And here we are, at the end of one journey - or at the beginning of the next. It all depends on perspective. A year and a half ago, two weeks before my twenty-first birthday, I signed a multi-book publishing contract with Permuted Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. At the time, I was thrilled, but could not for the life of me imagine what the last leg of the journey toward publication would feel like. Many people look at the author who has received a publishing contract as if he or she has arrived. Nay, my friends. You've been vindicated. I subscribe to the view that nobody arrives until they're dead.

Now, at the end of my first publishing journey, I look back at all that's past. Part of me feels unbelievably weary, and it's not physical weariness as such... more a kind of profound mental weariness, as if you've exercised your intellect enough for three years instead of one. It was, after all, four books released within the space of four months. I thought it wouldn't be too much trouble, because I had written each of the books. How wrong I was! I didn't take into account the author's greatest inspiration in times of creative stagnation: last minute panic. Realising that my books were releasing, I went into a tailspin. I was terrified... of what, I'm not quite sure. I met each of my deadlines... and called back three of my books after that, so that I could do vast edits on each of them again. I just couldn't stop. There were major things wrong with the books, to be honest. I look at them now and think that it's unlikely I would have as keen a readership if I hadn't greatly improved at least book two. And I'm certain anyone who made it through to book four would be feeling pretty mutinous by the end of the trip. The issue was, frankly, this: my main character was a turd. I hadn't done the hard yards of developing him. To add tension and excitement to scenes in which he appeared, I made him perpetually sullen and pathetic for no reason. Things happened to him while he himself failed to "happen". That is largely fixed now. Rafen has his moods for a reason. And that's it. And as you go through the series, he matures and changes. Thank God I had a chance to fix this.

But what an effort.

After my own frenzied revisions, I had revisions to go through with my editor. Each time she sent me a book, I actually added in more changes than she had. I went overboard. The books couldn't be any less than perfect.

I've worn that side of myself out. I know the books aren't perfect. But it was time for them to come out. God made that much clear to me. I hope that He'll use them even in their imperfect state.

Book four was the one that I thought would kill me. Rafen drove me nuts. He was the most stupid git a girl could have for a main character. It was trash, and I was lucky to have people close to me who weren't afraid to say so. I'm aware this isn't the best advertising. Suffice it to say, the book is no longer in that state. The revisions I did on it were so drastic, it almost reads as a different novel altogether. Rafen grew with the challenges he faced, rather than diminished. When the time for the final edit with my editor came, we were running three months late. Less than two months out from The Fourth Runi's release (today!), I simply could not get through the dang thing. I tried and tried. The end seemed further and further away. It was a long book and a very narrow time frame.

I prayed and prayed. And here we are. That's why today is a miracle. I thought I wouldn't survive The Fourth Runi. It's good for me that I'm having a break from deadlines after this. Even while I hanker for another potential writing deal, I will wait on the Lord. Clearly, He knows what's best for my mental health... and that of my family.

Ah, it is good to be published. It is good to be the author of multiple books. At last, some crazy, thirsty side of myself has been satisfied. I feel like I am where I was meant to be at long last. I look back at the six year old that wrote about Rafen first. I look ahead to now, where our names share the front cover of book one of The Fledgling Account. Besides my conversion, this has been the wildest and most rewarding journey of my life. And it's because of my conversion that it happened.

I'm going to leave you with a brief synopsis of The Fourth Runi, which is just as eye-wallopingly busy as its predecessors.

Rafen clasped the hem of his shirt, thinking desperately. He could get out of this if he got rid of the phoenix feather. If he lost it, burnt it, gave it away…

At last, Rafen learns what his phoenix feather means. Facing impossible tasks – and the growing power of  the demonic force Nazt – he gives into his desires for Etana and his own ambitions. Meanwhile, the Lashki plans to feed him to Nazt. Rafen's new vulnerability to the spirit world is getting the better of him. In the Ravine where the Lashki killed and resurrected himself, Rafen will be tested like he has never been tested before. Will he live up to his greatest title yet? Or will the responsibility destroy him?

The Fourth Runi - the fourth book in The Fledgling Account series. Available as an ebook through Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Smashwords.

Paperback to come within a week. 

I think I wrote The Fourth Runi (fondly christened the Fourth Runny, even though it is pronounced “ROO-NIGH”) for the first time when I was fifteen or sixteen. I remained very happy with that draft for a long time, and actual excerpts of the prose have made it into the final book that will be coming out just ten days from now.
 
