10 Reasons It Took Me 10 Years to Write One Book Two Times

Cover image by Nicholas Myer, 2013 (left) and a cover image by Aude Shattuck, 2022 (right).

We’ve all been young. We’ve all published a young-adult/middle-grade fantasy novel in high school.

Usually that novel is metaphorical.

Some people’s metaphorical young-adult/middle-grade fantasy novel is represented by edgy jokes that “the man” (i.e. your overworked mom) just doesn’t get.

Some people’s metaphorical young-adult/middle-grade fantasy novel is making it very clear that they ARE, in fact, going to a world famous actor of the stage, (which is why I no longer need to associate with you, Melchior).

Some people’s young-adult fantasy novel is publishing one of the most successful young-adult fantasy novels of the 2000s — the first of a multi-book series that gets a subpar, winter 2006 film adaptation.

1.) To my deep regret, I am not Christopher Paolini. I’m the guy pressing my face against a window and peering precipitously into the bookstore while Christopher Paolini gives a reading.

I’m the guy who writes the first book of a planned fantasy series and publishs it without a copy editor, a publishing company, or a significant grassroots fan-base.

For what it’s worth, most of my peers who read Element Keepers: Light (as it was titled) a decade ago seemed to like it. Multiple people in the years following asked when I was going to release the next book in the series.

So, proudly, almost a year ago, at long last, I… published that first book for a second time under the title Light Keeper Chronicle: The Unspoken Prophecy (available instantly on Kindle, Nook, and where all good ebooks are sold).

It’s just now, eight months after publishing (er—re-publishing) Light Keeper that I’m realizing I haven’t provided an accessible explanation to my concerned adult friends who wonder why I’ve self-published—for the second time—my 12th grade passion project again.

Well, actually, it’s my 4th grade passion project. But I won’t go quite that far back.

I’ll just rewind to January of 2013: The Mayans were wrong, Obama was still in the White House, James Cameron’s first Avatar sequel was just a year away, and jazz was playing on the radio (somewhere, presumably).

Meanwhile, I was starting to PANIC with a capital (p)AAAAAAAA!

Grand River Preparatory, the high school I went to, required students to have a “senior project,” something connected to the career they aspired to pursue. At the start of the fall I had figured that committing to self-publish the book I’d writing (and re-writing (and rewriting (and rewriting))) since grade school would be a great way to actually make myself finish the book. Why, the local bookstore—Schuler Books & Music—had recently gotten a chapbook press that could allow me to do just that!

Element Keepers: Light on the table of Chapbook titles at Schuler Books back in the day.

Panic was bubbling inside of me because it was around January of 2013 that I realized I’d over extended myself.

Despite having completed a full draft of my manuscript, despite having read multiple books on publishing and editing (shoutout to Your First Novel by Anne Rittenberg and Laura Whitcomb, and The Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass in particular), I was beginning to suspect this writing thing was going to be a LOT more work than I thought.

I began to mention this to my homeroom/English teacher at the time, but she was so excited about it that I felt galvanized to complete the project. After all, I’d gotten some friends to give me their feedback which seemed positive, all I really needed to do was edit the book.

Editing, I knew deep in my 17-year-old bones, is pretty much just reading a book and fixing any mistakes that come up and I read books all the time!

2.) Mistakes were made.

And most of those mistakes were fixed!

And a number that was somehow, remarkably, less than half, were passed over.

And then published.

I do want to take a moment to mention that I love the book I’m talking about with all of my hear. I don’t just mean the 2022 version, but the 2013, typo-laced publication.

That 2013 version of the book (and the more recent release) drew heavily from The Chronicles of Narnia: Four children are taken from our world to save a magical land from evil; along the way trusts are betrayed, prophesies are revealed, spells are cast, battles are fought.

Notably different though, I’d wanted my four main characters to be allowed to dislike each other in a way I didn’t think siblings could. (Siblings that don’t like each other, I thought, were often still capable of working together even when at one another’s throats.) So I made my protagonists—Lenzey, Walter, Ellean, and Zack—friends of various degrees.

I also had loved the high fantasy of The Lord of the Rings, so I tried to make my fantasy world, Garibain, more like Middle-Earth than Narnia in its construction. So history and nation-states became a big part of my world building.

I also wanted to give my characters a little bit of an edge in a fight (since, you know, they were pre-teens) so I added a dash of Avatar: The Last Airbender and gave each of them power over one particular element. Except, I figured this was a fantasy world, so the elements here maybe weren’t the same as the Greek elements. Hence: Light, Water, Shadow, and Fire (with Earth, Air, and Life to be featured in the sequels).

I got a proof copy of the book (about 140,000 words as I remember it) almost exactly 10 years ago on April 16, 2013, and I stayed up late every night for two weeks straight (editing (and editing (and editing))). I brought the word count down to about 120,000 and—with the end of the school year looming—I had to call it there.

After nearly a decade of work up to that point, I had published the first entry in an eight book series.

Thanks to my high school band teacher, who shared the book with his kids, I even did a reading at a library that summer.

