But finally the bug bit me again. This time, I decided to try my hand at something I'd never done before. I decided to write a young adult novel, so I brought together some ideas that were floating around in my head and started working on a manuscript.
That manuscript was for a novel called Mindy Lightbearer, and it was the story of an 11-year-old girl named Mindy Lang, her bullying friend Lucy Grossman, and the boy she secretly liked, Aaron Tennant. It opened with Mindy watching snow fall on the town of Chesset while her elderly father watched a documentary about Ponce de Leon on the television and grumbled at the screen.
Since it was an urban fantasy novel, it involved magic, specifically a kind of magic that turned thoughts and feelings into reality. This was meant to serve as a plot device to explore a theme about our protagonist envisioning her potential.
At the time, I lived in the smallest town I've ever lived in, a place called West Fork, and I wanted to capture the peculiarities of small town life. However, I didn't want to use an actual town as the setting because of the potential constraints of reality, so I created an amalgam of a number of area towns and named it Chesset. For the record, Chesset has the basic layout of Mountainburg, Arkansas circa 2008, but I rotated it 90 degrees and moved it west of the interstate and a few miles north. Also, unlike Mountainburg, Chesset has no dinosaurs in the city park.
The name of the town was a play on the town of Chester, Arkansas. In fact, Cholly's One Stop, the combination gas station-grocery store-cafe that serves as a major hub of activity in Chesset was very loosely based on the Chester Mercantile.
As I worked on the novel, I realized there was a much bigger story that could cover multiple volumes. Unfortunately, I was struggling just to get through the first draft. It turns out, not writing for years had diminished my abilities significantly, and when I finally finished the first draft, I was frustrated at how it had turned out. My wife volunteered to read it and afterward made a few confused comments and offered tepid praise.
What followed were about ten drafts of that manuscript, as I tried to figure out how to make it flow better. Mostly, it was just a struggle to create comfortable prose. I had lost my voice. I queried a few publishers, but I knew it was hopeless. Finally, I abandoned the novel to a desk drawer.
During the course of those rewrites, however, a lot of things changed. Mindy Lang became Mindy Lanham because Lang is my wife's maiden name, and I didn't want people to think the character was based on her. Then I dropped Mindy in favor of Mary; I thought Mary had more gravitas. She also grew up (from 11 to 14 and a half). Aaron Tennant became Aiden. Lucy Grossman became Kristen because I kept getting images of Lucy from Peanuts in my head.
But all those changes were for nothing. The book lay in a drawer and collected dust. I just didn't have it anymore.
And then November 2009 rolled around, and some frenzy took hold of me. It was like a voice from on high said, Dude, why are you not writing? Your talent is rotting in the ground! It was a strange phenomenon, but once it took hold, I couldn't shake it. Thus began a crazy five months in which I churned out dozens of short stories. They just flowed out of me like a fountain of the most beautiful vomit you've ever seen. Eleven of those stories wound up getting published. A few are still online, like this one and this one and this one.
It was a crash course, and I relearned how to write. So finally, after I got sick of writing short stories, I decided to go back and see what I could do with the novel that was now called Mary of the Aether. I knew now what I needed to do with the story, how to make it flow better, and crafting prose had become comfortable.
This time around, when I was finished, I managed to find a publisher, and I went through the whole process of being a first-time author (and all of the frustrations, excitement, and confusion that goes along with it). But, as it turned out, I was terrible at the editorial process, despite having a fairly involved editor. Some major typos made their way into the published novel. My favorite one was where I referred to the character of Constable Mohler as Constable Rogers in one place. Also, Kindle screwed up the formatting, and there were random font size changes throughout.
My publisher should have fixed these things, but they didn't. I won't get into the why, but the good news is I have a new publisher. That is to say, my publisher was bought out. The imprint still carries the same name, Whiskey Creek Press, but there are new people in charge. And the new boss has been diligent about rooting out every typo and formatting error in the manuscript.
So the good news is, if you buy Mary of the Aether now, you get the typo-free version, and if you buy the Kindle version, the font choices are correct from beginning to end. In a way, it feels like the end of a long journey with good ole Mary Lanham.
In the meantime, I've also written the rest of the series, and the fourth and final volume is coming out in mere weeks.
And there you go. That's is my long rambling history of Mary of the Aether. Thanks for hanging in there this long. There is a lot more I could say about the book. Maybe I will dig into the themes and ideas behind the story in another blog entry, but for now, these one hundred paragraphs will do. Thanks.
By the way, you can learn more about the books and places to buy them HERE.
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