An Aeons’ Gate Retrospective

I just got this email in my inbox a few days ago from one of my editors, Lou Anders:

Starting today, FYI. Excited. Gearing up to want to stab you all over again.

This was in regards to the finished manuscript I had sent him of The Skybound Sea, the third book in The Aeons’ Gate Trilogy.  The last book of this trilogy and a work I’m especially proud of.

And it was when I got this email that I was stricken by a few things.  First and foremost being how very special a friend must be that, even when you are threatened with mutilation daily from all manner of contacts (personal and professional), it still means something when someone says they want to stab you and they mean it.  Thank you, Lou.

Second and segundomost, how very brief the emails are now from the “hello, how are you, I’m very excited to be working with you, isn’t this a treat, aren’t we so fresh and fancy” emails I got when I was first starting.  Not that I miss those, really.  Lou knows stories about adventures involving me vomiting that even my closer drinking buddies don’t know and Simon Spanton has seen me tell stories involving masturbation to audiences of up to two hundred.  It’s a little hard to keep things stiff after that (har har har) and I’m much more comfortable with this sort of rapport.

But third and most importantly, I had finished it.  My third book was done.  At age 27, roughly ten years after I started seriously writing, seven years after I had given up seriously writing, five years after I had picked it back up, two years after I first got published.

I’ve never really given a crap about my age (there have always been more than enough people to do it for me) and I only remark upon it now as a footnote.  I’ve published a trilogy.  That’s kind of a deal.  Maybe big.  Maybe not so very big.  But it’s deal enough that it kind of makes me want to stop and think about what I’ve been doing right, what I’ve been doing wrong, what I’ll be doing from here on in, you know?

Tome of the Undergates is one of those books I think I’ll always be spitefully proud of.  Sort of in the way you’re proud of a huge scar that came from that time you did something kind of stupid-in-a-badass way like start an airplane propeller with your teeth.  Or in the way you’re proud of a dog that can roll on its back, have a seizure and start quoting scripture on command in Latin on command (in that some people will be freaked out, but fuck if any other dog can do it).  Basically, I’ll never remember it as my best work, nor even as a work that doesn’t have some very heavy flaws.  But because it’s my first, and probably because it’s got some heavy flaws, I’m always going to love it.

What flaws, specifically?

To be generally specific, I have a feeling that every beginning author has a need to explode in their writing, be it in prose, character, action or all three or all three and more.  And I think I’m guilty of more than a few of them.  I don’t think I gave the audience enough breathing room in my first book, which was a disease that spawned several symptoms: too much time spent in one overarching, ebbing and flowing tide of battle on one ship with characters whose motivations and attitudes weren’t exactly clear.  Basically, instead of taking the audience’s hand and asking them to dive right in with me, I put the audience in a headlock, screamed “I’M TAKING YOU WITH ME” and hurled us headlong over a cliff into raging rapids where we were tossed about as plankton with the audience desperately begging me to stop and me laughing maniacally until, at one point, we both threw up a couple times.

…that might have been overly specific.

I’ve mentioned before that I started writing Tome when I was about 17.  In a lot of ways, I felt too afraid to deviate from that iteration of the book.  I felt too pleased with my story, too easy with how things were, too convinced that this story had to be told exactly this way and I wasn’t willing to challenge myself enough to really hack at it until it resembled something tastier.  It’s another thing that I think a lot of authors fall prey to, and I think the realization that stories are mutable, ever-changing things isn’t something an author ever stops learning.  In some cases, you just learn it a little too late.

And then sometimes you just don’t learn.  If I have one tremendous regret about this story, it’s how I handled Quillian.  I have no regrets about introducing a gay character, nor any about how her orientation was handled, nor any about that fact at all.  It’s the same as writing a female character, she’s a character first and all my regrets come from failing to use her as an interesting character.  She had enough interesting stuff going on that I wound up doing nothing with.  Someday, I’ll figure that part out.

And at that point, gratuitous gore, purple prose, overexcited analogies and exaggerated character reactions just seem barely worth mentioning.  But there you go.

This isn’t to say that I regret what Tome turned out to be, of course.  It is the way it is for a reason and the way it is was good enough for nine countries and counting to pick it up.  So naturally, there are some things I did that even I think went right.  Most of these revolve around the characters and their conflicts.  I’ve heard some male authors say that they wish they had done their female characters better.  I’ve never really been stricken with that though (which means I either did them well or did them very terribly), but then again, I’ve never really thought about a female character as different from another character based solely on their gender.  I mean, an opportunistic, self-doubting degenerate is an opportunistic, self-doubting degenerate whether girl or boy, right?

But maybe I’m wrong about that.

Black Halo, I think, I wasn’t quite free of the need to erupt just yet.  And I’ll tell you this much: when you’re stricken with your first reviews, your first crises of careers, your first panics over whether you can write for a living or if you’re doomed to die in a sea shack talking to crabs who listen to you patiently as they wait for you to die…it affects your writing.  The conflicts were clearer, the companions’ needs were clearer, but the prose was sometimes just a bit too much as I waddled through melancholic self-doubt.

And yet, Black Halo had some astonishingly strange reactions.  People who absolutely loathed Tome came back to say that Halo won them over (there were some who had the opposite reaction, but not nearly so pronounced).  There was a greater clarity there, a greater sense of self developing.  But at the same time, there wasn’t enough happening.  Poetically, it was solid.  Structurally, it was just a tad too laggy.  It felt as though I were showing off too much, pondering too much, making the audience watch me muse dramatically.  It felt as though I were taking too much time stroking them gently and maybe things got a little weird, like I started purring into their ears and calling them weird names that I thought sounded sexy like “cookie crisp.”

But I had two pieces.  I could put an audience in a headlock.  I could cup an audience’s left butt cheek.  I simply needed a way to occasionally put my arm around their shoulder and give them a good, hard spank once in a while.

And so, I wrote The Skybound Sea.

I won’t lie, fellas.  I’m pretty pleased with this book.  It may be the first time I’ve been able to step back and say: “Yeah.  Yeah, that’s a real nice piece of work I did there.”  I’m pleased with the prose.  I’m pleased with the conflict.  I’m pleased all around.  It wraps up everything quite nicely.

It answers what happens to Kataria and Lenk.  It answers what Denaos did and what Asper is going to do.  It tells us whether Dreadaeleon will die and just if it is possible for Gariath to beat a man to death with a shark.  It’s satisfying.  It’s aggressive.  It’s tragic.  It’s bloody.  It’s 100% Sam Sykes.

Maybe that pleasure is a sign that I’ve messed up horribly somewhere along the way.  Maybe I’m deluding myself terribly and it’s actually all awful.

But for the first time in my life, I really don’t think so.  I can’t really feel that pang of crippling doubt (the doubt’s still there, as it should be, it’s just not something that will ruin me).  I can’t really conceive of a world in which I am a terrible writer (maybe not the best writer, as I should never stop trying to be, but I know my stuff).  For the first time since I started this, I feel like I’m really doing the right thing.

And if I’m not, I’ll just have to do better with my next trilogy.

Shit, did I forget to mention that I was doing another one?