I remember that I wrote this book largely with the intention of making it the most depressing book ever – but not so depressing that you want to stop reading. It’s got an intensity too – Rafen’s future and the futures of those around him are poised on the cutting edge of a sword. Anything could change the balance. Anything could result in a fate worse than death. And yet there's hope as well - determination, sacrifice, love, and even new life.
 
The final draft of this book was penned over 2013, during which time I also wrote the first draft of book five. I was twenty at the time. However, I did a major edit on all of the first four Fledgling Account books earlier this year when I read a book called: Harry Potter: An Unfulfilled Destiny. The book went into all the reasons why the urban fantasy epic Harry Potter did not reach its full potential – and the greatest of these reasons was Harry. Harry has things happen to him, but he does not define them, change them, or even carve out his own way to reaching his goals. Instead, he follows Dumbledore’s plans to the end. And when Dumbledore vanishes or doesn’t reply to Harry’s messages – or dies! – Harry is completely aimless, and the students on his side are heard to be saying: “What about Dumbledore?” “What does he want us to do?” “What will we do without him?” The formulaic layout of the Harry Potter series continues throughout all seven books. Harry begins the year at the Dursleys’. He leaves the Dursleys – is very often rescued, because he has no gumption to defy Dumbledore’s ruling and decide for himself where he wants to live (Hogwarts is said to be the safest place in the world, after all) – then a lot of things happen to Harry. There is normally some object/person that makes things very difficult for him throughout the course of the book. The Philosopher’s Stone… Chamber of Secrets… Prisoner of Azkaban… it’s sad to think that in some of these books you could take the words “Harry Potter” out of the title, and you wouldn’t have lost a great deal. Then at the end of the book Dumbledore shows up and explains the plot that Harry has failed to understand so far. In book seven, even though he’s dead, this is still a role that Dumbledore fulfils, even giving Harry advice on the last step he is to take. Harry’s final words to him are something like this: “But what should I do? Tell me what I should do!” In the end, what he “should do” only turned out to be something like an “expelliarmus” spell before watching Voldemort accidentally kill himself. I have spent years adoring the Harry Potter books, and still greatly enjoy the world-building in this series. But reading A Destiny Unfulfilled showed me for the first time what the books lacked in character development.
I wanted Rafen to reach his full potential. So I did a huge edit of my books at the last minute, calling each of them back from my publisher after I’d met the deadlines for them, and reworking his development over the course of each novel. In the editing process, this was something that I kept a close eye on too. I was obsessed.
 
The Fourth Runi is where Rafen’s character development will count the most. At a little over halfway through the series, this is the point where you’ll see most clearly whether he’ll continue pushing through and growing in his abilities – or whether he’ll stagnate and remain essentially in his twelve-year-old state of dependency like Harry did. I know my own faults, and I know it’s far easier to let things happen to my main character (far easier to plot meticulously without leaving room for him to do things) than to let him define his own story.
 
I’m setting you free, Rafen. Go ahead. Purge the world with your flame. Change the course of Pilamùric history.
 
Thrill me, because as an author, that keeps me writing.
 
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The Fourth Runi
 
Just when Rafen’s life is settling down, Sherwin – who has taken some mysterious journey alone – returns to tell him who he really is. Rafen’s titles of Fledgling of the Phoenix and Sianian Wolf have all been pointing to something he has deliberately ignored… but it’s impossible to ignore now. Angry at being cut off from the royal family and isolated with his blood father in the country, Rafen makes a move that he believes will tie him to the Sianian government and royal courts forever. Desperate to claim all that is rightfully his because of the phoenix feather he received at twelve, Rafen risks alienating Sherwin, his brother Francisco, and even Etana from himself as he pursues the life that he believes should be his… for only suffering will show him what it means to be Zion’s truest representative on the Mio Pilamùr.

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.
 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
“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!

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?

Over in America, a new day has dawned, and with it has come the consummation of twelve years work for me. At age ten, I started writing the book Rafen. At age twenty-two, I now look upon its publication.

It's been a long road - a hard one - and perhaps one of the most rewarding journeys of my life. When I started at ten, I thought everything would be simple. I worked hard and produced a 55,000 word manuscript that year. But I was under the impression that that was all a writer did. Afterwards, publication just sort of happened, like magic.

That certainly hasn't been my experience. After rewriting the book five times from scratch, I at last got the manuscript assessed by New Zealand author Tina Shaw. This was because, even at that early stage, I had already had rejections, and I knew I couldn't tempt a literary agent unless the book was good enough. When I was eighteen, an international literary agency picked me up. After two long years of copious rejections, Permuted Press offered me a multi-book contract. The rest is history (or shortly to become so).

