Every day, for ten years, I would get out of bed, turn on the laptop, start the coffee, and sit down to write. I did not need an alarm. My characters woke me. It was as if they were all crammed into my little apartment, tapping their toes and leaning on broadswords and axes waiting for me to get up. My every spare thought was spent on my world, and the lives of the people in it.

In 2018, I finished my book, Mother Made of Iron. I’d been through all the edits and revisions, the moments of bare-faced self-doubt and crippling questions of my choices in life and survived. After writing and writhing around in the world I’d created, it was time to promote it. I had to find representation. I started researching literary agents and drafting query letters to send them.

Today it is 2019 and it has been one long year, and one short year of actively querying agents. I am still going, and why shouldn’t I be? It’s only been a year. It was a long one yes, but then, I am not a patient man. It’s been a short one because how many writers have gone so much longer? I’ve heard the stories, some authors go through hundreds of rejections – hundreds. Some have waited twenty or more years to finally be published. Why should I feel special? Of course, I do feel special; like I should have been published already, but it’s that dab of necessary narcissism that probably keeps me from giving up. Despite the denials, I have come to appreciate the journey even though my folder of query rejections continues to grow.

Years ago, I started a practice where I would go to my local bookstore in Tempe, Arizona and take a picture of where my book will go on the shelf. I do this every couple of months. Between Patrick Rothfuss, and Rena Rossner, my debut fantasy novel will one day live. I take those pictures because I have to, because this process is not easy. Every writer has to go through the gauntlet of rejection. Some get through it quicker than others and some don’t. I’m still in it. The point is to keep going. Do not listen to doubt. Do not give up. Do not stop writing.

One thing that has helped me get through this query process with my fantasy novel, is writing something other than fantasy. Despite my desire to jump right into book two of the intended series, Mother of Light, Father of Shadow, I had to stop and address things that I had to write in this world, more specifically, my world. I write fantasy because the genre saved me growing up through difficult times in my life. I don’t particularly relish going over the things that made me turn to fantasy but that’s where the writing is telling me to go, and I go where the writing takes me. Most of the time, it takes me to lands where dragons sleep under the earth, but sometimes I have to walk back from a scorched childhood to find my way home.

Writing brings me places I never knew existed and some I wish never did, but I am kept warm by the fire it creates. Like some modern day caveman, I hunch by its flame to scrawl the contents of my mind on this digital wall.