The Road to Fire and Flight

It’s been a long road to bringing Fire & Flight, the first book in my epic young adult fantasy trilogy, the Heirs of Tenebris, to this point. Over the six years I’ve spent working on this YA fantasy novel, I’ve not only been humbled by this process but also overwhelmed by the outpouring of support from my friends and family. Looking back on the process I went through to write Fire & Flight, I wouldn’t change a thing because I learned a lot along the way but also grew into the author I am today. I hope that my experience—and the time it took—can encourage others in their writing, no matter how long it may take for your writing to come to life! Without further ado, this what my road to Fire & Flight looked like:

My YA fantasy novel was born on the spot. I mean that literally, because my Creative Expressions teacher had me write a paragraph à la “stream of conscious,” and the first thing that came to my fingers as I typed, was the haphazard awakening of the girl who would become my protagonist, Nyla. I didn’t have even have a name for her when I wrote that paragraph. There was only a girl with silver hair and lilac-colored eyes, and a forest.

Rolling with this first paragraph and developing the country that would be called Tenebris, Fire & Flight slowly grew into the novel it is today. It would take years and many revisions to get here, but as the narrative of the Heirs of Tenebris trilogy grew, so did my dreams.

During the summer of 2017, I pushed hard to finish my first draft before the next school year. My Creative Expressions teacher showed a great interest in helping me through the editing process, and I can almost guarantee that some of my best pieces of writing advice were stolen from him. I not only finished draft one in August of 2017, but also my first complete read-through. That’s a feeling I’ll never forget, but it was also overwhelming! By the time I was done, all 49,359 words were bleeding in pink corrections (red pens are pretty scarce on my desk!), and my head was spinning.

What happened next? How was I supposed to edit this, especially when there were parts I knew were rushed or needed to be ironed out?

I decided to wait out the summer and shelved Fire & Flight until the school year had started again. In September 2017, my teacher and I were getting ready for the long haul. With both of us working on our respective novels, I learned what’s probably the hardest but most helpful editing tip of all time: rewrite or retype your entire first draft. As you create draft two, you revise and expand what’s already written in draft one, making it better than it was before. Drafts are meant to be an evolution, and so I found myself using draft one more as the outline for what draft two could be because I never did outline Fire & Flight. In doing so, my second draft became everything that draft one wasn’t. My story started to blossom, and I couldn’t wait to see it bloom.

2018 was a hard year to map for me, as it’s drowned in revisions and obsessive periodic read-throughs to make sure I was on track with the goals I’d set. Through this revision process, I realized not only had my style of writing changed throughout draft one as I grew as a writer and learned more techniques, but the perspective had changed too! Frustrated and disenchanted, I pretty much abandoned the progress I’d made and began what I’m going to call draft two-and-a-half.

By June 2019, I’d completed a major overhaul as well as my last check-point read-through of draft two-and-a-half so I could finish it by the end of the summer (spoiler: I didn’t finish it by the end of that summer), and move onto the next stage.

When November of 2019 rolled around, I finally had my draft three, and my novel was nearly perfect. I still had some details I wanted to iron out and things that could be tweaked just a little more, but I couldn’t be prouder of how far Fire & Flight had come. From its measly 50,000 words to 127,625 words, all I had left to do was one “final” read-through to fix any remaining issues in early March of 2020.

I deemed Fire & Flight as “officially” finished on March 27^th at 128,307 words.

It was around this time that I began looking at the different publishing options and the industry as a whole. While I’d researched literary agents and sent a few queries out, my heart wasn’t entirely in the process. The more I learned and the more I researched, the less compelled I was to pursue traditional publishing. Taking a bit of a break from Fire & Flight and the whole process, I opted to regroup and come up with a plan. It was then that I decided to self-publish Fire & Flight.

There were many reasons I decided to take my YA fantasy novel’s fate into my own hands, but I won’t get into that here, but know that I couldn’t be happier with this decision and am proud of the lengths I’ve traveled to bring my novel to this point!

From its short-circuited beginnings, Fire & Flight has grown so much from the novel I was writing between classes and in my free time, but I’ve grown too. It’s been a long road for both of us—YA fantasy novel and author alike—and I can’t thank everyone enough for their overwhelming support throughout this journey. I’m so excited to share Fire & Flight with the world, and was over the moon to finally hold this YA fantasy novel that captured my heart and mind in my hands for the first time. There was absolutely nothing like release week, and the happiness I felt was indescribable, especially after spending so much time pouring my heart and soul into Fire & Flight, and the debut to my YA fantasy trilogy, the Heirs of Tenebris.

For all my fellow writers out there, I truly hope my experience reminds you that no matter how long it takes to tell your stories, it is never too long! Whatever your process and the time it may take, it’s just the perfect amount of time for it to come to life????