When a country is held in thrall to a vicious, despotic king, it’s up to one woman to take him down.

Long ago, Queen Mirantha vanished. King Karolje claimed it was an assassination by a neighboring king, but everyone knew it was a lie. He had Disappeared her himself.But after finding the missing queen’s diary, Anza–impassioned by her father’s unjust execution and inspired by Mirantha’s words–joins the resistance group to overthrow the king. When an encounter with Prince Esvar thrusts her into a dangerous game of court politics, one misstep could lead to a fate worse than death.

Esvar is the second son to an evil king. Trapped under his thumb and desperate for a way out, a chance meeting with Anza gives him the opportunity to join the resistance. Together, they might have the leverage to move against the king–but if they fail, their deaths could mean a total loss of freedom for generations to follow.

Set in a world where resistance is as dangerous as it is important, The Vanished Queen is a tale of the courage and sacrifice it requires to take on a tyrant.

STALIN WAS REALLY REALLY BAD

The biggest change between the published novel and the earlier ones is that I focused the plot almost entirely on the political resistance to the king. This meant I had to do some reading about authoritarianism.

I had known Josef Stalin was a dictator, up there with Hitler and Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein, but I hadn’t know any of the details of his life or regime. Having grown up under Reagan, I had developed skepticism toward anyone bad-mouthing the Soviet Union, and I had not known how really bad Stalin was. Well. He was bad.

He ordered the collectivization of agriculture which resulted in famine that killed millions of people and may have been directed at ethnic Ukrainians, the show trials of the 1930s in which he eliminated rivals, and the “Great Purge” of 1936-1938 in which hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million, people were killed, many of them ethnic minorities. Stalin, his chief of secret police Lavrentiy Beria, and his other cronies were ruthless, cruel, evil people, of the sort that made me feel dirty after I read about them.

I added details inspired by this history here and there in the novel, but it was pretty brutal to realize that nothing I could imagine was as horrific as things that had actually been done.

THE KINGDOM OF AKSUM WAS A PLACE

I also read The Emperor, by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński (1978), which is an oral history of the fall of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia and dictator. This book is fascinating and was useful to me for its depictions of how Selassie played his ministers off against each other while cultivating the adoration of his subjects.

I knew that Ethiopia had existed in some form since antiquity, but I knew absolutely nothing about it prior to the Selassie regime, so I did some additional reading. The Kingdom of Aksum, which encompassed parts of modern Ethiopia, Eritrea, and other regions in North Africa, was a major player in the trade and politics of the first ten centuries of the Christian Era. The last ruler of the Aksum dynasty was the Empress Yodit in CE 912. (Eventually Ethiopia was ruled by the Solomonic Dynasty, which began in 1262 and lasted until Selassie.)

I have not learned nearly as much as I would like to, and I am really hoping that multiple writers of African origin will use Ethiopian history as a setting or model for a setting to write some completely badass epic fantasy. So much history waiting to be retold!

EXPLOSIVES ARE NOT INCENDIARIES, AND VICE VERSA

In movies, whenever something explodes, there’s a big boom and a big fire. In the opening scene of the first chapter of Queen, something explodes. I wanted it to be a loud explosion that would break some windows and make it hard for people to hear each other afterward. I also wanted lots of flames, because dramatic. Since I have no personal experience of explosions, I decided I had better do some research and not trust Hollywood.

It turns out that an incendiary is a chemical reaction that releases energy slowly, while a bomb causes explosive damage by releasing energy suddenly and powerfully. It generates shock waves and noise. Pulling the trigger on a gun sets off an explosive reaction which propels the bullet out of the barrel. Dynamite blows up rocks but doesn’t set them on fire. A Molotov cocktail, on the other hand, does its damage by burning things. Damage from the shattered glass is incidental.

It’s possible to have both heat and noise in one device by using an explosive charge to ignite the incendiary material, but the technology is complicated and was beyond the means of my characters and their environment. So I had to put a separate fire-source on the site to have both booms and flames.

PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY IS A SIGNIFICANT COMPONENT OF PLOT

In writing, I’ve often let my settings develop intuitively and focused my worldbuilding on customs, food, religion, transportation, and so on. In earlier versions of the book, the capital city was a river city. I decided somewhat arbitrarily to make things a little more interesting for myself and change the setting to islands in a lake. That led into all sorts of other things I hadn’t anticipated at all.

Control of the lake gave the king much more control of the populace. It was easy for his minions to limit access to various parts of the city. People leaving the city had to have a way “off-Island.” Even his sons couldn’t just get up and go. On the other hand, an entire economy related to shipping developed, and that introduced targets for the resistance. The resistance suddenly had the ability to attack vulnerable docks and to sow dissent by playing merchants off against their insurers. Changing the physical geography to one of isolation at the outset turned out to be extremely useful for coming up with small plot points that I could string together. This relationship between geography and plot has been a useful tool to add to my writer toolbox.

FAMILY DYNAMICS AND POLITICAL DYNAMICS ARE MUCH MORE INTERESTING WHEN THEY ARE INTERCONNECTED

I knew I wanted to explore power dynamics in Queen, but the book wasn’t gelling. So finally I sat down and thought about my favorite Shakespeare plays: Henry IV, Part 1; King Lear; Macbeth; and Hamlet. What I realized was that the core of each of these plays is a family story. Prince Hal has to negotiate his relationship with his father; Lear grievously misunderstands his children; Macbeth operates in concert with his wife; Hamlet is driven by his father’s ghost to kill his uncle. The politically powerful positions of the characters shape the plots, but what makes the plays meaningful is the family dynamics.

That power and family are more interesting when combined seems really obvious, and I had known it intellectually. But I didn’t really learn it until I was trying to make the connection important for all the characters. In earlier drafts, my main character Anza was an orphan; in this version I gave her a father who had been executed by the king, which not only raised the stakes for her but made all her interactions with the king’s son Esvar more complicated and twisty. In turn, Esvar’s relationship with his missing mother shapes his own actions. These changes gave the story a lot more meat.

***

Lisbeth Campbell grew up in Illinois and western Pennsylvania. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her jobs have run the gamut from housecleaner to teacher. When she is not writing, reading, or spending time with her husband and daughter, she is probably attending to one of her cats.

Lisbeth Campbell: Website

The Vanished Queen: Indiebound | Bookshop | Amazon

So, I officially teased the second Wanderers novel — a sequel — back when I dropped the fresh TV news about it, and now it’s time to talk about the deal that got us there.

Del Rey has kindly fallen for the trap once more and opted to re-up with me for a new three book deal. That includes Wayward (the Wanderers sequel), a new book called The Orchard (described as “the dark history of a small town, apple cultivation, and American colonialism”), and a third SECRET AS-YET-TO-BE-ANNOUNCED book.

So, for releases, that means:

Summer 2021: The Book of Accidents

Summer 2022: Wayward

Summer 2023: The Orchard

Sometime 2024: Secret Book

(Also in 2021: You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton, and my MG, Dust & Grim.)

An interesting bit of inside baseball when it comes to publishing —

Initially, The Book of Accidents was coming out this month. Like, the month we’re in now. And back before The Quarantimes, my publisher said, ennnnh, did you know there’s a huge election coming up? And a bad election? They noted that book sales around the 2016 election were wobbly, in part the assumption being it’s really hard to get sustained media and social media attention on a new book. Everything is election, election, election. Especially in the Trump Era, when Trump is just a giant sucking void that consumes all light and goodness. So, they said, “We’re moving the book,” and at first I was honestly a little circumspect about that, but then trusted their judgment. I didn’t want to fight the election for attention, could you imagine? So, they moved it. And then the fucking pandemic hit and now I think I’m glad we moved it. Admittedly, who knows what a HELL TOILET the Year 2021 will be, but hopefully by this July we won’t still be litigating the election and maybe new leadership will ease the pandemic.

So, initially we talked about having The Orchard be the next book after TBOA, okay? And then have Wayward in 2022. But because TBOA moved, we decided to not move Wayward and still leave it in place — which meant that became the next book, with the Evil Apples book juggled to 2023.

Anyway! So them’s the news.

