The Story I Couldn't Quite Kill

I've been thinking about how long I've actually been working on this story, and the slightly horrifying answer is twelve years. Not continuously, thank God, because I'm not sure whether that would make me dedicated or in need of professional supervision, but the first version of what eventually became A Veil Sundered goes all the way back to 2014.

Back then, it wasn't A Veil Sundered. It wasn't even really the same story it is today. But the bones were there, along with some of the characters, the ideas, and this strange hidden world that apparently had no intention of leaving me alone.

The First Attempt

The original book was called Witch and Warrior. I had this idea about Witches, Warriors, the strange relationship between them, and another world operating quietly underneath the normal one. I started writing it, eventually gave it to someone to read, and was told it was utter crap.

Not that it showed promise but needed work. Not that the writing was rough. Crap.

So, being the wonderfully confident and thick-skinned aspiring author that I obviously was, I stopped writing it.

I wish I could tell you I took the criticism constructively, studied the problems, improved my craft, and bravely carried on because I believed in the story. That would make a much nicer version of events. The truth is that it hurt, I believed them, and I stopped.

Trying Again

Eventually I started over with something much bigger called Chronicles of Sanctuary. Because apparently my response to failing at one book was to plan ten of them.

I did a huge amount of worldbuilding. I worked out characters, history, locations, major events, and the broad story across the series. Then I started Book One, Before I Sleep, and actually got twenty-three chapters into it. I showed that to someone too. Same basic result. I was told it was crap, and I stopped again. Looking back, I can laugh about the pattern now, at least a little. At the time, there wasn't anything funny about it. I'd tried twice to take these ideas out of my head and turn them into something another person might want to read, and twice I'd come away believing that maybe I simply wasn't good enough to do it.

The Story That Stayed

The problem was that while I stopped writing the books, I never really stopped thinking about them. The characters were still there, bits of the world kept changing in my head, and every so often I'd go back and look at something I'd written years earlier. Sometimes I'd think, You know, this actually isn't that bad. Then, usually about thirty seconds later, that other voice would turn up and tell me not to be ridiculous. Pieces of Witch and Warrior survived. Pieces of Chronicles of Sanctuary survived. Characters changed, some disappeared entirely, others appeared years later, and the world slowly became something very different from the thing I had started with. For a long time, I thought I'd abandoned the story twice, but I'm not sure if that's true anymore. I may have stopped writing it. But that's not the same thing. Twelve years later, the damn thing is still here. So am I. Apparently there is a huge difference between quitting a story and actually being finished with it.