It is rather daunting when I sit down and realize I’ve been working on my series for over half of my life at this point. I started when I was eleven years old, and I’m now twenty-six – what do I have to show for it?
Certainly not a finished product.
-takes a long moment to stare out of the window…Chicago is gloomy today-
I am overwhelmed much of the time, when I think about my passion – writing is and always has been my greatest passion in life, and it has always been my dream to be able to write full-time. I am, unfortunately, not very equipped for juggling many things any more. Whereas once I could have gone to work, gone for a long walk, read and written in a single day, now I can only do one of those things well, and rarely do I get to enjoy it for long. There are the rare days when my mind seems to have escaped its self-inflicted dungeon, but those days are fleeting and are merely hard-earned gifts after over four years of working diligently with a therapist to try and fight the way my brain works.
Would you believe me if I said that I think about my book every single day? That I think about updating this site every day? I’m sure many of you would not.
But I do.
There’s just this terrible thing in my mind that doesn’t allow me to simply go to my laptop, or sit down for ten minutes. My brain much of the time doesn’t want to work the way I know it can. My brain is very exhausted.
This tangent wasn’t really the point of this post today, though.
I was looking at Patrick Rothfuss’s website (I love Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicle – it’s some of the most phenomenal writing I’ve come across in ages, and this is coming from someone severely disenchanted with the Fantasy Novel as of late), and saw mention on one of his posts that the series is merely a prologue to more. He mentions that he himself hates when we are entertained by these immersive worlds and then POOF!, “that’s all, folks.”
And I realized I felt the same. And I remembered what I’ve been striving for, and why it has taken so long to make my debut novel just right.
I am a Worldbuilder. The story I’m creating is not necessarily the first of this world, but it’s the first I care to tell. It is a story that has been burning within me since I was a child, even though I haven’t always known exactly what the story is.
Even in my current revisions, I am changing so much – not because the other variations weren’t good enough, but rather because the other versions weren’t quite what I want them to be.
Because they are, most definitely, the foundations of my own legacy.
I’ve always been aware that this first series was a first series in this world. The more I build this world, the more stories I come across that aren’t ready to be told, but will be one day. Stories predating the current one, and years and years after. Stories of the characters that will be untold and maybe only hinted at, or maybe never spoken of at all.
Stories that can build upon this world, indefinitely perhaps.
I’ve been in writing groups where we’ve had the opportunity to discuss certain aspects of our world – the theologies, the magic, great landmarks. And, while this is of course no indication of a good product, I’ve been told that I have a very flushed out understanding of my world. It’s the one compliment I’ve always gotten that I believe has true merit, because I have worked my ass off to think of details that I know will go a long way in the long-run.
And sure – there are plenty of great works out there that didn’t take so long to flush out. There are plenty of writers who create wondrous worlds, in much less time.
But it’s not a contest. When I’m ready, it’ll be ready, and my timeline doesn’t need to look the same as anyone else’s.
It took me much longer to type of this post than it may have four years ago. Four years ago I may have been able to breeze through a post like this in five minutes. Today, that’s not the case. Maybe tomorrow it will be.
Briari Hallow 