Introducing “9 Years Yearning”
Hello again, everyone! I disappeared from Medium last year, shortly after my highest-grossing article ever. But there’s an excellent reason for that! I’m so delighted to finally share the truth of my mysterious absence.
My second-to-last post was pretty prescient. “I Wrote One Million Words of Creative Fiction Last Year: Here’s What I Learned” discusses my journey to reach that golden milestone of one million words. This has been hailed as the marker that writers should reach before attempting to publish, and I blasted past this limit from 2022 to 2023, hitting about 1.8 million words.
And then … I stepped past that barrier from hobby writer to author.
In June of this year, I published my first book, 9 Years Yearning, available on Amazon. Here’s the blurb:
Uileac Korviridi has three goals: honoring his late parents, protecting his little sister Cerie, and serving his country.
Fellow student Orrinir Relickim has a chip on his shoulder the size of a mountain range; his fierce demeanor hides an unrelentingly tender heart.
Both boys only seek martial prowess. Destiny has other plans.
Over the course of their education, Uileac and Orrinir gain instruction in something much different: the agonizing glory of young love. Explore their coming-of-age romance, twined with poetry, mythology, and war.
The world of Breme
The novella is set in Breme, a country lightly inspired by Celtic culture and Mongolian geography. Other than the majestic Rimuk Mountains that block it off from enemy nations, Breme’s primary feature is High Poetry: a type of magic based on poems. In fact, High Poetry is the reason for the country’s continued existence — and the aforementioned mountains, raised by a saint to protect her people.
While Breme is beautiful, with a rich culture and warm-hearted people, it has many downsides, just as any real country does. One of those is the very reason that 9 Years Yearning exists. Destitute children, especially orphans, are pressed into military service at the War Academy, where they grow into young men willing to die for their country.
For generations, Bremish men have thrown themselves at the intractable problem of Sina, the land across the mountains, which is desperate to colonize and destroy Breme. A sparsely populated, impoverished nation like Breme needs as many highly skilled warriors as possible to supplement High Poetry, which is used for everything from warfare to healing. 9 Years Yearning delves lightly into this magic system and the religion that has grown around it, but it is more deeply explored later in the series.
The Eirenic Verses
9 Years Yearning was not actually my first project in what will be a much longer series; it tentatively has ten parts, but it may very well spiral into many more.
In fact, I started with is now the planned sixth part, Poesy, which focuses on Uileac Korviridi’s younger sister, Cerie. Poesy is a full-length novel at around 110k words, and it was originally intended to be the first part of a trilogy. As I expected this would be the starting point, I finished and began querying the novel around January of this year.
However, I found myself so enraptured by the world I had created and the characters I had come to love that I began to “backfill” with more stories that take place before the initiating events of Poesy. Realizing that I might as well make a more expansive series, I gave up on querying and turned my attention to 9 Years Yearning, which serves as the introduction to the world of Poesy.
The Eirenic Verses follows characters from both Breme and Sina, with a main cast of six characters. On the Bremish side, this includes Uileac and Orrinir, both soldiers, and Cerie, a High Poet. The Sinan cast includes Mordrek, a slippery Sinan Intelligence Services officer; Haniya, the princess of Sina; and Ono, a royal guard.
With a sympathetic cast from each side of the conflict, we see a more nuanced picture of this long-standing war and come to understand that despite rhetoric and resentment, there is rarely a clean-cut conclusion to any political issue. This touches on an issue that has always fascinated me: the human tendency toward oversimplification and tribalism.
Though The Eirenic Verses is firmly set in the fantasy genre, I have sought to develop a realistic world filled with many of the same issues that plague our everyday lives, whether that is international relations or human psychology.
Why I chose to self-publish
I have the greatest respect for tradpub authors. Though my own querying journey was relatively short, I recognize the tears and frustrations that come with putting your work out for the world to see and receiving constant rejections. It takes a special kind of person to muscle through that disappointment and continue believing in your work.
Unfortunately, some tradpub authors look down on indie authors as being lazy, uncommitted, cheap, or undisciplined. “Anyone can self-publish, so it’s not that special,” some sniff, quite unfairly.
While it is true that anyone can put something up on Amazon with little effort, this does not mean that every self-published work is of low quality. It also does not mean that everyone who chooses the indie route simply cannot handle the stresses of querying and traditional publishing.
My choice was strategic based on the content of my work. All of the pieces before the sixth part of the series, Poesy, likely never would have been picked up by an agent. These books are in the weird space between novella and novel, making them more difficult to sell. While I could have expanded them into full-length novels, I believe in telling the story as it needs to be told — not conforming to arbitrary word counts.
9 Years Yearning features snapshots of Uileac and Orrinir’s lives together, with 1 chapter for each of their 6 years spent in the War Academy. It is told in retrospective, with the narrator, Uileac, picking out a highlight of each year based on his remembrances. Though it would have been possible to rhapsodize for 100,000 words (or more!) about their experiences, I felt this was unnecessary for the effect I wanted: a sense of movement and growth across time. There was no need to drone on in order to reach a specific word count based on a publisher’s demands.
I want the story of the Eirenic Verses told as it is supposed to unfold, no matter whether a publisher would balk because of the shorter length. As such, self-publishing was my ideal medium, and I’m very pleased with the result.
It’s my hope that you, too, will be delighted with the world I have created.
You can purchase 9 Years Yearning on Amazon in all marketplaces for USD $2.99.
Be sure to follow me on Amazon and Goodreads so that you’re updated when the next book, Pride Before a Fall, is released!
