn sneakers. 2014 Justin is certainly not the Justin of 2022.
I like to think, and my friends and beta readers can confirm, that my writing is getting better.
Another Time, as the future books in the Freedom and Control series will, serves then as a marker of progress. Part of the fun in continuing this series to the end is watching the writing change. The characters are more, the plot is more, I’m happier with it overall. While edits and rewrites of the two books to come may change this, it remains my pet favorite of the series for those reasons and others. Its second part, Watchland, is a huge part of that transition. It’s time for these characters to breathe and figure themselves out, which is important and is what I find lacking about A Place I Have Never Been, critiquing my own work there for a minute. The middle of any book, of any series, is hard to write because so often it feels like downtime between bigger action set pieces. Watchland, I hope, avoids some of these pitfalls.
But that’s the nitty gritty, the writing stuff anyone engaging in this as a hobby or as work deals with. We must never forget that it’s fun, that it’s a creative outlet, an escape into a world of my own making with characters whose lives were crafted entirely in my mind. That’s part of why the books are titled how they are, that ideal of fantasy so expertly explained in Chris de Burgh’s song. I think I’ve referenced that before.
Telgora is not as fun as other fantasy worlds, and I can tell you that’s by design. In part it’s a lingering legacy of the Justin of 2014, a freshman at a college far from home trying to find himself. In doing so he made a darker world, a world with characters who struggle with their place in it, with experiences that force them to confront their fears and in doing so helped him process the author’s own. In continuing this series, I am continuing the things he was looking for and the things he was afraid of.
Fear plays a huge role in Telgora— it’s the foundation of the Telgoran magic system, Ahamekla. It’s the motivation of many characters, the core crux of the namesake struggle of the novel. Freedom versus control. In as much as this is a conversation with growing up and coming to terms with a world that became scarier as this series progress (consider Another Time came to life around 2016, and the series as a whole capped off in the middle of 2020), part of me wishes that I could share the answers I’ve found out now with the person who started writing this series.
More than that, I wish they could know all the progress that came about with Freedom and Control as a focus of a creative life. That I’ve joined writer’s groups (shoutout to the Chaos Builders’ Veggie Patch), written four new books in between the Telgoran ones, that the website designed to promote a book has expanded to discuss wine and books, to show off photography. In that time, too, I’ve gone from that Floridian campus to sommelier-ing at a wine bar and winning cocktail competitions. Hell, I had a short story published.
And Telgora’s been there the while. Watchland is just the next step. I feel now that same giddy excitement as I did the first time around. I hope I never lose it, either. That all endeavors, that every book, feels this cool to hold and to see my name writ upon. That I will always remember the first fateful line written as I stepped into a place I had never been.