​I know several people who seem to have all the time in the world to read and write. Normally, these are folks who, for one reason or another, have given up their day job, and now live – sometimes even financially supported by family – as writers. I mean absolutely no disrespect to those who are actually making a living writing, after long and hard years of working toward that particular goal. My quandary is with those who are not making a living and yet have sacrificed most everything – even the things worth having – to become an author and only an author.
 
 In the meantime, those of us who have a day job (and sometimes a demanding one) struggle on, trying to balance life with writing. I was thinking the other day about this and wondering if I would ever get to be a fulltime writer, at some glorious point in my life. And then I realised that I probably wouldn’t want to. There is a saying that forbidden love is twice as sweet as permitted love. While I find this to some extend ridiculous, I can understand the sentiment with writing. When you spend eight to ten hours of your day doing something else, writing suddenly becomes a haven. When you spend eight to ten hours of your day writing, even push ups can begin to look attractive. I know, because I’ve done this in the school holidays. My day job is music teaching. So actually, oddly enough, I really do thank God for my day job. It keeps me a more balanced person I believe. It certainly keeps the writing spicy and fresh.
 
For those of you looking to balance your day job with your writing, here are several tips that have worked for me.
 

1. Work time is work time; writing time is writing time.

 
Don’t think about anything other than what you are meant to be doing now. Don’t check emails related to writing or try to squeeze things in during the quiet times at work – the same goes for when writing becomes boring, and you try to squeeze a work job in. Set aside blocks of time where you do nothing but what you have determined to focus on. This makes for effective efforts in either department.
 

1. Guard your writing time.

 
Treat the precious hours of writing time that you do have like work time. Don’t cram an extra work commitment in when you know you’ll regret not writing anywhere from an hour later to a week later. The regret hurts.
 

1. Have achievable goals.

 
10,000 words a week is achievable for me, but only if I don’t have exams that week… or extra students because of necessary auditions, etc. Then I have to drop the word count to 7000. I stay positive because I’ve still met my goal. Staying positive keeps me from losing motivation to write.
 

1. Stay positive about your day job too.

 
Find reasons that you like it – the reasons that you might have gotten it in the first place. If you don’t stay positive about it, you’ll be rushing things and putting yourself in an angry writing mood anyway.
 
Lastly, remember: if your writing ever becomes your day job, you’ll discover it can be a slog too. You can become enslaved to your own passion in the same way that you can become enslaved to any other job. For me, I look at it this way: if writing is a luxury for me now, rather than my bread and butter, I may well enjoy it more than if I’m getting stressed about making a living from it.

After 2015, it might be years before I next experience the marvellous pleasure of having a book traditionally published. And this is why I give God thanks that today my third book is out. Sure, it’s a rapid publishing schedule. But who knows when I will next get a contract of this nature? My next three books will be the fifth, sixth, and seventh volumes in The Fledgling Account. And it’s very hard to sell a publisher the last books in a series that’s already half done. If your books aren’t selling brilliantly – and I mean brilliantly – you haven’t got a hope.
So I’m very lucky to have the first four releasing this year.
 
Today Servant of the King is available to the public for international purchase. I wrote this book when I was nineteen, and I’ve surprised myself by still being relatively happy with it (even though I and my editor improved the prose in this book quite a lot). I’m pretty thrilled, actually, to have my tribute to Shakespeare featured on the front cover of the book! The words “alas, poor Yorick” were going through my head when I gave my villain a lucky skull as his talisman. Needless to say, just as Yorick forebodes Hamlet’s end, so the talisman Wilkins points ahead to Sirius’ untimely demise. For all of you who are thinking of this – as my brother does! – as the “bogan” book, the above explanation is more accurate reflection of Servant of the King’s contents.
 
Today, I’m feeling generous, so I will leave you all with a free sample of book three of The Fledgling Account… a YA epic fantasy thriller that will prove to be a perfectly eye-walloping experience.
 
Now available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords. Links to a paperback purchase to come soon.
 
