And for the rest of the month, is still only 99 cents!
I haven’t promoted this book much outside of my own personal blog, and there are reasons for this. The main one, of course being that most of my time in the last few months has been spent with the production and promotion of one of my flagship series, Annals of the Bitch Queen.
But on another level, this novel was my attempt at gaining a little bit of control and sanity in my life. I started writing this right after finishing The Ikessar Falcon, at a particularly low point in my life where my last series wasn’t taking off quite as I wanted it to and I wanted to give my next one, in a way, the permission to fail.
Permission to fail seems like a pessimistic way to look at things. I don’t often like the optimistic rhetoric of “If only you believe, everything will turn out just great!” I don’t come from an environment that allowed that. Belief had to come mixed with equal amounts of hard work aimed at realistic goals, and it is all too easy to fall into patterns that don’t yield results–as my husband likes to say, “It’s easy to look like a busy idiot.” Swim in circles, and the sharks eat you. There was a point last year where I had to understand that this wasn’t going to work out through some sort of Godgiven miracle, where all I had to do was believe in my stars and wait for the right moment, and then glory will come riding in on a shining steed and make all my dreams come true.
I had to be realistic; the truth is, chasing after those shiny medals of fame and recognition is a recipe for disaster. You don’t make life decisions on the basis of winning the lottery. Who knows how to predict the crowd’s tastes, or create a book that will mold itself solely for the pleasure of the particular reader? Break new ground, they say–write something unique, something new, something wonderful and dazzling and will sweep the ground off our feet…”Sell me your book! Tell me why I should read it!”
This is the dance of the damned. I cannot be sucked into it. I had been writing all these years with no audience but myself, pushing and pushing at my craft because I enjoyed it that way. I can’t see myself doing it any other way. Trying to devalue my writing because I felt like I did something wrong, or I didn’t do something quite right, because it wasn’t good enough to be rated 5-stars or stand out in a sea of unknowns is…a poor way to treat something I love so much that I do it in my sleep.
So I wrote Blackwood Marauders. It’s a generic coming-of-age. And I wrote it for the love of storytelling, for the chance to explore characters even if there’s nothing particularly unique or outstanding about them or the world they’re in. There is absolutely no concept in here that is new or groundbreaking in any way, but I treated it with care, I followed the main characters as truly as I do with every character I write. To say that this was one of the most enjoyable stories I have ever written is an understatement. I was plowing through 4000 words a day without blinking, finishing all of its 110,000 words in just under ten weeks.
And as I followed this story, the message rang out clear and true:
“You could be rotting in a gutter somewhere. Your bones could be at the bottom of the sea. You must not have been the only child in that ship that day, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re the only one left alive. And maybe you’ve decided that it ought to mean something, that you were destined for great things if only you could do better, be better, anything but yourself…but that is asking for too much from a single man, Luc. Too much. You are not made lesser by your circumstances. It is how you respond that dictates your worth.”
I will continue to write until the day I die. Even if I am never discovered, and people easily forget what I say, or my work becomes buried in a sea of new favourites and hot, shiny debuts. This novel has proven to me that the sheer love of the work will always be enough for me, as it has always been. And that the value of a story is what’s happening in the moment, between those pages; what happens after is icing on the cake.
