Ten years of work left me right back where I started.

A journey like this doesn’t really begin with the first edition published. Where you could begin it is more nebulous: flashes of ideas in 2006, while I was in third year of my undergraduate degree? 2008, when a first draft was finally written?
For the purposes of this post, I’m more concerned with the attempted career launch of late 2014 and early 2015. It was a time of great excitement and impatience, a decent case study regarding the dangers of getting one’s hopes up.
“The Campaign”
Lacking interest from any publisher, I first thought to publish this on my own, with no mentorship or guidance at the time. For that, I rightly expected to need a budget while having no savings to speak of; I was working inconsistent freelance editing and transcribing, listening to empty promises from one particularly erratic client and bouncing in and out of brief work stints with him, and content to use what I earned for the occasional splurge or short trip, while my middle-class parents kept housing and feeding me as I pursued my dream. Whatever career I thought I would get from my degree never transpired, though that did get me some interesting experiences with a magazine – something better suited to another post.
What a long way to say I didn’t have much money, therefore I went around asking for some. I was familiar with the Kickstarter platform at the time having supported others, and I shopped around about as well as I would when I enter a store already knowing the one item I want.
My promotional activity was an amalgam of everything I perceived other people to be doing. When they did it, I understood and others seemed to understand; people were going all out for their dream and didn’t have the backing of a corporate sales and marketing team, so word of mouth was the best way to go. When I believed I was carrying this out precisely as observed, I seemed to annoy people and even lost some friends.
The money went to a small service provider which promised to do several things I couldn’t, and delivered on the basic and most tangible ones. Wraparound cover art, a press release, formatting of the book, everything I paid for. They couldn’t make people want to purchase or read this book. I wouldn’t work with them again.
What phrasing: “make people…” I like living in a world where we have enough choice for that phrasing to be dubious. If I were able to access a power that would make people read and enjoy my work, there’s no reason why only I would bear this power – and that means anybody else with access could suddenly hijack my choices and yours, mandating our consumption, perhaps altering our perception so we are made to enjoy what we otherwise wouldn’t. Would some detached part of ourselves remain cognizant of our existence as marionettes, helplessly observing in first-person all the things we are made to do? Mentally screaming for the rest of our lives while our mouths are forced to smile? Creepy, dangerous, and wrong no matter who has that power – even if wielded solely by one who promised to use it for good. Therefore, I agree that I would rather live in a world where people arrive at some authentic form of appreciation and enjoyment themselves, and as a consequence, retain the capability to pan and subsequently avoid everything I have ever written if they see fit. Everybody has that lifelong right; you do, which means I do too.
But everyone lives with that. It’s a baseline problem, separate from the only learning method I seem to employ: bumping into every wall of an unlit labyrinth as I hope to turn a welcome corner.
2015: The Release Year
In the background of everything, and not known to most, I had been an anxious wreck for a long time. I had a project to gain a social life that began during my undergrad years, and it was only either euphoria or the brink of collapse. I didn’t have a professional assessment until 2021, to validate exactly why the social realm seemed like such a frustrating place or what I was even doing. Some people seemed pretty insistent that I knew exactly what I was doing while pretending not to, which is the most frustrating reply to hear when you truly have no idea what you are doing.
In my private life, I more often think of 2015 as The Medication Year. I got my prescription while I had yet to bounce out of my second roommate experience, had the dose steadily upped as I hoped for a breakthrough right around the next corner of the unlit labyrinth; something way more accessible and easier to understand. And somewhere along the way, I’m sure I botched my dosage upwards at least once, got into a disagreement about whether I should be taking it at all, and quietly titrated myself off without any guidance for doing so – quickly and improperly.
The time span encompassed by that goes between the end of the Kickstarter campaign, the release, an era where I couldn’t seem to stay conscious for much longer than six hours at a time without needing even more sleep than the ridiculous amount I appeared to require, and coming out the other side.
I feel quite satisfied to be alive after that. Once off the meds, I became capable of staying awake and aware long enough to work even one of the entry level jobs I knew I needed soon. If I were to continue, I decided, there should be no more Kickstarters; no one-stop-shop would deliver quite what I was hoping, and in the long term, soliciting funds hurt more than it helped. Anyway, it was self-evident I needed some form of income to proceed even without the very present external pressure to do so.
That would lead us to 2016 and the boutique cosmetics manufacturing years, but those encompass the direct sequels and a couple other books released with cover art paid out of pocket. That’s another post in itself.
