Light On Water, rebooted

‘I should have died the day I learned my father’s name.

I would have, but for the second of three gifts I inherited from him, and one I took from my mother.

I think—I did die. I just didn’t stay dead.

After 25 years, several titles, and several false starts, I’m rewriting and fine-tuning the high fantasy manuscript that tells the story of Eridan One-Strike’s many-times-great granddaughter, Istelian.

‘Light-on-Water’ is what Tel’s name means in her mother’s language. She’s been a snarky joy to write, and a cautionary tale for other writers.

TL;dr…

Worldbuilding is hella fun as long as you keep it private.

Understand what you are getting into when you write a big but unpublished series over many years.

Don’t put stuff on Wattpad unless you think there’s no hope of getting agented or noticed by a Big 5 publisher. You’ll hear of exceptions, but those are *exceptions*.

Tel is an *old* side-character of mine. I’ve known roughly who she was since 1988.

The first adaptation of her first-person POV story, 1996-2009, had the apt working title of ‘Handmaiden’. Even then I knew it would be confused for Atwood’s dystopia. I’d set it aside halfway finished, from 1999-2009. In June 2009 I picked it back up after waking from a flu-induced fever and knowing how to finish it.

From 2009-2012, it was called ‘Blackfire’. I queried 65 agents but I am absolute shit at writing my own queries. I think I had one partial request! Though finished, the mms was seriously disjointed, and I was too close to it to realize how flawed it was. Even so, It won a third-place mention (for worldbuilding alone) in a 2011 Del Rey Suvudu writing contest. I kept it on my ‘needs improvement’ list.

From 2012-2019, it was called ‘Bloodshadow’. I rewrote it, trimmed a bunch, and put it on Wattpad from 2014 to 2016 (I think). It had this cover.

My then-agent had no interest in the novel, so at the time Wattpad seemed a worthwhile experiment. It earned a thousand or so reads and a few followers, but it certainly never left a mark. I had other things to write and make.

I took a hard look at it over the 2019-2020 winter holiday break, and saw where I could make more changes to bring the story closer into my current Lonhra Sequence canon.

Because it was self-published on Wattpad and *wasn’t* a huge success, most literary agencies aren’t going to be interested, nor will the SFF commercial giants that I’d normally approach.

So when I revise and get it edited, I’ll probably self-publish it again through Draft2Digital, as both an ebook and a print novel. I have the feeling that’s where most of my fiction is eventually going.

It’s going to fun getting this story back into the wild!