The best part of my August: I finished the first draft of my new fantasy novel!
I’m still coming back down to earth, very reluctantly, after spending the summer halfway in an altered state of intense creativity and inspiration I had never felt before, the kind where you could tell me I was some sort of conduit receiving the story from another plane and I would believe you. It was such a different experience from writing my first novel.
In this photo, from right to left: An old map of Åland that I used to gaze at often as a child, which served as inspiration for part of the novel’s setting; a genealogy book for one side of my mom’s family, from which I took a whole bunch of names both Finnish & Swedish; the two notebooks of ideas and plans for all the iterations this book saw over the past four years.
It does have a title, but it didn’t come to me until after I was finished, unlike The Quiet is Loud, so I still need to sit with it for a while.
I’ve already started editing the first draft and am happy to say that I actually enjoy reading it! It’s still in my brain, I still wake up far too early in the mornings thinking about it, so I’m happy to have this time with these characters and this story, making it even better.