 
“Two-three-seven, is it not?” Mainte said in Tarhian.
Rafen fought hard to keep any recognition from his face. The other Tarhians had likely received descriptions of him. Yet, it was dark, and they weren’t looking closely at a boy now. Only Mainte had paused, not needing a description to identify Talmon’s most notorious slave.
“I can’t understand you,” Rafen said, in an impossibly crisp Sianian accent. He moved toward Stalim.
“Stop!” roared Mainte. “I know who you are. Do you think you can trick me, two-three-seven? Still think you’re a prince? Check his ankle!”
A nearby Tarhian rushed toward Rafen. Rafen leapt backward, snatching up Wilkins, and hurling him at the Tarhian’s head. The Tarhian threw himself sideways, the skull grazing his shoulder.
“Enough!” the Ashurite shouted in ringing Tongue. He pointed his thin blade at Rafen, and it gleamed white with kesmal. “What is this about?”
“One of your men started a brawl for no reason,” Rafen said innocently.
“I tell,” Mainte said in broken Tongue. “Two-three-seven—”
“Counting, Mainte?” the Ashurite said, eyeing him with disgust. It was clear he thought Tarhians lacked intelligence.
“His name—” Mainte struggled.
“He’s mad,” Rafen bellowed. “I don’t know him!”
“Ra-fen,” Mainte pronounced.
There was a short silence, in which Rafen violently hoped the Ashurite hadn’t understood Mainte. Then the philosopher’s eyes glittered dangerously.
“I knew I had seen your face somewhere. Seize him!”
Two dozen people moved. Rafen whipped his sword out, kesmal warming his fingers.
“TO YOUR POSTS, FOOLS!” someone thundered, and then Sirius was before Rafen, arms spread, his coffee-colored robe making him look like some hideously huge brown bat.
The Tarhians halted, uncertain. A satisfied smile spread over the Ashurite’s face.
“Ha!” Sirius yelled. “And guard your walls; your city’s under attack.”
Stalim’s face was white. Sirius reeked of spirits.
“Get back,” Sirius gestured vaguely to the Tarhians before him, and to Rafen’s surprise, they stepped back. “Get back to your wives. A woman only lasts ten years before she no longer looks like a woman. Gor, the prime over. So fast.”
“Do you have anything else to say, old fool?” the Ashurite said, stepping closer, the point of his blade hovering before Sirius’ nose.
Sirius seized the blade with one weathered hand and grasped it so hard that his dark blood fell in heavy drops to the ground.
“Your light’s out,” he said, and sure enough, after some slight vibrating, the Ashurite’s kesmal had faded from the blade.
The Ashurite moved wide eyes from his weapon to Sirius’ face. Sirius’ mouth was working to produce some intelligible sentence.
“Playersh,” he said. “P-players. Innocent. No charge. TOUCH MY BIRD AND DIE, YOU IDIOT!” he howled at the philosopher. “If you want a fight… start… lose… die. I have you all—” He described a semicircular line with his arm, and the Tarhians recoiled again at this passive sorcery.
“You need more men,” Sirius said.
“I think you are right,” the Ashurite said. “It is too much to take the Pirate King and the Fledgling with twenty-four men.” The philosopher returned to his horses, and the Tarhians rallied to him.
“I will be back,” the Ashurite sneered. “You won’t get into the city, Sirius. And you won’t get away. The Lashki will know about this.” 
                                    ~ Excerpt from Servant of the King, by Y. K. Willemse. © Permuted Press, 2015. All rights reserved.

Perhaps some of the most boring advice I was given as a girl with regards to writing was the old adage: "Write what you know." Everywhere I went and every time I said that I wanted to be a writer, there would always be some sage person saying: "Write what you know. Don't try anything too big." I guess that's fair enough. For instance, if a university student decided to write about something they didn't know, they would fail that particular essay.

But writing stories is very different from writing essays. 

Between ten and fourteen, I was often shown the stories of Anne of Green Gables and Little Women as examples, in which both the woman protagonists discover that they need to stop writing extravagant fairy tales and write about something that they actually know - so they both write autobiographies, and nobody remotely minds that they were used in Anne's or Jo's stories, no matter how honest those stories were about the natures of their characters. And both women, of course, find spouses the moment they write about something they know. Both these stories annoyed me inordinately when I was younger, because neither L. M. Montgomery or Louisa May Alcott wrote autobiographies, so far as I know. Although they did write about the sort of lives they themselves had experienced, they were able to shape events in their books with relatively watertight plots and semi-idealistic endings. I think it is fair to say that there was a small measure of fantasy in each of these author's works. 

