Battlemage is officially published next week and at the moment I’m spending a fair bit of time reflecting. Not only looking ahead to what is about to happen with my first launch event at Waterstones in Leeds, and London the week after, but I’m also looking backwards into the past.
I was going to write about how long it’s taken me to get to this moment, but I think I covered that previously in my posts about How I Found an Agent, part 1 and Part 2. The short version is, it’s been a long time coming. I’ve written many novels and had many rejections over the years before I got to this point.
From next week my first published novel will be out there in the world. It won’t belong just to me anymore and neither will the characters or the story. That’s a very weird feeling because for the longest time it has just been me talking about these characters, their thoughts and dreams, and soon I’ll hear other people talking about them in a familiar fashion. They’ll feel as real to them as they do to me. They will live in the minds of other people. I’ve not experienced this kind of thing before, so I think it’s going to take a little while to adjust. It’s also going to be fascinating for me to hear what other people think about certain characters, how they see them and find out which are their favourites and why.
Also, I kind of knew something already, but it really crystallised very recently. Despite it taking a long time to get here, this is actually just the beginning. For readers I’ve essentially fallen out of the sky and if they like Battlemage, they’ll look for more books in the future. So after that I have to deliver something new and if they enjoy it, continue delivering periodically.
Thankfully book 2 is well on its way to being totally complete, and it will be out in about six months. I’m now inches away from the end of the first draft of book 3, which will then be coming out in about 12 months time. So by this time next year, the Age of Darkness trilogy will be complete. Totally done and dusted. That’s kind of scary but also a cool thought. It will be amazing to see the three books together and see what people think of it as a complete story.
In about a month’s time, things should be a bit quieter and for the first time in three years I’ll start to properly focus and think about something beyond the Age of Darkness. It’s an exciting and slightly terrifying thought, but it will also be a bit of a reset moment and a step back in time because I won’t have a deadline or people asking to see it. Not just yet anyway!
Next month I’ll be at Fantasycon in Nottingham and then I’ll be a guest at SledgeLit in Derby in November. Take a look at the events page for more details.
Stephen Aryan 