Once Upon A Time There was a Family of Kids Who Lived Happily Ever After

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cover reveal, finale, once upon a time, Poetry, Stormdancer, The Wandering God, The Watcher, writing

Part 1 of this blog can be read here. Part 2 can be read here.  I suggest you do that before you continue.

Once upon a time there was a poet who wrote two epic poems.   Both of them by accident, both of them by magic.  Once upon a time the poet realized that he could write this world and these characters forever.  They were a part of him and he them.  They had enriched his world and made him better by coming to be.

And yet…

Times had changed.  They had nearly said everything they needed to say to him.  And he in turn had other stories to tell.  The sad truth the poet realized that once upon a time, is that even though that he could keep writing forever, him and his characters needed to go their separate ways.

This is where I started on this journey.

I will never presume mine is better.  Coleridge is a master and someone that I can always go back to for more inspiration.  I’m not sure if mine will ever have that kind of impact.  I hope (what artist doesn’t?), but I don’t know for sure.

That said, I’m proud.

This is where it finishes.

All journey’s evolve.

This is a story about the journey.  A vision from the Wandering God compels the Watcher to seek the city at the end of the world, and save the Wandering God before the Dragons get him first.

The Wandering God came to me like a poem in of itself.  A being who creates everything and leaves, always wandering onto new ideas, leaving behind old ideas without a second thought, or a whim.  I feel every writer is a bit of a wandering deity.  We create our creations and then move on.

Writing this book taught me why this was so.  I love my characters.  I love Will and his inventive mischief.  I love Nicki for being the smallest, fiercest person I know.  I love Kristen, for she is the toughest person I’ve ever met.

But we all have to change and grow and when I set out to write it I knew when I got to the other side of the story, that I had to put it down.  I owed them that.  For this world and these characters and this place and this time, I’ve said what I’ve needed to say.

This one was more planned than the others.  I knew the fate of the Wandering God, and I knew what the stakes really were.  I had an ending (mostly).  So I let them walk and guide me to the end of their story, wherever it lay.

I didn’t expect some of the things in there that happened. I didn’t expect the rock people that came to me.  Nor the empty space between nature and the city itself.  Perhaps my favorite chapter in this story is “Stories In An Empty World” where each kid tells a story about the empty and how it may have came to be.

It’s a grand adventure, with monsters, wonders and joys and sadness.

And it has an end.

 

This book to me is a culmination of a story of a journey in my head.  Writing this made me realize there were things about my health and my place that needed to change.  None of us can afford the danger of stillness.  No matter how happy or sad we are, we have to keep moving forward, for time always goes on.

We have to make the moments count.

So what’s next now?  I have no idea in terms of epic poetry.  I do have some ideas, but this is the last story in this world.  With the first we talked about freedom, the second, we talked about family.  This story was about faith in the journey itself and where it leads.  I hope if you get to the end you have the same satisfaction I did.

I guess there are only two things left to say.  The first is a caution.  Just because this blog says they lived happily ever after doesn’t mean that they in fact do.  I do promise that there is an end.  Beyond that?  Not telling.  Buy this book on October 17th, 2017 and find out.

The second?  Thank you for letting me explore this Once Upon A Time.  I learned so much on this journey.  I’m happy it happened.

Once upon a time, there was a boy in a tower, who dreamed of a world without dragons and once upon a time there lived a poet to tell his story.  #thereismore #thestormishere #greaterworldsthanthese #happilyeverafter

Once Upon A Time there were a Family of Kids

Tags

Poetry, sequels, Stormdancer, The Wandering God, The Watcher, worldbuilding

So, the first book is done.  If you want to read the journey, click here for part 1.

Once upon a time I wrote a really good book.  I’m very proud of the Watcher.  But where do I go from there?

Once upon a time I dreaded the idea of doing a sequel to this.  I never planned the first book at all.  It was an accident.  This wouldn’t be quite so accidental.  I was continuing the story I started before.

But I had to try.  Once upon a time, I did.

Keep in mind, sequels by their very nature are harder than regular books.  You have to serve a bunch of masters doing one.  The first thing you have to do is look at what you think made the first book work, and try to keep that tone and feeling in book two, all the while doing something different.