While there are many writing advisers just waiting to tell you to "write what you know" with a bit of an emphasis on the autobiographical, no one tells you what to do if you simply can't - if it would open too many wounds in your personal life; if it would ruin many of the good relationships that you currently enjoy or at the very least hurt some of the people that you know; or if you find it simply impossible to open up about your own life... to make sense of your own life. I found myself in that boat. My Mum told me that I should try writing an autobiography about myself and my family life. The idea was repugnant to me, even though my life was good. The very odd time I tried writing about anything I knew, my creativity just completely gummed up. Writing became a depressing chore... a kind of report on reality.

When I was thirteen, my grandparents sent me an article about an Australian author called Kate Morton. In it, Morton said that it was important to write what you knew, but also what you "loved". I reckon she was on the money (and time, in fact, has proved that she was!). How in the world can you hope to write anything captivating if you don't love it? The passion must shape the art.

In the end, for me, I discovered that fantasy was one of the only things I knew. My brain simply worked that way. In my own life, whenever I would imagine my future, it always involved some supernatural occurrence or "magic" of some kind (not to be confused with the occult, naturally). Fantasy gave me a freedom unlike any other - I could write what I truly felt without even knowing it. It gave me the freedom to be honest about who I truly was. Writing what you genuinely feel about your real life can be a dangerous business, even if you're trying to be nice. In fantasy, no one would think to trace themselves back to particular characters or particular interchanges in your work. 

The other thing no one told me was that sometimes you have no idea what you know until you start writing. I've learnt a great deal through writing, and I'm looking forward to learning more. And I don't think that's a bad thing.

In short, when someone tells you to "write what you know", don't let it get you down. In many ways, that has become mildly obsolete advice for a writer. And what's better than having a journey of discovery?

The fast publishing schedule continues to roll forward, and now the release for book three of The Fledgling Account is looming, on the 20th of October. I was thinking to myself the other day: “I really must write a blog post about this”. The only trouble is that I don’t fully know what to say about it – because the fact is, Servant of the King gave me virtually no trouble as a novel. I don’t know why that was. Maybe it was because it was still early enough in the series to be a smaller work, but late enough in the series for me to have gotten the hang of what I was doing with my first few books. All I know is that I only wrote it twice, which is a record for me. I typed out my first draft at fifteen, but the book that I wrote at age nineteen was basically a completely different story from the one four years earlier. You could hazard to say that I really only wrote one draft of this book. And it bothered me like anything, but I couldn’t think of what to change.
 
I won’t say that there weren’t problems with this book. For instance, there was one particular character in there – the Pirate King – whom I really dislike. Normally, I like even my bad guys. For instance, I have a love-hate relationship with the Lashki Mirah. He freaks me out something terrible, but I like him as a villain. The Pirate King Sirius was a different matter. Something about him just makes me very uncomfortable. For this reason, I have never been able to decide whether I wrote him well enough or not. However, my beta readers came back to me after reading Servant of the King saying that it was “the best of the lot” – fast-paced; scarcely a moment to breathe; high stakes; a determined and fierce main character; and an epic climax that goes on for pages and pages, but has enough variety to keep the reader from wondering: “When the heck is this going to end?” I myself couldn’t think of many ways to make the plot better, with the result that I often wonder if I’ve just deceived myself with this book. But then experience has told me that sometimes – about once in a blue moon when green panthers dance in polka-dotted boxers beneath six foot trees of algae – the first draft comes out right. In ten years of writing, there had to be one occurrence of that. I guess Servant of the King was it.
 
I can’t tell you much about this book, because some of you might not have even read the first one. For those of you who have kept up (admirably, admirably!), I will give these little hints, spoken in the deep and gravelly voice of someone who has been smoking for hundreds of years:
 
“People get attacked. People fall off things. People get burned to a crisp. Someone dies. Someone lives. And… someone ends it all.”
 
After that wonderfully specific synopsis, I’ll give you one that is slightly less seductive.
 
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“Rafen, how much would you give for Siana?” Sirius said.
 
Siana is still not liberated from the Lashki Mirah. Rafen faces a horrible decision: should he fight with the Pirate King Sirius or battle alone? Only Rafen can harm the Lashki, and it will take all he has to win Siana back for King Robert. As cities fall, Rafen realises he may not survive this fight … and his loved ones might not either.
 