This week, I've effectively been on submission again, looking for other online retailers willing to stock Rafen and even trying to tempt some physical book stores. So far, Wheelers and Fishpond.co.nz have responded positively (although I'm working on getting cover art and a description up on the latter website). The response of these two retailers means a lot to me, because I don't want my New Zealand audience to effectively have to spend forty dollars to purchase the physical copy of the book from Amazon. Friends, don't do this to yourselves! Fishpond now has it seven dollars cheaper. For those of you who live in the UK, Australia, or America, all you have to do is click on the green type to see where it's available for you. Australians can also purchase the paperback from Fishpond.

In another month, my second book releases, but much depends on how well this first book does. Whether it flops spectacularly or does well, it has certainly changed my life. I pray that it will likewise make a positive impact on an audience, offering them an adventure full of emotion, full of ups and downs, reminiscent of your own most profound experiences in life.

Mikinyai - blessings,

Y. K. Willemse

Well, here is the third and final instalment in this story about a story. At least, it is the final instalment for now. One never knows what will happen in the future. I hope the books of the The Fledgling Account, the series that Rafen is part of, will sell all right. But if they don't - if they flop - that's okay too. I'm just glad I got a chance to do this - glad I got the opportunity to get this far.
 
After three months of no story writing at age seventeen, I was rather proud of myself. I was recovering my spirits, and it seemed that I'd left behind my foolishness for good. At that time, I had a checkout job at a New World supermarket. One Saturday night, my supervisor sent me down to clean checkouts fourteen and fifteen. After I'd filled the bucket and started scrubbing, something really weird happened. My mind was completely blank (which unfortunately isn't uncommon with me) and then I saw Rafen in my head. I heard someone shouting his slave number: "Two-three-seven!" And then the whole first half of the book, as it is now written, flashed through my mind in about half a minute - everything, including a slaves' revolution. I paused.
 Don't be stupid, I thought.
 But I really couldn't help being stupid this time. So I grabbed a whole lot of old receipts and signature slips and started writing on them - just rough ideas so that I could remember this epiphany, because I had never visualised the first half of this book like this. Previously, I had devoted very little time to Rafen's slave life. But suddenly it seemed appropriate, and intensely symbolic to me. Not symbolic of my checkout job, mind you. However, it has occurred to me later on that it was very ironic I had the idea of extending the slave labour section of the book while cleaning checkouts. 

 I didn't have a lot of time at this stage, because I was seventeen, preparing to finish school and enter university. Hence, my only available time was on Saturday afternoons, for about an hour before I headed off to work. Accordingly, the following week I began rewriting Rafen for the fifth time. I looked at the blank white screen. And then I said to myself: "Stuff this. I don't care what anyone thinks." And I began, writing more honestly than I've ever written in my life.

 A year later, I was finished. Without telling anyone, I paid five hundred dollars to get the book manuscript assessed. The result was a much better novel. By this time, my writing was ready for the assessment. The writer I chose to help me was Tina Shaw, a New Zealand novelist, who was impressed with my writing style but let down by the second half of the book. In response to her advice, I did my best to find that place I had when I was cleaning the checkout, and I imagined up the climax anew. This time, I allowed the Lashki Mirah, my villain, to come in and attack whoever he liked. The result was that my protagonist fought back, and it was rather thrilling for me to watch it all come together. As an author, I write for much the same reason as a reader reads: to find out what happens next. The main difference is that I get to find it out first, and my experience is a rich and spiritual one, as a result.

 After the manuscript assessment (without telling anyone again), I started submitting to literary agents. My goal was not to let anyone find out that I was writing again, but that's rather hard, as the writer disease is an obvious one, with symptoms such as perpetual muttering, frantic typing, glazed eyeballs, intense coffee drinking, and so on. However, no one found out that I was submitting to literary agents until one in Spain showed some interest. I mentioned it to my sister in passing, and she spilled the beans. While my family was still bewildered, Pontas International Literary and Film Agency (the same agency that championed Jonas Jonasson for a while, and still works with Alan Duff) offered me a contract. After my Dad and I went over the contract together, and he gave me some more much needed advice, I signed it. At age eighteen, I was their youngest ever client. Over a two year period, Pontas submitted Rafen to numerous large publishing houses all over the world. What I didn't realise was that there was (or is) an acceptable formula for YA fantasy novels these days. And my book didn't fit that marketable formula. The plot was too complex and the project itself too sprawling and large for any of the large publishing houses to take on. They wanted something that was guaranteed to work. And let's be honest: epic fantasy seldom works any more these days. Lord of the Rings was clearly a miracle.