What were my problems with this book?  There were a handful of them.  The biggest problem with the book was the Watcher himself.  He was such a defined character.  He had been the star of the first book and his journey had been amazing.  He had grown so much.

Kristen, Will and Nicki on the other hand were complete unknowns.  I had no clue who they were really, and if I didn’t I know the audience really didn’t either.  It would have been easy for me to just do another Watcher centric story with friends that would have served to add very little depth to them.

I needed to get to know them better.

The solution seemed obvious.

The Watcher would go missing with this sequel and it would be up to his friends to find him.  (Or would they?)

I decided that either Nicki or Kristen would take the role.  Of the two, Kristen spoke to me the most.  She had been the most distant of the three characters in the first book, and a very good reason came to me why.

I had a start to my story.  Did I have an end?  Would the world come to me as easily as it did before?

Easier.  Now there is something to be said about sequels.  You know the tune to the music you are writing too more familiarly.  The trick about going on a journey with a different character is to have different things happen to them.  The City of Dragons is something I didn’t focus on in the first book.  What would a city of Dragons and Humans look like over a compound?

But it was also a little different too.  Kristen wasn’t coming from a place of anger the Watcher had in book one.  She was coming from a place of uncertainty.  She had been happy with the familiar comforts of her life in book one.  Now they were gone.  Forever.

Her evolution was my favorite of any character I written.  Here she was in jail surrounded by dragons and humans and just made a decision to bust out.  With her friends she succeeded in doing so bare handed.  She is a living breathing bad ass and tougher than this writer will ever hope to be.

And you know what?  I like this book better than I like The Watcher.  It does venture into some of the same themes.  But like good sequels I think it managed to build on what came before.  The Watcher was about freedom, but Stormdancer was about family.  It was about the bonds of friendship surviving in a world such as this, and that love can move through anything.

Also,  I think Kristen is a more well rounded character than the Watcher himself is at the end of book two.  And as you can see above, Florence Chan killed it with this book.  My favorite thing she drew in here?  A pez dispenser.

The Pez dispenser came to me just while writing this.  I thought about all the religious artifacts in ancient times and just wondered to myself that what if all those things were nothing more than toys for children?  And maybe, just maybe, we just don’t know how to play with them any more than Kristen, Nicki or Will did in Stormdancer.  I really liked that thought.

Which leads to the final thing I want to discuss before I move on.  Rain dancing as a concept just intrigued me.  How could one make rain fall just dancing?  Only when I looked at my keyboard did the answer come to me.   What if dance movements were simply instructions inputted into a system?  How would I communicate that?

dot, dot, line, line is a primer.  And now dear reader, you may see some hidden messages between Kristen and the world of the Watcher you never saw before.  Stormdancing indeed has a message.

One other small change I should mention is that I wanted Florence to get a credit for this on the cover.  After all the work she put in, she deserved it.

One final note of serendipity and I will go.  During the stampede in Calgary it rains as it always does.  I needed to go out to a concert and it just so happens that Lights was performing.  Now she did make the mistake of a white shirt with no bra in the rain, but that aside, it was a great show.

I wrote Stormdancer to the Lights album Siberia and here I was once upon a time dancing in the storm listening to the very music that created a whole world.  Not only did I create it, I lived it.

Now you don’t need the Watcher to read Stormdancer, but I do hear that they go together like peanut butter and jelly.  You can buy them at Mirror World Publishing’s store or you check it out here, and if you do so, leave a review.

to be continued….

Once Upon A Time

Tags

books, florence chan, Mirror World Publishing, Poetry, Stormdancer, The Wandering God, The Watcher

Sometimes the path comes to you by accident.

Good journey’s start with once upon a time.  So let’s go there.

Once upon a time I read this book right here.  It’s a neat book.  It was an epic poem that retold the story of Jesus, Paul and the book of Revelation.

It’s pretty good, very imaginative, and gives you a sense of a great epic unfolding.  I should at some point review this book in truth.  It really showed me just what could be possible with the whole poetry book thing.

It wasn’t just a poetry book per se.  It was a graphic novel.  There were illustrations and some very cool mythological concepts.  One such image was the glass in The Finale.  The glass reflection showing only one truth was just such a neat concept and it made me think.

