Sylv

I've been... Putting off writing this particular post, I think, at least for a little while. Sylv has been promised and then not delivered over and over again for four dang years - and no casual reader wants to know the explicit traumas and excuses I have for that.
When I was young and bad shit happened, I wrote. Furiously. Passionately. I wrote through the night, in the back of my notebook during school lessons, hiding in the bathroom at family parties because I had all these ideas and this energy and I had to do something with it and it was the most important thing--

I didn't stop writing until pretty much bang on two years ago. And then I did. I just stopped. I wrote maybe a few hundred words in the space of a year. Forced myself back into it, said I was going to finish The Fall, punished myself for not doing it... It wasn't important to me any more. It didn't matter.
I felt like I'd let Sylv down. Like I'd let him go. Thinking about him hurt too much to do anything with. This time last year, I had a fully completed, half-edited novel, just needing a few polishing touches... And I couldn't do it.
Letting myself write other stuff was probably the best thing I did on that front, but really I know it was the personal growth and finding home in one's skin and all such poetic things from the past few posts that really healed it for me.

So, I'm trying to... Articulate it now.
Sylvestus is about a magic island that appears in the middle of the Indian Ocean and the beastly gods which walk upon it. It is about the Roman invasion of that island and one seemingly insignificant man among them. It is about fire tigers and dusty moths and giant bears and sword fights and tribal warriors.
And it's about running away. Reinventing. Starting over.
Aka, what I've become very good at in my life.
And it's about finding home. Turning back. Embracing the hollow space inside yourself and calling your own life your home.
I was so full of hope a few years ago, when I first was writing Sylvestus and knew what it was going to be about. I was discovering myself and other people, falling in first clumsy love, having people tell me they hated me - I had already been through heartbreaking trauma, and I had recovered from it, I had come back, and I was going somewhere. I wrote ~250,000 words in the space of just over a year about the island and the Romans and Sylv - and even as I declared through him that one must come to terms with their trauma and face their own mistakes to truly be at peace, I kept running. I was going somewhere and I didn't know where and it was terrifying.
Which is why the re-write and the drafting and editing of what would become Vol I: The Fall was so impossible.

It won't be easy. I'm not fixed. And he isn't finished. Vol I is finally, truly, ready to be officially released to the public on the 22nd August, 2019 (aka next Thursday). Vol II is, erm... Well, I've written seven and a bit chapters of the first draft, sooo...?
I'm really struggling right now to express how much Sylv means to me. As a character, as a person, as an idea... And yes: as a story and as a book. He was one of many characters I made and wrote for with the creative writing community that I spent most of my teen years in; I only kept writing him because the community had drifted apart when we'd just come up with an awesome storyline I wanted to play through; and then, somewhere along the way... He came to mean so much to me. The original plan we had ended much, much differently. Almost exactly the same on a grand scale, but so unimaginably different in the smallest, and most important, way.

Sylv means a fucking lot to me, y'all. He's not my oldest character. He's not the most like me. He's not the hardest to write or the easiest or my favourite.
But right now, he's the one I needed. And I think this novel is the one I've put more of my heart into than any other. Hours, and drafts, and pain, and anger, and anxieties, and so much love.

So it would mean the world to me if you could support it when Sylvestus Vol I: The Fall comes out on 22nd August, 2019 (yeah, forreal this time. I gave myself less than a week between the announcement and the release date to force myself to not back out).

More details will follow closer to the date (and more art, and the playlist, aaaand...) but for now you can subscribe to this page on the right-hand side, or like the Sylvestus FB page for more frequent updates.
Apologies for the dour tone; it's extremely nerve-wracking to make this announcement for real at last, and it's very... Vulnerable. But I promise this is exciting.

And the novel is very, very good.