 I was thrilled to be let off the hook with submitting my book to publishers. But I wasn't thrilled to get all the rejections, and after two years, I was seriously considering self-publishing and marketing the book myself. I had written the next four books during that time, and I had come to the realisation that I had gone too far to go back. There was no giving up now. Just when Pontas decided collaborating with me wasn't working out (even though they still really loved the project), Permuted Press made a multi-book offer. Pontas left me to pursue that option, and I did. Two years on, here I am, a paid author, with the release date of her first book imminent.

 Part of me fears that the first half of the series won't do well enough for me to get a contract for the next three books. But then part of me doesn't worry. I could always self-publish, I suppose. And even then, I know that Someone's looking out for me. The whole journey of The Fledgling Account has been one of prayer. When things went really bad, I handed it to God, because I knew I couldn't do it on my own. I remember praying about Pontas, when I wasn't sure a contract was going to come through. This amazing sense of peace came over me, and I was suddenly full of joy, because I knew everything was going to be all right. For me, the story behind Rafen has been a miracle. And even if nothing comes of all this, I'll still be standing there in wonder, because in the end, I got there at twenty-two - and not on my own strength, but on Someone else's. It's the biggest and best cheat ever.

But I will admit, I am praying that the story has really only just begun here.

 Rafen is now on preorder as an e-book. The paperback will be available from the eighteenth of August onward.

Last week, I started telling the story behind my début novel, Rafen: how, after wanting desperately to write this story, I wrote my first manuscript at age ten, and how it was terrible. I finished with my Dad telling me that I had to rewrite the book. This would be a cliffhanger if it wasn't already obvious that I did rewrite the book. Over and over in fact.

 The following year, after my Dad read my first manuscript, I followed his advice and started writing character sketches and chapter plans in preparation for a rewrite. I was serious. If this was how it was done, I was sure as heck going to do it. The ironic thing is that I never write character sketches or chapter plans anymore. I have tried and tried to plan my books, to no avail. My characters always mess up the story. Again, I have tried and tried to plan them. That doesn't work either. I normally always have a decent description of the characters that I reference back to. I look at how they talk and walk and what they wear in the initial scene in which I introduce them. And then I ask myself: okay, what would this person honestly do in this situation? And this one? And that one? And that's why they mess up my books: because they try acting like they're real. Presumptuous little people. However, the most important thing, I've discovered, is to get out of the way of my own story. This is something I still struggle with. So while I don't follow the exact method Dad prescribed back then, I carry the principles with me.

 After I did my character sketches and chapter plans at age eleven-going-on-twelve, I started rewriting the book. I followed the plan meticulously. I remember feeling like the story was going to be very long. This was because I tried to put everything cool I possibly could into it. The result? At the end of the year, I had written a complete 98,000 word manuscript. My friends tried valiantly to plough their way through it. Unfortunately, very few eleven and twelve-year-olds read books that length for fun, let alone as a favour to a friend. And that's fine, because that draft was junk too. I just didn't know it at the time.

 My Dad didn't read it this time. We were in the throes of moving back to New Zealand from Australia. However, I had ambitions of publishing this draft. When we moved to Pukekoe for my Dad's year as a vicar in the church there, he told me there was an author in the congregation. Sure enough, there was a lady who had written for years - novel-length manuscripts, wonderful articles, and all kinds of other things.
My Mum said: "You won't bother her, will you?"
The people who have the misfortune of knowing me too well know that I'm pretty good at bothering people. Sure enough, I went and bothered her. And we became great friends. She would invite me over to her place for writing afternoons, and together, we went slowly through the important parts of my 98,000 word draft. She encouraged me to write concisely, and I still use many of the tricks and tools she gave me today. By the end of that year, by which time I was thirteen, I had discovered that I could either do this the hard way, and edit six extra words out of every sentence - or I could just rewrite the whole novel. Halfway through the year, my writing friend had to move to Australia. Once again, I was left to my own devices. I remember yearning for more input at this stage. But I was young and had loads of time. I just didn't feel that way.


 I chose to rewrite the whole novel. By age fourteen, I had written a much more concise (and edited) version of Rafen, which was, in those days, called He Who Is Radadazh. I sent out my first query to a literary agent at the end of that year, without telling anyone. The reply was that while my story looked promising, the writing needed work. I was given a list of manuscript assessors. I begged Mum and Dad to let me shell out five hundred dollars for a manuscript assessor, but they were unwilling to let me spend so much money on something that was, to all intensive purposes, a hobby at that particular time. My writing wasn't mature enough to benefit from a full manuscript assessment anyway. At fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, I wrote several more novels and rewrote Rafen a couple more times. I penned a small trilogy and the next three books in my Rafen series, which I hadn't named yet. I thought they were all brilliant. By age seventeen, I had written ten full-length books. My Dad read through Rafen several more times and gave me advice. I often felt like I would revise and revise and revise and nothing ever got better. At sixteen, I was accepted as a winner in the New Zealand Re-Draft competition. My story was published in their book Fishing For Birds. The experience of seeing my name in print was absolute magic. I couldn't stop looking at those pages.