And yes, this is all just a scheme to ensure that my apple purchases are tax-deductible.

“IT’S RESEARCH,” I tell my accountant, apple juice soaking my beard.

Needless to say, this is really great, and Del Rey has been a wonderful publisher — and Tricia Narwani a most excellent editor. Her edit letters are a thing of vicious beauty. My agent, Stacia Decker, deserves thanks too for not only helping broker the deal but also being an excellent editor herself. My books are 4007% better because of their combined efforts.

And thanks too to readers, because honestly, I always said there’d only be a Wanderers sequel if both there was a story there to tell (meaning, I figured out what that story was), and if sales of the book warranted it. The sales did in fact warrant it (whew), and I actually thought of the story from snout-to-tail on the first plane ride on my book tour in July 2019 (remember book tours?).

So, again, thanks.

All who wander are not lost.

See you in Ouray. Black Swan says hi.

Set in a 2054 where humans have locked themselves out of the internet and Elon Musk has incinerated the moon, Set My Heart to Five is the hilarious yet profoundly moving story of one android’s emotional awakening.

One day at a screening of a classic movie, Jared notices a strange sensation around his eyes. Bots are not permitted to have feelings, but as the theater lights come on, Jared discovers he is crying.

Soon overwhelmed by powerful emotions, Jared heads west, determined to find others like himself. But a bot with feelings is a dangerous proposition, and Jared’s new life could come to an end before it truly begins. Unless, that is, he can somehow change the world for himself and all of his kind.

Unlike anything you have ever read before, Set My Heart to Five is a love letter to outsiders everywhere. Plus it comes uniquely guaranteed to make its readers weep a minimum of 29mls of tears.*

*Book must be read in controlled laboratory conditions arranged at reader’s own expense. Other terms and conditions may apply to this offer.

***

My novel, Set My Heart to Five, is narrated by Jared, a biological android who undergoes an emotional awakening and sets out to change things for himself and his kind. As the wide-eyed Jared stumbles through a world he does not understand in pursuit of a lofty goal, he unwittingly breaks every important rule, accidentally causes terrible offense, sows chaos and confusion, and ultimately learns many valuable lessons along the way. Perhaps not coincidentally, this is almost an exact analogue of my own journey into novel writing. Fortunately, the drafting process means I got as many do-overs as I needed, but I did not extend this same courtesy to my protagonist. What follows, then, is what we learned together along the way.

Things Happen When They Are Supposed To

My previous book – a memoir about losing my brother – came out back in 2011. It did relatively well in a literary-memoir-about-devastating-grief way, by which I mean that it got fantastic reviews and won a small prize in my native Scotland, but hardly anybody bought it because it made people cry too much.

Nonetheless, after it was published, I decided it was time to write my novel. That was what serious writers did, and didn’t I now have a shoebox of reviews that confirmed I was had arrived as a serious writer? So I quit my job, stocked up on coffee and ramen, and nothing whatsoever happened.

Well, not exactly nothing: I began a half dozen novels, and each of them fizzled out after the first few chapters. In hindsight, they were all perfectly good ideas and the problem was never with them. It was with me: somewhere deep down, the book about my brother had felt like the only important story I’d ever have to tell. I simply was not ready to write another book.

Of course, I did not know that at the time. And so I tried just about everything to get past it – hypnosis, therapy, a prison-like writing residence in France, even something called the Pomodoro Technique – and none of them worked. Mostly, of course, I tried self-flagellation, and when that did not work either, I tried even more self-flagellation. It did not lead me to a finished novel, and only a prescription for Zoloft.

Mercifully, life eventually intervened with other plans. Some doors opened up in screenwriting, and that led me to a new life in California, first in Los Angeles, and later in San Francisco. And then – six years after all my endless false starts – one Saturday afternoon in the Marina District I had an idea about a screenwriting android. And I knew it was a novel, and not only that but that I would actually finish this one.

The process of writing Set My Heart to Five was plenty tough at times, but it did not require self-flagellation, a prescription for anti-depressants, a trip to France, or anything named after the Italian word for tomato. And if I could only go back and tell my 2011 self to take it easy, that if things are meant to happen then they will happen in their own good time, I certainly would.

