The Making of a Book: Manifestation

I’ve been working on Kestrel, the first installment of my m/m sci-fi romance trilogy, Starhawk, for just over a year now. That includes conjuring up ideas from the ether, fitting and re-fitting those ideas into something logical like a neatly completed puzzle, outlining out nineteen chapters worth of content, writing, re-drafting, editing, working in beta feedback, and on and on.

But the idea for Kestrel existed long before that. The weird but true origin of the story began as an idea for a music video—a short, fun, and vivid little piece in my head about a bounty hunter vs a deadly assassin. In the short video format, they fight, pursue one another in cyclical cat-and-mouse games, fall into an illicit love, and are still caught up in their conflict. For years, that little idea haunted me every time I heard the song that had inspired it. I could picture every angle, every scene, every color. And I cursed the fact that I had no skills whatsoever in animation (since that’s how my mind pictured the whole thing).

Somehow, around early Autumn of 2022, my mind shifted gears and I started to wonder: what if that fun little idea was actually a book? I began toying with that, fleshing out the characters, their settings, their motivations and backstories. It was electrifying to me, as though this idea had quietly waited patiently for years in the back of my mind until it was finally allowed to become what it was always meant to be: not just one book, but a trilogy that carried a single story arc with the same characters.

I’d always wanted to be a writer, but for most of my life, I struggled with perfectionism, impostor syndrome, every bit of self-doubt my mind could conjure up and throw at me, like little painful knives. It took years of struggling through mental health and incomplete attempts to finish novels to finally reach this point. Once I finally had the manuscript printed out and in my hands for editing, it was a surreal feeling.

This thing, which had for years remained nothing but ephemeral concepts and ideas inside my head, now had weight. It took up space. It sat heavy in my hands, hundreds of pages of text that told a tale from beginning to end. It was only draft one, of course, but it meant the world to me. It was the moment my whole life changed: I had a book in my hands—a book I had written. It had been made real and became a part of the world, manifested and conjured into physicality like a softly spoken spell.

But that was only the first step. The new realness of this book was a private sort of realness, one that existed only for me. I spent countless hours editing it—first with pen and paper, scouring through each line, finding what could be cut or expanded on, what needed polished, what wording needed reworked. Then I switched back to my virtual file and incorporated those changes in draft three, overhauling entire chapters’ worth of content—cutting, slicing, dicing, merciless as an assassin of my own words.

Character motivations weren’t adding up, chemistry was awkward at times, logic was questionable at best in some scenes. And oh, the repetition. I agonized over how to fix things, what to add to give meat to the middle through rambling journal entries until I finally found the answers I was looking for. And then I added in entirely different chapters to replace the ones I’d cut from the whole. Several drafts of polishing, mending, weaving every little part together, and I was ready. My book was ready to be outside of me. It was time to share it with other eyes, other minds. It was time to give it a gentle push from the nest, to see if it could fly.

It was terrifying and exhilarating to get to see what had been held so preciously inside myself grow and change and finally be to a point where it could be judged by others. There’s no control over that. And it’s a necessary judgment—after all, if you want to be an author, you’ll need to make sure your books are the best that they can be. And that involves sending it to real people who can give you honest feedback. And the best kind of editors and beta readers want to help you grow.

I got my feedback (and thank you so, so very much to everyone who helped me along the way with that, including my incredible beta readers and the gem of an editor, Kasey, from Pine Tea Editing! I appreciate every one of you) and am now in the final stages of incorporating the overlapping feedback to make Kestrel ready to spread its wings and soar. I’ve spent countless hours deliberating over traditional vs self publishing. I’ve hungrily researched everything I could on what goes into publishing a book. I’ve got a blurb made, I’ve got cover art made. (And talk about that surreal feeling of wow, this book is a real, actual thing… cover art really drives the whole thing home.)

Now, all that’s left is to publish.

From a playful idea borne from a song to a fully realized, polished trilogy, Starhawk is something I’m quite proud of. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it and standing alongside Niko and Elliott on their harrowing adventure as much as I’ve enjoyed creating it for you. Because nothing in my life has given me more pleasure than to manifest a whole galaxy from a tiny seed of daydream.

Cover art courtesy of GetCovers.