Grave of Empires

It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?

How have you been doing, by the way? It’s 2022, but only just. Two years ago, the world started falling apart. Many years before that, it started thinking about it. It’s been tough on a lot of people–I hope you’re coming out of it okay.

Me? I’ve been busy. I wrote a book. It’s called Three Axes To Fall.

It’s the book that comes after the second, Ten Arrows Of Iron.

And that book came after the very first book, Seven Blades In Black.

These books are special to me because they represent something important I discovered about myself. I’ve been writing for awhile now (you might have read some of my other books) and in all that time, I’ve had an issue I didn’t know about. I was writing for someone who wasn’t me.

I think it’s easy for a lot of writers to develop a belief about what they think success should look like. Maybe it’s even inevitable. Social media means you’ll never be unaware of how other people are doing–their successes, their reach, the ways they decide to portray their lives–and you’ll never be able to not compare yourself. It’s easy to start thinking that success looks only one way, that you need to be doing the things that make it look that way, that if you aren’t doing those things, you need to be worried.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Because it was me. I was keen to do things that I thought a writer like me should be doing, things that I thought looked like what I thought success should be, whether I wanted to or not. It was a grievous place to be, mentally–a place where I couldn’t pursue a definition of success that was my own and couldn’t satisfy a definition I’d created that was impossible.

Until these books.

It wasn’t all them–I’ve been in therapy for a few years now and it’s helped a lot. But something about these books, these books about broken people who keep fucking up and keep trying despite it, about healing from wounds in a way that isn’t pretty, about the physical vices we take up to escape our emotional vices…

Yeah. Something about them was real good to me.

And I hope they’re good to you, too. Because you earned it.

And so have I.