 
Pre-order Servant of the King from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo. (Book Depository to come soon, God willing).
Happy reading!

I just wanted to share with all of you this brilliant book that I read recently. Plato's Cave is written by Russell Proctor, for whom I did an author feature on this website some time ago. Even though this novel sounds highly philosophical, it's not really. The message of this book, if one summed it up, would probably be something like this: "The truth about reality is so much stranger than any of us realises, and it involves hundreds of raw pork sausages".

 Plato's Cave opens with twenty-two year old Emily Branwell struggling to accept her conscious state one morning in Brisbane, Australia. She is suffering the affects of a hangover, but that turns out to be the least of her worries. A weirdly accurate horoscope prophesies that she will find a raw pork sausage in her basin. Later, she discovers thousands of dollars just lying around in her kitchen and, in the afternoon, she sights a giant split in the sky. The book follows Emily's journey as she tries - increasingly frantically - to figure what exactly is going on. Scientists and psychics alike endeavour to help her. But no one really has any answers. During this time, Emily is forced to confront the truth: Something is out to get her, and it's coming closer every minute. Yet will she escape this mysterious, supernatural entity, or will she be swallowed up in the void?

Even though I don't agree with everything in this book, I really enjoyed it because it was quirky, the characters were colourful, and the humour was just right - spontaneous, plentiful, but not overdone. I'm a very fussy reader and am seldom tempted to read ahead on books. I read twenty pages each day and that's it, because I'm also the slowest reader in the world. My reading schedule is very regimented. Nevertheless, I did something bizarre while reading this book: I read extra pages. It was really quite fascinating. I also had numerous dreams about pork sausages randomly appearing, which was slightly less pleasant, but still intriguing.

I didn't find many weaknesses in this book, and any that I did see, I freely admit, were purely subjective. I felt the ending could have more punch - a greater feeling of enlightenment. It probably could have been tied up a bit quicker too. But it's a small price to pay for a diverting read.

Plato's Cave can be bought here, at very pleasant pricing. Russell Proctor's website is also a fun place to spend some time.

If you're into epic fantasy or YA novels (which are simply the best novels on earth), this week Permuted Press has put my début novel Rafen on sale, for $0.99 as an ebook. The sale lasts for another three days, so for the same price as a chocolate bar, you can get the book on your Kindle and waste some time reading some outrageously busy fantasy fiction that wallops you in the eye. The book's also on sale through Book Depository at the moment. Read on and write on, everybody.

Since writing Rafen, I've had a lot of people comment on how emotive the image of a slave is. I've had a couple of others tell me the first half of the book is too intense, but the gospel truth of the matter is that I couldn't really have made it much gentler, because it was about a slave. If I had made slavery look like a picnic - if I had taken the grit and the suffering and the raw, cutting material out - I do think I would have seriously short changed the novel and belittled the experiences of those who have ever come close to having endure circumstances like those.

Anyway, the comments that I've had really prompted me to think about why exactly the image of a slave is so powerful. And I guess it's because all of us, in some way, have experienced slavery - some to far greater and more awful degrees than others. For me, I think of what my life was like before I became a Christian. I would certainly have described myself as enslaved - in both mind and spirit - before I experienced salvation. But for me the picture has a far greater significance, and it's really an allegory of a particular period in my life. To be a slave is to have nothing - not even an identity. It is to be completely crushed and burdened. It is not necessarily to be hated, but to be treated as a product that can be consumed, wasted, poured out, or defiled as the user wishes - a product that is not even worthy of hate. It is to be reduced to an object. The sheer desperation of that state is terrifying. And then when freedom comes, it really is unthinkable. And the question is: can one ever live a normal life after having experienced trauma? When one has been hurt so badly, can one ever recover?

I like to think that while the ex-slave will never be the same, they will, in some ways, rise above the trials that they have experienced. I believe that pain makes one stronger. I believe that there must always be a light, even in the deepest darkness. I was once idealistic enough to believe one can erase one's former scars, but I don't think that any more. There are some things that a person can never forget. However, I do believe that this is why the slave imagery is so potent: because everyone hurts, everyone suffers, and some people suffer unbelievably. The slave image allows an author to sympathise with the reader who has gone through hell. Answers are not always forthcoming. But sympathy can mean everything.

What imagery really appeals to you?