Beautiful, flowing, musical, and maybe a touch preachy for those that don’t believe.  It doesn’t change the fact that I liked this a lot.

I wondered if I could write something like that someday.

Or maybe something like this.

 

A wise man once said, seek what the masters sought.  This to me was the master goal if I ever decided to try and write an epic poem.  Coleridge to me was the man and I remember in high school wondering if I could write an epic like that myself some day.  Poetry seemed very hard to me (it still is to be honest).  But I told myself one day I would try.

One day.

Once upon a time I was in Calgary Alberta, and wanted to try a poetry collection.  I wanted to do something longer and a little bit bigger than a one or two page poem.

My day job still blows and I remember at the time being unusually upset.  Now I want to clarify something before I go, it’s not the job itself that I’m railing against.  If I’m honest, I’ve worked with some great people in the past, and I work with great people now in the present.  But at that moment I was sick of work.

I was sick of the waste of time, the futility of the struggle.  Why work just to get by?  It seemed (and seems) like the biggest waste of my energy.  A boy came in my head, looking out in the horizon, watching for the rain, dreaming of a time he could find his freedom.

I wrote that poem.  It was longer than any other I did.  I called it “The Watcher”.  I liked the first poem.  He captured exactly what I was feeling in the moment.

And then, once upon a time, I dared to ask what happened next?

I wrote that.  It was an action piece entitled Escape.  The Watcher kills his dragon masters and flees out into the unknown for the first time ever in his life.  I enjoyed that.  But I couldn’t stop there.  I had to know what was next.

And then after, next.

I knew then that I had a story here, told in a unique way.  I read it start to finish and thoroughly enjoyed it.  But I wanted to keep it unique.  During my time as an apprentice I found myself looking at how young adult books combine illustrations and design to challenge how a book can be read, not unlike the Singer Trilogy I mentioned above.

My stick figures tend to revolt, so I couldn’t do this myself.  I needed to enlist aid.  I found it in a comic shop.  Someone I had worked with had done a comic.  I really liked her work and thought she’d bring a unique angle to the project.  Fortunately, she agreed.

Her name is Florence Chan and her Twitch channel is here.  You should visit her on mondays.  She does amazing work.  She added a depth to the story that wasn’t there before, and gave me new dimension to consider.  I will say here and now that she made each book in the series better for being a part of it.

I need to mention my first editor here in Kristen Denbow.  Kristen enjoys my work and has been a great friend for me and been there when I really needed someone in my darker hours.   Even though she doesn’t make it to the last book, I need to take a moment and thank my friend who was there as an editor and dear friend.  Thanks Kristen.

So finally, it was done.

Not bad.  Of course, once the book was done I had no real plan.  The initial idea was that I would sell this as an ebook and print the odd one here and there at conventions.  I had no big plans.  I mean, it was poetry, who would publish it.

Once upon a time there was this author in Windsor Ontario that I interviewed when I bought her first books in a local bookstore.  They were neat and I admired her guts for doing so.  She bought one of the early Smashword editions and read it and liked it.

She then asked me what I was going to do with it.  I told her my grand plans as I’ve written here.  I figured that would be the end right?  But it wasn’t.  It turns out this author was starting her own publishing house based in Windsor and offered to publish the book on the spot.

Her name was Justine Alley Dowsett.  She is the publisher of Mirror World Publishing.  You should check out her website and buy books there (mine for example.)

http://www.mirrorworldpublishing.com/

Somehow, I got published.  I never sought the door with this in particular, it came my way.  I’ve always said in the past that if you can get just one yes, that’s all it would take.  I got my yes without ever asking for it.  It was really awesome and still one of the coolest moments I’ve ever had happen to me.

And I have to say, it turned out rather well.  I’ve managed to time and time again surprise readers who have looked.  Poetry isn’t a big sell.  Even my publisher isn’t quite sure how to approach my books sometimes.  That said, it captivates people who open the contents of the book.  I’m proud I did it.

I should also mention my Amazon page for this book.  It’s here.   If you do so happen to be curious about the book yourself, please leave a review.  It’d be nice.

And then, another came to me one day, about a girl and a storm…

To Be continued.