Me, Land Over Sea, and becoming

I've never been one for blog posts. My preference is, generally, that an author disappear from the work, that their biography not emplace a lens through which their work is read. Knowing an author's story, context, and geography can provide insight or credibility, but that delineation may also bound the imaginative potential of the reader-text relationship. I speak for my own work: to the reader is released Land Over Sea, and one's relationship with the text is uniquely their own.

So, how am I to write a blog? The answer, I hope, is to find a careful balance. Literature is universal; stories are true blood. If I can remain in the vein of the universal as I convey experiences and what I have learned, I think we might share a meaningful connection without detracting from individual relationships with Land Over Sea.

I want to address a theme: becoming. Here, I will speak of my own and how that process forms a helix with Land Over Sea. Growing up amid nature and the aesthetics of multi-cultured myths, the earliest strands of Land Over Sea were the actions of vivid play. My earliest writings were, as they must be, imitation. Of those old, old experiments, ley lines remain, even if all the words have changed.

As a youth, I was told I was good at writing. Now of course, many of us are told that about various skills, and that encouragement is both motivation and a burden at that uncertain age. Gladly, for me writing remained for some time a form of play, and so I wrote for pleasure. That would change, somewhat, but not yet.

In high school I had a rather wretched time, though I did not, perhaps, know it then. Nothing needs to be said other than that I read and wrote more, but there was more desperation in it.

A draft of Land Over Sea, the very first, technically, was completed in 2016. The book has changed so much since, it hardly feels the same, just as the person I was hardly seems to be me.

University was a blossoming, and initiated a return to what I loved and enjoyed at my core. My mind expanded. I became aware of a tradition of seeking and majesty, a chain of minds, dead and never dead, as I looked above the horizon of the city and the country. I wrote more consciously, and certainly imitatively, and I learned. My writing was poor.

It was both a blessing and a curse when my laptop was stolen at the end of my first year. While perhaps six months of writing were lost, it took me far more time than that to rewrite what was missing. I had to relearn my style, and could not. I started again, and it was painful and slow.

As my writing improved academically it also improved creatively. I learned the rules; I hadn't the ability to break them, but I started to wonder at the act. I rewrote what I had written, as I had already, with each new expansion of consciousness.

The summer after graduating was spent in fierce work. Then, I began and finished my Master's during the pandemic.

The following year I dedicated to the book. My days were long. Drafts had been completed several times, but upon completion, when I returned to the first chapter with intimations of triumph, I was always confronted by the discovery that my writing no longer met my standard. I rewrote. I read the book aloud, I read its characters, I read it put together, I took it apart. I knew the text intimately. Today, a slight distance away from that intensity of contact, not all the text's nooks remain explicit, though I know their truth. Land Over Sea had grown into a product of multiple selves.

I completed Land Over Sea, in what is essentially its current form, in 2023. My becoming, and Land Over Sea's becoming, had reached a point of convergence. I began the hunt for an agent and was turned down for a year. Perhaps it was the length of the novel, its uncertain categorization, or my query letter. I know of only one agent who read even the first chapter, but she did not think a market for the book was obvious.

I set out on my own, and I have enjoyed the control and freedom of self-publishing. It is good to learn the skills behind the design of a book. If you also write, do not believe your journey ends with the actions of anyone else but you. Go on.

I continue to compile notes, and to think of Land Over Sea. The future of the series is vast, and it thrills me. I see paths; I glimpse their ends, but not all the turns. The future I am excited to share with you.

Warmly,

—W. R. G. Fuller

P.S. If you wish suggest a topic for another post, I welcome it.