If You Ever Stop To Think About It, Humans Are Ridiculous Creatures

In truth, I knew a little of this one before I began writing, and it played a role in the setting of the novel. The near-future allowed me to trace some of our current absurdities to their inevitable conclusions: by the 2054 of Set My Heart to Five, humans have locked themselves out of the internet, North Korea and New Zealand have annihilated each other, and Elon Musk has incinerated the moon.

Still, for all that, I did not realize just how absurd we humans are until I spent some time looking at us through the eyes of an android. Whether it be the minor achievements we believe differentiate us from the 8 billion other biologically-identical creatures on earth, or simply the unfathomable sport of golf, we are an undeniably ridiculous species.

Of course, nothing baffles and fascinates Jared quite as much as our lackadaisical attitude to the climate emergency. Please name another species, he’d politely ask, who would discover they are destroying their only habitat, and then simply carry on regardless? I didn’t have an answer for Jared as I was writing, and – with my state of California now on fire – I certainly don’t now.

Nothing Is Ever Wasted

I spent the summer of 1998 working as a dishwasher in a family restaurant on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I was on a break from medical school, and being a writer – let alone ever writing about my little corner of the kitchen – was the last thing on my mind. But twenty years later, as my character began a search for work that would leave his days free, I immediately knew the job that he would do: he would be a dishwasher, just as I had once been.

The novel being set in Los Angeles and not coastal North Carolina, Jared finds his gig in a family Mexican Restaurant rather than a family Seafood restaurant, but the rest of it is all drawn from life. And if I had not worked in that restaurant all those years ago, I would not have known that the front of house staff – the servers, the hosts, and the imperial overlord that is the bartender – can sometimes consider themselves a little above to the behind-the-scenes kitchen staff. (Deep cut: I suspect this is because the front-of-house staff are expected to tip-out the kitchen staff, and mildly resent this, because who likes enjoys having to give other people money?)

Jared, of course, is not offended by his colleagues’ attitude, but simply finds it another fascinating example of the curious need us humans feel to institute hierarchies that permit them to feel superior to one another. And he stores the information for later use, just as I once did all those years ago.

Nothing Is Ever Wasted II

When I began to write the book, I set myself several absurd aspirations. The most ridiculous of them all was that I would teach myself to code, and then write a bonus easter egg chapter that took place in code.

Needless to say, I did not teach myself to code and we are all no doubt better off for it. But something I did learn in that research is that computer code is sometimes copy-and-pasted from one application to another.

In the book, Jared runs on a source code that was originated for use in domestic appliances, but has since been modified to support biological androids. Jared – programmed to sound as reassuringly human as possible – is very proud of this, and especially the domestic appliance he considers his noble ancestor: the toaster. The toasters I myself have known have mostly gone up to five, and this gives Jared one of his catchphrases ‘Set it to five!’, which is his way of both expressing maximal enthusiasm and paying tribute to his forebear.

The Future Is Already Here

The idea of writing about the future initially terrified me, and if I had stopped and thought about it for too long I might never have got started. Likewise, I will forever be in awe of writers who can imagine another planet, another galaxy, another dimension, but that is not my talent. All that being so, I deliberately limited myself to writing about places I already knew, and amending them to fit in with the misstopian future I imagined: Hollywood Boulevard will still be a tourist-trap disappointment, but the stars on the sidewalk will now be neon; Las Vegas will host the ‘Attrition Bowl’, a never-ending game of football played by biological androids cloned from the unsporting DNA of Tom Brady; here in Los Angeles, the sublet pool-houses of Echo Park will still be the place us screenwriters first land, but the pools themselves will all be empty.

I like to think the gambit worked, but if you are so minded I will of course let you be the judge. Perhaps I will be more adventurous and set my next book on the moon, but I have learned that things happen when they are supposed to, so that next book might be eight or nine years away. And, for all I know, by 2028 Elon Musk may well have incinerated the moon.

