This is the free monthly edition of The Morning Realms Dispatch, in which I share with my lovely readers some behind-the-scenes content and teasers for GUARDIANS OF DAWN: ZHARA, the first book in the Guardians of Dawn series, forthcoming AUGUST 29, 2023. If you would like even more secrets, why donโt you consider becoming one of my ์ ์น?
In the summer of 2020, my brain broke.
To be fair, I was far from the only one undergoing a mental health crisis in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, but on the day my brain broke two things happened:
I checked myself into a local crisis center.
I was supposed to deliver the first book in the Guardians of Dawn series.
Madness, mania, melancholy, music, and finding the drive and desire to create when the world was literally falling apart โ both within and without you โ was something I had written about in my previous duology, but I hadnโt expected these themes to escape the very bounds of my books to haunt me in real life. Although I had written acceptance of my mental illness monster into the pages of Wintersong and Shadowsong, I hadnโt yet understood how to live with bipolar disorder. How to work. How to write. I knew how survive, but I did not know how to thrive.
And then the world ground to a halt.
When I first pitched Guardians of Dawn to my publisher, I had wanted to work on something a bit more light-hearted than Wintersong, something inspired by the magical girl manga and anime of my youth โ full of action, adventure, romance...and joy.
It turns out that finding joy โ much less delivering on it โ is a lot harder during a pandemic.
By the time my brain broke, I had been working on the first book in the Guardians of Dawn series for several years, writing draft after draft after draft in an effort to get it right. Not good โright. I had the premise, the characters, and the plot, and yet some ineffable, intangible quality was missing. The book lived and breathed, yet somehow the spirit โ the soul โ remained elusive.
In the weeks after I returned from the crisis center, I had some time to consider what it was I truly wanted. From my writing, my art, and myself. I took a lot of baths, watched a lot of BTS content, read a lot of webtoons, played a lot of otome games on my phone, and tried to remember the way joy felt. The way I felt when I was fourteen, reading print-outs of Sailor Moon fanfiction while luxuriating in a Victoriaโs Secret Enchanted Apple bubble bath. The way I felt going over to my friend Abbyโs on weekends in high school to binge-watch The Vision of Escaflowne with her and Jenna. The way I felt when I was teen: girlish and innocent and full of delight.
It turns out that joy is not just discovered, but made. Created. Nurtured. Built.
I have over 800,000 words on various drafts of ZHARA โ 811,810, to be exact โ and each of them are links on the chain that I built of joy. It was over the course of these 800,000 words that I discovered joy is made of so many more things than happiness or fun; joy is light, joy is dark, joy is labor, and joy is play. I wrote all that and more into this first book, and I hope you will find as much joy in ZHARA as I did.
Oh wow. Thank you for sharing your story. I am so glad you found joy--and the strength to cultivate joy in one's day-to-day life. ๐๐