Corstae – Available Now!

Let me just say that I am actually really proud of this book (which you can buy here!).

I want to document how it came to be. It started all the way back right after I had finished my undergraduate degree. I was languishing and a bit directionless, but I used my time to write when I could. What I wrote turned out to be A Quest Through Winter Sleep, a book I will never release again nor revisit because it’s one of those first novels that should have been put into a desk drawer once completed. However, as I was writing that, I was conceiving of a series of stories set in the same universe, a high fantasy universe centered around a small country called Corstae.

The second story became Crystal Embers (buy now, it’s good). The third was this one. I didn’t actually start writing it until about seven years ago, and I still have the hand-written first draft. I actually recall what my original conception of the book was going to be: a war novel that never left the castle. That fell apart when I started seriously considering what should actually happen, but it did allow me time to focus on what should be happening back at the castle as daring battles are being found many miles from home.

That first draft took me about fifteen months to write. It was a long book, but the bigger problem was that I just didn’t have the work ethic to keep to it with real regularity. Once I finished it, I put it aside, as I do, in favor of other stories to explore, continually pushing it aside over the years, doing subsequent drafts but always favoring other books to try and polish into publishing form. Well, I settled into finally releasing it a few months ago, and revisiting it was a bit of a challenge. I had lost the third draft completely. Instead, I just had a printed out copy of the second draft with my handwritten comments and changes in red ink on top. I had to scan the whole thing and correct every line of every page.

Thank God my mother, Amy Welborn, decided that she wanted to play copy editor. It’s not just that she helped find a bunch of the little copy errors I had missed, but she dug into the writing and helped clean it up. I remember hearing Grady Hendrix talk about the first time he got an editor to go through his work, and it was an extremely humbling experience for him. I felt the same way, looking over pages and pages of changes, all targeted at simply how I wrote, not what. Well, that polish has simply made the book better, and I thank my mother greatly for her help.

The result is the book I am, perhaps, most proud of. I think it’s final thirty pages or so are heartbreaking, and the way I manage it is surprising in its delivery. My decision to tell extra facets of the larger story through a series of letters that I inserted between every chapter was an incredibly worthwhile effort.

Anyway, I do hope that you buy, read, and enjoy the book. I hope I’m able to entertain you for a few hours of your life and make you feel something genuine.