***

Simon Stephenson previously wrote Let Not the Waves of the Sea (John Murray), a memoir about the loss of his brother in the Indian ocean tsunami. It won Best First Book at the Scottish Book Awards, was a Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4, and a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. Since then he has been dividing his time between the UK and LA, where he works as a screenwriter, most recently at Pixar Animation Studios.

Simon Stephenson: Website | Twitter

Set My Heart To Five: Indiebound | Bookshop | Amazon | B&N

This is how I feel:

I feel like I’m the fucked up one. I feel like I’ve gone cuckoo bananapants, because I look out into the world and I see people who think the pandemic isn’t real; I see them not wearing masks anymore; I see people who somehow think Trump is doing a good job, or that believe he’s accomplished anything at all; I see people who live in a reality where blue state cities are places Snake Plissken would have to escape from; where Democrat Pedophiles are shipping children in furniture; where scientists are traitors peddling climate change coronavirus fantasy but Jesus Christ was a white man with an AR-15 who fought to make sure corporations were people, the poor got fucked, and nobody raised his Dad-blamed taxes. I feel like I’m trapped in some Hellraiser puzzle cube, some mirror universe trap where on my side of the mirror there are still things like common decency and empathy and shared reality, and on the other side are people who think that wearing a mask in a store is the same thing as being a Black man summarily executed in front of his family for writing a bad check.

I feel like I’m sitting in a living room and in the middle of the room there’s a toilet on fire, and nobody else will claim to see the toilet, or the fire. And if I push, they tell me, “The fire toilet is antifa propaganda, just eat your fuckin’ Spaghetti-Os.”

It feels like my brain is misfiring.

And once in a while, this brute force attack on our collective psyche, it works. I think, maybe I’m the broken one? Maybe I’m the partisan asshole? Like, is it even remotely possible that Trump is no worse than any other president, that life under Obama was some kind of nightmare realm, that COVID-19 isn’t real? It’s just a moment. And then I remember the people I know who got sick or died from it, and I look at the facts, the actual (sing it with me) facts of life, and I yawp again into the void THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS even though they want me to admit that I see five.

Maybe you feel that way too.

But your brain isn’t misfiring.

I’m not okay. You’re not okay. And it’s okay we’re not okay.

Your response is that you’re not okay because things are very much not okay. It is perfectly acceptable, normal, and expected to feel fucked up in a fucked up situation. Broken politics, Zoom school, gender reveal forest fires, Patriotic Re-Education, Herman Cain tweeting about the hoax virus that he actually died from — in this endlessly scrolling set of brand new WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE* verses, it’s easy to feel like you’re the broken one. But you’re not. You’re just responding to a broken world. And not just broken in a normal way — but broken in a way that’s hard to parse, that doesn’t form clean fractures. The difference between a snapped femur and someone who stuck one hand in a blender. We’re tip-toeing across a tightrope, and on one side is a chasm of Absurdist Incompetence and on the other is a pit of Active Malevolence and we’re just trying not to fall.

I mean, I barely go anywhere, right? But last week, I went to an ice cream place to pick up a couple pints because in this Epoch of Fuckery ice cream is medicine, and in the place, everybody was masked, everybody was good. And then the next day I went to the doctor’s office to get a flu shot and two people who worked there were not masked. In a doctor’s office! A DOCTOR’S OFFICE. Aaaaa dooooooctooooor’s offffffiiiiiice. Where if anybody (!) should be cleaving to good mask protocol (!!) it should be in a god damn d o c t o r ‘ s   o f f i c e. Sometimes I’ll drive through town and I’ll see a group of people where some of them are masked and some of them aren’t and I’m like, how’s that even work? What’s the fucking point? And then you see a parade of dicknoses who I guess believe that AIR does not come out of their NOSEHOLES only their MOUTHPITS and then you get on Facebook and you see some ding-dong relative sharing a screengrab of a spectacularly fake tweet where Joe Biden said something about how he’s gonna raise your taxes and turn your kids into dogfood and change the name of the country to the United Socialist States of Berniecratimerica, and you start to scream? You just scream. You scream into a pillow, into your clenched fists, into a box, into the hollow of an old tree where the Earth takes your scream and nurtures it into a flock of hungry winged things. I’m screaming right now! Just screaming.

