The Journey Begins

After five years of work­ing on Chal­lenger’s Chase, I have final­ly start­ed pub­lish­ing chap­ters online. I set-up the first free chap­ter on the first of the year, and my first patre­on-locked chap­ter today. Not nec­es­sar­i­ly much to look at (yet) but a huge per­son­al mile­stone. I think I’m offi­cial­ly going to upgrade myself from writer to author.

I’ve dis­cov­ered a lot of things in the past few years. Patience, to keep from avoid­ing a half-fin­ished sto­ry to my audi­ence. Dis­ci­pline, in find­ing the will to keep work­ing after three years of revi­sions. My writer­ly and artis­tic skills, from the sheer amount of prac­tice I got from work­ing on this project for so long. I have lev­eled up so much, and in so many ways since I start­ed work­ing on Chal­lenger’s Chase five years ago, and yet despite all that growth, it still feels like I’m half the artist and writer I need to be.

A major part of it is sim­ple quan­ti­ty. My orig­i­nal plans for pub­li­ca­tion antic­i­pat­ed I could put words on the page at around five hun­dred per day. Quite a low esti­mate, I thought, giv­en what oth­er writ­ers man­age. Turns out, I was wrong, though it was­n’t the word count per say. The prob­lem was that when I wrote, it all came out out of order. If a para­graph was sup­posed to look like 123456789, my brain would vom­it out 48?13??56. And the time it took me to fig­ure out and reor­ga­nize those sen­tences in the right order vast­ly over­shad­owed the time it took me to write those sen­tences in the first place.

Com­pound­ing on that prob­lem was the nature of my writ­ing style. Since my illus­trat­ed nov­el attempts to seam­less­ly main­tain POV between the prose and the art­work, Tev­ery time I had to reorder a para­graph, a scene, a chap­ter, there was a strong pos­si­bil­i­ty I had to rethink what any near­by art would look like. The com­po­si­tion, the per­spec­tive, and how it inter­played with the text. The num­ber of sketched art­works that have end­ed up in the garbage bin, pulled back out, then put back in again, would hor­ri­fy you.

Suf­fice it to say, it has been hell stream­lin­ing this process. But I have got­ten bet­ter.

I think that’s the point of this post, I guess. I don’t want to be miser­ly with the back­log of chap­ters I’ve writ­ten so far, but right now, I have to be. I am not a prac­ticed enough writer or artist to pub­lish the vol­ume of work I’d like to. But I think I even­tu­al­ly will be.

Book One of Chal­lenger’s Chase is some­what of an amuse-bouche for the whole series. It’s a whole lot of world set-up, and whole lot of char­ac­ter intro­duc­tion, and a whole lot of fore­shad­ow­ing; hid­den inside in a fun lit­tle pack­age of dead­ly com­pe­ti­tion. I ful­ly intend for it to be enter­tain­ing and grip­ping in its own right (it bet­ter be after the work I put into it, god­damn it!), but the stuff I real­ly look for­ward to comes after. After all, the core nar­ra­tive has not changed in the past three years of revi­sions, and I’m look­ing for­ward to explor­ing new ground in the world of Aerth.

But that’s skip­ping ahead. Even pub­lish­ing what I have, I expect to do a lot of learn­ing this year. Some of my most explo­sive peri­ods of growth as a writer have occurred when I put my work in front of an audi­ence, and I expect much the same now. Even if, in some mag­i­cal won­der­land, there was noth­ing to fix in my writ­ing or art­work, I already know there is so much for me to fig­ure out about the logis­tics of pub­lish­ing, how to reach my audi­ence, and a whole bunch of oth­er real­ly impor­tant, real­ly prac­ti­cal things.

Time to put my feet in the fire. 2025 is about to be a year of growth.