The Gift-Knight’s Quest
My first book is no longer for sale on any platform. If it is, it shouldn’t be. Perhaps someone is trying to sell you a pre-owned first edition at an inflated price; inflated because it’s my earliest work where I had the least knowledge of what to do, and also because I’ve seen eBay listings where people claim it’s from the 19th century or some other era. The author was born in 1985 and never had access to a time machine that he can recall.
I’m surprised at how many decent reviews this book has, which I chalk up mostly to the willingness to be kind to a debut.
I say this because I’m writing The Last Gift-Knight, or as it will be known upon release, The Gift-Knight’s Quest. After more than one quiet tweak and re-release, I am undertaking a deeper and more intensive effort to rewrite this book. To me, it’s The Last Gift-Knight not just because Derek could/will be the last gifted warrior in his tradition (tangent – I perceive a narrative hole in the first edition where the gift-knight tradition is well discussed, but no mention is ever made of the one that would have been sent for Jonnecht the Second, or the ones sent to any new regent in the Eastern Kingdoms, for starters). It’s also the last time I’ll attempt to have this book address the ideas I always had in mind, yet I wasn’t skilled or experienced enough to deliver in the first edition.
My greatest obstacle in the process so far is having to read this book. I have gained a fresh appreciation for why it has been so difficult to persuade anybody else to read it. My chapter-by-chapter outline in advance of a writing retreat is about half way through, but my most recent note warns me to go back to the rather short section for Chapter Seven and actually read it closely this time, not only summarizing what’s there but noting suggested changes, just as I have done for other chapters. I can’t let myself skip steps, even if it’s a slog.
And if it’s a slog for me, that suggests why it got many looks but few sales in any store where it was on consignment.
When I took my first three books off sale, I felt like accepting them mostly as they were; I knew they were earlier works, learning is lifelong, and whether others can forgive the necessities of the journey, I of all people should be able to count on my own forgiveness. I expected to sweep through and immediately improve the reading experience by editing countless unorthodox dialogue tags. Other than that, how different could they read from any of the five books I’ve kept on sale?
So, I opened up The Gift-Knight’s Quest, 2019 re-release edition, in epub and PDF editors to make the changes in parallel. Then I encountered a word choice I would make different, closely followed by a turn of phrase that didn’t mean what I must have thought it meant… an ever expanding list of things from the first couple of pages alone.
No, thought the author, I see no quick fixes. I believe it would be less trouble to rewrite most of this book.
And then I began to consider a host of other things. The series order should change; I should direct people to read Prince Ewald the Brave first. It could be read independently of anything published prior to it, anyway, similar to why I promote it and the books after it as readable on their own. But what of the series order? If the prequels are no longer prequels, and read first, they will already have established historic facts and world-building that The Gift-Knight’s Quest attempted to address with countless flashbacks – hoping to show echoes of the past in parallel with a journey in the present. By the same token, this must render obsolete more than one infodump in dialogue.
If I merely removed flashbacks and brushed up what was left, this would become a short novel like Their Village, Their Fortress. I don’t intend for that. Scenes removed make room for scenes to be added, and I could imagine some that would better develop the present-time of the narrative.
It would need new cover art. As I vaguely recall my agreement with the original cover artist, I was permitted to use her art for that edition. The 2019 revisions didn’t push that boundary much, essentially leaving it the same book. This time, I can’t really pretend it’s the same even if the title carries over.
It’s just as well that I have no new stories in the queue. I’ll have my hands full rewriting this one. So full that even if simple logic dictates the propagation of changes to the sequels, perhaps an equal need to revise them (they rely far less on flashbacks, at least), equal need for new cover art… I write down a note when it comes to me, but beyond that, I refuse to look ahead to the next two projects implied by this one. I work better with one task at a time, so as not to feel overwhelmed. Paying work may mandate multitasking, but my creative work feels like a realm where I should consider my personal experiences and optimize my process accordingly.
The Last Gift-Knight
When I finally accepted that the difficult path for this project was the appropriate one, I created a working folder for it on my desktop named “Right Back Where I Started”. This refers to a long deleted social media message where I once cynically predicted that after a long series of failed efforts promoting all the past releases, and throwing good money after bad, I would find myself right back where I started.
I’m standing at that place now and it’s not what I once feared. There’s a life I was worried I would end up with if I never found enough support for my creative works to wildly succeed: it’s very much my life today. It feels like a good life – good enough. With the wisdom of hindsight, I look back upon the only life I could have led, shaped by decisions based very much on my personality and the boundaries of my knowledge and capabilities at the time.
A dust devil comprised of overwhelming possibilities and things that never came to pass has dispelled, leaving one path ahead that I can recognize. With the other paths stripped away, I might as well.