Just fucking screaming.

And it’s okay.

It’s okay if you’re screaming, too.

It’s okay if you’re worried and sad and mad all the time and it’s okay if brushing your teeth feels like a heroic moment and if you can’t stop doomscrolling the Apocalyptic Stock Ticker that is social media.

It’s okay if you’re not okay.

I’ve no answers how to make it okay. (Except, obviously, vote, give money to charities and politicians, raise a ruckus, eat ice cream, try not to bite your phone.) Try to secure some peace and pleasure for yourself away from this Hell Realm. I try to put down my phone. I walk and listen to birds and high-five pine trees and it feels a little better. Not okay, but closer to it.

(And I note that even going outside is a privilege right now, with many places experiencing ash and smoke or bad weather. I only mean to suggest you put down the phone and try to steal some moments of peace away from the maw of the maelstrom.)

I don’t know that we’re going to be okay. Individually or collectively. We are under not one but… at least three existential threats I can count. But we can try despite everything to care about ourselves and each other through whatever comes — and that can be our true north, a star to chart the dark.

The things you see are real.

There is a toilet on fire in the living room.

I see it too.

It’s okay that you’re not okay.

And I hope we get to find moments where we are okay, and that we can take it, and hold it, and sustain it. And that we come out of this better than we were before. But it’s okay to be afraid that’s also not what’s going to happen, too. Whatever happens, we’re in this together. We can have a shared reality, a shared empathy. We can rage and scream and we can vote and we can do what we can and what we must to endure.

These are fucked up times.

It is normal to feel fucked up in response to them.

May you steal moments of peace from the jaws of chaos.

p.s. wear your fuckin’ masks for chrissakes

(This is based off a Twitter thread I did the other day that seemed to resonate, so I’m letting it live here, too, in a more blog-flavored format.)

* I used to think that our current reality is broken because of that weasel that fucked the Hadron Collider, but now I fear that Billy Joel pissed off a wizard somewhere and now he’s locked in a tower, forced to write increasingly horrible new verses to WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE that the wizard makes real with his shitty wizard magics. We need to find and free Billy Joel from the wizard trap! Before all of reality is doomed by his songsmithy! We’re coming, Billy Joel! Just hold on! Don’t write any more! For the love of god, Montressor, don’t try to rhyme anything to “gender-reveal forest-fire!” Wait no Billy Joel what are you writing oh god you’re writing SLENDERMAN WALRUS SPIRE what the fuck does that mean oh god oh shit oh fuck

When the airplane piloted by Elias Santos crashes one week before their wedding day, Coen Caraway loses the man he loves and the illusion of happiness he has worked so hard to create. The only thing Elias leaves behind is a recording of his final words, and even Coen is baffled by the cryptic message.

Numb with grief, he takes refuge on the Mexican island that was meant to host their wedding. But as fragments of the past come to the surface in the aftermath of the tragedy, Coen is forced to question everything he thought he knew about Elias and their life together. Beneath his flawed memory lies the truth about Elias—and himself.

From the damp concrete of Vancouver to the spoiled shores of Mexico, After Elias weaves the past with the present to tell a story of doubt, regret, and the fear of losing everything.

It isn’t easy being funny when everyone is grieving

My novel is about death. There’s more to it than that, of course, but death is its black heart. A pilot flies an airplane into the sea one week before his wedding day, and the story follows the fiancé as he tries to make sense of the aftermath. It’s tragic.

But this story isn’t entirely grim and gloomy. I decided early on that there would be an undercurrent of lightness—the tricky part was having this coexist with the novel’s darker themes without trivializing them. Some of the subject matter is serious, and it’s important to me to treat it with respect. Like life itself, this story has moments of joy and moments of pain, plus everything in between, and I want readers to feel the full range of these things.

My novel is not a dark comedy, but I do want readers to come up for air and laugh at times. I’m still not sure I pulled it off, but I’m encouraged by reviews that describe the humor as “hard-won” and “refreshing.” My favorite reviews are the ones from readers who found themselves laughing and crying at different points throughout the story. That’s the goal, really.