However, I was nearing the end of my school years, and the reality was I was no closer to getting a novel published, and I had to decide on my future - on what I was going to study at university. The thought of studying for three to four years while a seven book series was swimming around in my head just about put me under. Maybe people will say that was pathetic of me. I don't know. But the idea of being forced to lay aside that project for so long was torturous.


My parents talked lots to me about studying and getting a good job. Writing would never earn me my living. I didn't want to listen. They were right, and I knew it. But all I could think of was the pain of leaving this behind. One day, my Dad told me that I needed to try something different. Very depressed, I vowed to myself that I would give up writing.

 And for three months, I managed it. Yet something had sunk its claws into my brain and just wouldn't stop holding on. Rafen came knocking again, and this time, I just couldn't ignore him.

This week, the e-version of my début novel went on pre-order. After over ten years of working on this book, on and off, I can hardly believe that I'm here. Who would have thought it was possible?

Voices from all sides tell an author to advertise aggressively. But rather than sit here and type "buymybookbuymybookbuymybook" I thought I would do something different. Very few people are interested in something promoted with robot-like persistence anyway. Experience has taught me that humans are interested in stories. And a story is exactly what I want to give you. I don't think I'll be able to tell this one in one blog post, so I'll spread it out over a few weeks.

Here it is: the story behind Rafen.

I was a homeschooled kid. A lot of people think homeschoolers are freaks, and they wouldn't have been too far off the mark with me. My other siblings are not insane. It's just me. I guess I caught the author bug young. From the time that my Mum pressed one of those super thick pencils into my hand and told me to write "Yvette", I meant to have my name on a cover one day.

Why would a five-year-old want to become an author? Why would a kid who can barely write one word want to write an entire book one day? What could be worse? I can't answer any of these questions. I can only say what my heart was set on. Who knows the reasons behind it all?

My notebooks from when I was six prove that I was writing about my main character and his female sidekick even back then. However, she was the centre of attention in those days. It was when I became a tomboy, at age ten, that the main character became male forever.

At age eight or nine, I remember one of Dad's old colleagues coming over to see us in Australia. She showed a huge amount of interest in my crazy designs of becoming an author, and she encouraged me. While she was visiting, I wrote five or six handwritten A4 pages of what I hoped would be my first book. I never finished it. My hand got sore.

When we went to Sydney, when I was ten years old, the folks whose place we were house-sitting at had a Harry Potter book on the shelf. My sister read it and then told me to have a go. I read it, decided it offended me, and vowed and declared I would write something better. (The crazy thing is, I'm a huge HP fan now.) I was a bit of an arrogant toad back then. I'm slightly less so now, and still working on toning down my stubborn ego.

Anyway, the end result was that I started writing my first book at age ten. When we returned from holiday, I began typing it on the family computer, secretly, during school time. I was meant to be learning how to type by going through a course my Mum had given me. Instead, I was writing a fantasy novel. Rebellious, right? I learned to type in the end. I'm probably the fastest in the family. 

By the end of the year, I had written 55,000 words, and I was sure I was on the high road to fame. Hilarious. My Dad read it. And here's the bit that's interesting in this story. Any other parent would have said: "Wow, kid. You're amazing." I'm a teacher now, and I haven't meant any ten or eleven-year-old that has the level of literacy I did at that age. That's not to say I was incredible. I was just precocious. But school teachers would have loved me. My Dad? He saw how serious I was, and he gave me the greatest gift I could possibly have. He was serious back. 
I said: "I'm going to get it published."
He said: "There's no way anyone's going to publish this."
Me: "Why not?"
Dad: "The characters make no sense, half the time we don't even know where they are, and there's no plot."
Me: "What's plot?"
Wow. Dad said to me: "I think you're going to have to rewrite this."
I remember having difficulty talking. Another whole year of giving up computer games? Another whole year of sweating over writing this book while my friends called me weird? I didn't know if I could do it.
It took me about two or three days to think it over. I wanted to get it published. I wanted to do it so badly that it was a constant ache in my bones. And I didn't want to just publish anything. I wanted to publish this idea, this boy - the slave turned hero. Nothing else would do.

I comforted myself by telling myself I could type pretty quickly by now.