3.) I was preparing for college and I almost immediately started working on the second book in the series. Within a year, I had about 60,000 words in that sequel (what I thought of then as book two of eight).

The problem was, I was 60,000 words into this sequel and only about 20% of the way through the planned story of that book. If I’d kept on going like that, the end book would have come out to about 300,000 words, which I sensed could be a problem.

4.) The first book had sold pretty much exclusively to family and high school friends. Furthermore, the 400 pages that my first book had ended up at was already dangerously close to the maximum my local bookstore could print.

So, in 2015, I decided to put things on hold with the series.

After a year of thinking it over, I decided I’d clean up the first book and try to get it traditionally published. Given I was still in school, I hadn’t had a ton of time to promote that first book—and I became a little bit nervous as it became more and more apparent just how many typos that first book contained.

In 2016, I started editing and revising. The changes weren’t big. I knew I needed a better start to the book so that was my main focus, but very little was actually cut or noticeably changed.

5.) I sent my first query letter in January of 2017. I sent my second and third a week later. I sent my fourth on January 31st of that year.

You see where this is going.

As best as I can tell, my final 49th query for Element Keepers was sent on January 5, 2020. (As best as I can recall, no one I sent a query letter to requested the manuscript in full.)

Mind you, this is just to get an agent who would THEN try to sell the book to a publishing house. It’s also worth mentioning that sending out 50 queries is not at all an unusually high number for a first time author.

Having learned a lot over the course of doing other writing in college, it became apparent to me that, as much as I loved and still love my book, Element Keepers just didn’t have the it factor for traditional publishing.

6.) What has become Light Keeper Chronicle is still a very tropey story where wizards have staffs and pointy hats, the hero has a sword pulled from a stone, and the villain is a man who associates heavily with goblins and ogres.

I feel there’s a lot to love in it, but those tropes were well worn when I started writing this book.

In 4th grade…

… about 20 years ago.

7.) [Ten second break for existential dread.]

As I saw it, I had a choice: I could entirely change this series that I’d put most of my life into to try to be more commercially appealing, or I could just sort of keep on writing the books knowing I wouldn’t ever really publish them or have them on my shelf.

Problem is… I really like putting stuff on shelves.

For better or worse, the series book meant a lot to me. (Plus, the people who have read them don’t seem to hate them.)

I decided to meet in the middle.

8.) In August of 2021, I decided to re-self-publish what I imagined a more broadly appealing version of Element Keepers might look like.

I changed as much as I felt I could while keeping the core of the story.

I brought the word count down to about 75,000 which mean trimming a few (dozen) side characters and shrinking plot lines for those that remained.

I changed the title to something a little bit more SEO friendly.

I used a pseudonym to better distinguish my fiction writing from my non-fiction writing.

I decided to tool the book to be part of a more manageable five book series as opposed to eight, while also trying to keep it mostly self contained.

I made the points of view more strict, in Light Keeper Chronicle you only get POV from the four main Element Keepers.

Given the age of the four main characters, I skewed the books a bit more toward middle-grade rather than YA.

I decided to actually release an ebook this time because, yes indeed, I’d hired a copyeditor.

On June 13, 2022, I released Light Keeper Chronicle: The Unspoken Prophecy.

Legit, just holding a book you’ve written is the most exciting thing in the world.

While I still love Element Keepers: Light more in rather specific ways, I feel so much happier when I look at Light Keeper Chronicle, because when I see Light Keeper, I see a finished book.

There’s a version of the world where I would have released a sequel to my book in 2015 and kept chugging from there. (At that pace, I’d be on book five of eight by now, with six well on the way.)

There’s a version of the world where I publish the second Light Keeper Chronicle book this year in late-May/early-June to coincide with ~10 years since Element Keepers and one year since Light Keeper.

9.) Here’s the last problem.

Like I said, I published Light Keeper Chronicle a year ago and it’s about met my expectations. I think I’ve sold shy of 75 copies. (This is, in part, due to the fact that I want to have a second book out before I start more aggressively marketing my work.)

On top of that, my writing has changed a lot over the years. There’s places outside of Garibain—people outside of Lenzey, Walter, Ellean, and Zack—that I want to write about.

Currently, I’ve got another finished novel I’m once again going back and forth between self-publishing and trying to traditionally publish (a dozen or so queries sent on that one). There’s a third novel that will probably be forever relegated to a bottom drawer, but there’s a fourth novel that I’m about 30,000 words into that I think about nearly every day.

I am going to write the second Light Keeper Chronicles book.

In fact, hopefully this time next year, I have a title and a locked release date.

I don’t know that these books will ever be successful enough to break even, but I’d also love to release an audio book of The Unspoken Prophecy and the subsequent four entries.

10.) I’ll wrap it up now.

All of this has just been to break down the broad beats of how much can go into trying to release a book and, furthermore, to promise those who want it that a second book is coming.

It may have taken me 10 years republish the same book I put out in 2013, but it won’t take as long to get a true second book.

The sequel is coming, and hopefully so is at least one other book between hear and there.