Mexico City stands on the ruins of an ancient Aztec capital

This story could only be set in Mexico. The Mexican people have such a deep reverence for death, and I’ve always admired the beautiful ways in which they honor those they’ve lost. These traditions, from both their Indigenous and colonial cultures, are prevalent throughout the novel. They lend meaning, sometimes in contradictory ways, to the protagonist’s journey as he struggles to make sense of his own tragedy.

Fragments of Aztec mythology and history make appearances, and I fell into a research rabbit hole learning about their fascinating beliefs and defeats. I discovered Tenochtitlan, the mighty island fortress that was once the Aztec capital in the middle of a valley lake. When Hernán Cortés and his Spanish conquistadors arrived with their weapons that shot thunder and foreign diseases, the Aztecs were overtaken and their city destroyed. The capital of New Spain was built on the ashes of Tenochtitlan, now known as Mexico City. The ruins of the pyramids can be seen today beside the crowded central square.

I took an impromptu trip to Mexico City when I was writing the novel, wanting to see and touch remnants of the Aztecs. These people live on through their genes and their heritage, and Mexico has been independent from Europe for nearly two centuries, but I can’t help but lament what could have been, had it not been for colonialism.

Point of view is key, but voice is a bolt cutter

The story is told through a first person point of view, primarily in the present tense. I knew it was a risky choice from the beginning. There are plenty of opinions out there against choosing such a foolhardy combination—it’s too intimate, too limiting, et cetera. I fought the decision for a while before realizing there was no other way to tell this story the way I wanted to tell it. I needed the intimacy, and I wanted to play off the limitations.

In the end, I learned that there is no right or wrong way. Some choices are safer than others, but do I aspire to be safe? Is that what I want my work to be known for? What’s most important is how it all comes together. That often involves a bit of magic, something hard to define, but one critical ingredient is voice. That’s what brings a story to life, arguably more so when it’s a first person point of view. People want to get lost in a story. Technical sins can be forgiven when the reader is captivated. I’ve loved plenty of books with generous heaps of head-hopping, telling (rather than showing), and all manner of things authors are told to avoid. I didn’t care or notice, because I was immersed, the characters felt real, and I bought it all.

Everything is subjective, of course. There are readers (not to mention editors and agents) who might judge a book more harshly based on its tense or point of view. A reader will either connect with the voice, or they won’t. But I learned to trust my instincts without overthinking them. I’d rather connect deeply with a smaller group of readers through a distinct voice than be considered safe enough by the masses.

Music is as close a friend as coffee

I become rather fixated when in the throes of writing a novel. I know the story won’t work unless I’m obsessed with it. Motivation to write isn’t usually a problem for me, but certain things help the words flow more freely. Music is one of these things.

I don’t usually listen to music while I’m writing—far too distracting!—but I curate a different soundtrack for the novels I write. These songs imprint themselves onto the DNA of the story, capturing its mood and atmosphere. I’ll listen to them before a writing session to help myself slip into the right mindset, or while I’m pondering the story’s intricate details or larger shape. There’s a symbiosis between music and literature that I find so valuable as a writer.

While I wrote my first novel, After Elias, I had two albums playing on repeat: Battle Born by The Killers, and Conscious by Broods. “Le lac” by Julien Doré and “Holy Ghost” by BØRNS are also songs that I associate closely with the story.

There’s no such thing as a British accent

One of the characters is a woman honeymooning alone on the Mexican island where the novel is set. She’s from London, and she spoke with a British accent until I realized that such an accent doesn’t exist. English-speaking North Americans, such as myself, tend to lump together all things British. There are so many different accents throughout Britain that even drawing distinctions between English, Scottish, and Welsh would be overly simplified, but at least it’s a start. Thus, my character now speaks with an English accent.

***

Eddy Boudel Tan is the author of After Elias (Fall 2020) and The Rebellious Tide (Summer 2021). His work depicts a world much like our own—the heroes are flawed, truth is distorted, and there is as much hope as there is heartbreak. He’s currently writing his third novel at home in Vancouver.

Eddy Boudel Tan: Website | Twitter | Instagram

After Elias: Indiebound | Bookshop | B&N | Amazon