Published!

Wow. I almost don't believe it (and neither do my friends), but I've finally shipped my young adult novel The Tree of Life. Only that's not what it's called anymore. There have actually been quite a few changes over the last, oh... 3103 days since I started plotting the story.

Back on the 29th of October 2006 in beautiful, but rainy, Galway, Ireland, my wife, me and our baby son had just come back from a vacation to Kenya. Previously that year we had visited family in the U.S.A. and the Netherlands as well as made trips to Prague and Estonia (you can say with a safe heart that we like to travel). All these cultures and beautiful experiences infused me with inspiration. The magical Emerald Isle certainly helped as well.

So when I had finished reading the latest Artemis Fowl, Harry Potter and Series of Unfortunate Events I thought: 'Why can't I write a story like this?' I was quite enchanted with these wonderful works, but equally frustrated by the boundaries the writers had set for themselves. For example, Harry lived in a wonderful part of the world with fantastic magical items, spells and mysteries. But what about the world outside of England? Artemis certainly traveled more, but his problem was that he was always bound to the faerie realms. How very Irish. Finally the Baudelaire Triplets seemed to always be on the move, but their world was one of simple symmetry. Villains appeared and disappeared like clockwork and story lines followed the same pattern and although charming in prose and imagination, it lacked a base of the real world. And that was what I was interested in: the real world in all of its glorious rich locales and exotic cultures. One where magical creatures of all sorts (not just fairy tales or faeries or elves and dwarves) roamed.

And so Aelemental was born. A 5 part series, steeped in the rich lore of cultural myths and legends (Mike Mignola's loves to delve here for Hellboy) where Indiana Jones meets James Bond. Worlds which Harry might find himself traveling to and Artemis would discover races beyond the faerie kingdom. I wove a rich tapestry of mythological races, history, languages and motives, all working behind the veil of Charms, away from humanity's curious eyes.

The first book was initially called Simon and Sally's Storybook Sojourn, then became Simon Spangenberg and the Tree of Life, and finally the Life Tree Discovery. The funny thing is that even though it took me about 8 and a half years to finally wrap the book up and publish it, the very first three days and the very last three days were marked by a whirlwind energy, courtesy of my Muses. Sure I've had many days where I loved working on the plot, characters and locations of the book, many more doing research, drafting and redrafting, but these were all slow and steady waves. I had a day job and a family after all. Besides, we ended up moving from Ireland to Sri Lanka to Thailand to the Netherlands to the U.S. in the span of those years. Still, those first three days were magically powerful as were the final three.

And now Book 1 of the Aelemental Journey series, the Life Tree Discovery is available on Amazon Kindle. It's what I call the trailer version, which has provisional artwork and is still under review by my editors, but it's also available at a discount price of $1.99. Somewhere down the road (as I write Book 2) I'll release the full version with its proper artwork, grammar corrections and some extras, and I'm even thinking of setting up print to order hard copies down the road with a whole bunch of source materials and annotations (like a Blu-Ray disc).

Let's hope it doesn't take another 8 and a half years to get that done.

I Write Like...myself

I've been a little bit in a slump lately. There is no way I'll be able to wrap up the redrafting of Simon & Sally before the deadline hits next week. My motivation to write has hit another low. Somehow my creativity strikes me in different ways. Lately it's been with painting and I found myself catching up on a number of assignments, first making a Klimt-cartoon version of my wife for her birthday (she's big on Klimt). Then I went to work on a promise to a friend I made a long time ago. Next up if the mood still strikes me is the second painting in a series of five representing the five books I want to write about Simon & Sally. Maybe that will get me back on the horse again. Other than that I've been making a number of pencil and color pen sketches, some about Simon & Sally, some not.

But it's not all visually expressed creativity as I found myself pulled towards the latest viral website: I Write Like. It's basically a site where you dump a portion of your written word in (fiction, non-fiction, blog, whatever) and through some mathematical calculations compares you to famous writers and gives you the name of the writer whose work yours most resembles. Very fun if a little arbitrary. I dumped one of my blog entries in there and came up with David Foster Wallace, a 'post modern hysterical realistic' writer according to wikipedia. He alledgedly commited suicide and was known for his examination of the human condition. Admittedly I like to delve into the psyche myself, to see what makes me tick, but then again, don't we all when we write blogs? My actual writing on Simon & Sally invoked resemblances to Ian Fleming and Kurt Vonnegut, and that's only of the next two times I ran the 'I Write Like' machine.

I'm careful to not take this too seriously, especially because I know I have an over-nurtured sense of associative reasoning. It's too easy to say that I'm writing the next James Bond, or that my style resembles that of the early 20th century fiction writers. After all, I bet if I ran my collective work through the site a hundred times it would probably come up with fifty to a hundred different writers. So what does this say? I guess we are all influenced to a certain degree by those who went before us, but ultimately we mold our stories from our own collection of experiences, both real and fictitious. So we write like we are. I write like me. And I wouldn't want it any other way. After all, what's the point in being the next Stephen King or J.K.Rowling? They're still here, and following in someone's footsteps who has already died (like all three of my so-called style buddies) just puts unnecessary pressure to perform.

And that's the last thing I need now...pressure to perform. I just need to keep tuned to my Muses and wait when they are finished window shopping in the mall of my visual expression and return to the road of literature.