A Year into the Journey West of Apocalypse
A year since my novel was published
Life’s been hectic, so today snuck up on me. August 8th. I’ll get to why that matters.
Everyone has a story to tell, but for some of us, it’s a deep need that claws at the insides of our grey matter every day and every hour, sometimes even as we sleep. We aren’t whole until a part of us is ripped out and surrendered forever to others as words on a page. That desperate need births literature and art.
With the release of my next novel, The Dragon Spy, just 54 days away, most of my focus has gone to that book. Earlier today, it suddenly hit me that today is the one year anniversary of my adult fantasy debut West of Apocalypse.
One year with that book no longer trapped in my mind.
I’m not sure I can convey how much that means to me. The scale won’t be fully balanced for years, but a little weight has come off my soul. I started writing Ayleen Torr’s galactic quest for revenge in September 2017. Only took a few months to realize this book wasn’t the lark it started as. I’d waited all of my life to tell that story, a journey that started in high school when Sheri, the girl who later became my wife, leant me her copy of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger (the primary inspiration for my book). I finished West of Apocalypse less than a year after I started it, but Ayleen’s story stayed trapped. I queried agents and publishers. Got some nibbles, but no success. Even five years after I finished it, I could count on one hand the number of people who had read the entire manuscript. That’s counting my beta readers and Sheri.
In a very real sense, the scale won’t balance until August 2029. In another sense, it won’t be until roughly 2056 (Sheri introduced me to The Gunslinger around 1990).
Ever since I started writing Ayleen’s journey in 2017, she’s refused to give me a moment’s peace, and I’m grateful for that. I revisited her in 2022 to write a novelette set between the second and third acts of the novel, a story called “The Bounty” (at a point when I still wasn’t sure I’d ever find a home for West of Apocalypse). I didn’t struggle to find Ayleen’s voice again. She’s never left, so how could I not find her again to add to her journey?
I love this book, and as much as I desperately love the novels I’ve written since then, none of them occupy the special place in my heart the way this one does.
It’s not exactly your birthday, Ayleen Torr, but it is your book birthday. One year down, many more years and many more worlds left to go.