Vakov Fukasawa is trapped.

Captured by his ruthless and cruel enemies, the House of Suns, he has been broken in body and mind, tormented until he is something less than human. And yet, Vakov and his brother Artyom are the Common’s last hope.

The war against the Suns has grown to swallow the galaxy. Entire systems rattle with violence. Planets are burning. Species are hunted to extinction. And now that the genocidal alien Shenoi have been successfully summoned, billions of lives are staring into the abyss.

To save his friends and his home, Vakov will need to work with his brother to build a great intergalactic army. He will need to become the hero, the legend, his people believe him to be. He will need to draw on his every last ounce of courage to gain the loyalty and fury required to survive. He will need to become The Black Wolf.

But is Vakov willing to pay the price that victory demands?

Allow the scenes to guide you

Blindspace, the sequel to Stormblood, was the first book I ever wrote under contract. I developed an outline and kept to it pretty strictly, not wanting to let myself get side-tracked with ideas that did not fit my self-imposed narrative.

But that caused me problems. A lot of them. So I learned to loosen things up for Wolfskin. Sure, the overall shape of the story fits my vision, but I allowed myself to be a little faster and looser with how things swerved to reach that point. Certain side characters introduced themselves to me, demanding to be written, and write them I did. There’s a scene in this book that I genuinely did not think I’d get away with (you’ll know it when you see it). And there’s also a chapter just before the middle-point that I completely pantsed. I threw in several new characters and alien races and funky world-building details, set them interacting with each other, all against the backdrop of a very cool set-piece.

Neither of those things were in the outline, or the first draft. And yet, they turned out exceptionally well, because I allowed the characters and the scene and the story’s momentum to guide me. And I had enormous fun in doing so.

Trusting your own voice.

For a variety of reasons, I had a bad experience when working on Blindspace, Book 2, where I was exposed to a slew of very negative feedback about my work. And it left me doubting everything about my story. My voice. My style. My storytelling. The direction I wanted to go and the method in which I wanted to go there. I struggled to even get a single paragraph down, already imagining the inevitable criticisms and dissecting that it would be exposed to, and how I might be forced to change things.

I’ve always known that I was neurodivergent. But all this made me realise how deeply it was impacting me.

So I had to learn, all over again, how to give myself permission to do what I wanted to do. To remind myself that, yes, as the creator and CEO of this savage little world of mine, there was no objective right or wrong way for me to tell this story: only the way I wanted it to go.

But this did not happen overnight. It took at least a whole extra year of sitting down everyday and pushing, forcing myself to stick with my goals, my voice, my vision. And I’m hella glad I did, because there are a lot of risks and bold decisions that I had to take in order to finish Wolfskin, and I don’t think I could have done it if I hadn’t built up that muscle.

Good writing is not necessarily fun or easy writing (and that’s okay!)

Most of us aren’t writing to get rich (ha!) or for untold fame. We do it because we enjoy telling stories and putting our thoughts on paper. And ultimately, yes, the act should be enjoyable.

But does it mean it will be easy? Or always fun? Absolutely not.

It’s easy to write one word after another, to do what one feels like in the moment, with little thought given to craft or layering or larger story arcs. I used to write fanfiction when I was younger, and the experience was both immensely enjoyable and immensely easy.

But writing professionally, for publication, is much harder. It’s harder to show up day after day, writing hundreds and hundreds of pages with a close attention to craft and detail, making sure every scene is working as hard as it can, scraping entire chapters and characters if they do not fit, and sculpting a story arrows towards a conclusion that is logical and surprising and satisfying and half a hundred other things.

It’s much harder. And there will be days when you won’t love it, where it won’t always be fun, and where writing will feel frustrating and difficult and overwhelming (if someone says otherwise, they’re lying!). The more ambitious the project, the more intense these feelings can be.

And that’s okay.

As someone with ADHD, all this is especially true. And I’ve had to learn the hard way not to beat myself up when a given day’s writing does not rock the world, or when I’m not jumping out of bed to get to work everyday. You are allowed to have those days. You should not feel terrible if some projects are tougher to get done than others.

You’re allowed to be human.

Crank up those bad-ass moments

Sure, I write for myself. But I also write to be read, to leave an impact on the reader. And so I invested heavily in writing some epic “stand up and cheer moments”, where there is a feeling of catharsis and liberation and satisfaction.

Where we see the characters shrugging off the limits imposed on them by their tormentors and go after them with their fangs bared and wild fury in their eyes. When all the pieces fall into place and the curtain is whisked away and a grin starts slowly spreading across the face of the reader as it all dawns on them all that has been in play behind the scenes.

It’s not easy, writing these scenes. But pulling them off successfully and making everything sync up together like clockwork? Immensely satisfying. And it showed me that, when done right, how they can raise a novel to new and riveting heights!

The darkness comes from within.

For plot-related reasons that I do not wish to spoil, there’s a lot of dark emotional ground that is explored in Wolfskin, through the main character Vakov, especially at the start of the novel. Anxiety, depression, rage, hatred, self-loathing, hopelessness.

I did have the option to cut through these, and it would have been much better for the pacing. But I couldn’t. It would have been a betrayal, both to the main character, and me. These issues were things that I myself had either endured, or was currently working on, and seeing them there, as part of my story, was hugely cathartic for me.

Was it hard to channel up that darkness, to expose myself on the page like that? Yes. Unquestionably. But it also taught me a great deal about my own mind, and allowed me to have a higher level of empathy, both for my character and even for myself, as strange as that may sound. And I think it has added a depth to my writing that readers will appreciate.

Bonus thing: I couldn’t not do this.

As you may have guessed from the above, writing and publishing these books have come with some significant challenges, during a time that was already challenging (COVID, anyone?). I wrote Stormblood when I was 21 years old, and sold it at 23, and publishing can be baffling for anyone of any age.

But I could not not write them the way that they had to be. All my life, I’ve been seeking a way to be a writer. To get my vision and voice into the hands of other people. To rise above the limits imposed upon me, either by others or myself, and to let my fury shine.

In many ways, this is my story.

And now, that journey that I’ve been on, the ups and downs, has been worked into these books. Crystallized in flawed memory. Every description, every insight into human nature, is mine.

And I hope you’ll come on the adventure with me, because, like life, we cannot survive it on our own.

Jeremy Szal was born in 1995 and was raised by wild dingoes, which should explain a lot. He writes epic fantasy and dark space opera of a character-driven, morally grey nature. His main series is the Common trilogy from Gollancz/Hachette, which includes STORMBLOOD, BLINDSPACE, and WOLFSKIN, about a drug harvested from alien DNA that makes users permanently addicted to adrenaline and aggression. He’s the author of over fifty short stories, translated into sixteen languages, many of which appear in his collection BROKEN STARS. He was the editor for the Hugo-winning StarShipSofa until 2020 and has a BA in Film Studies and Creative Writing from UNSW. He carves out a living in Sydney, Australia with his family, where he loves watching weird movies, eating Japanese food, exploring cities, learning languages, cold weather and dark humour.

Jeremy Szal: Website

Wolfskin: Bookshop.org | Amazon