The Journey To Redux

It’s been a long while since I’ve made a blog post like this. One of the problems of writing is that you need to choose where each written word goes. Up until now, they’ve mostly been channelled into the books themselves, either in the work needed to get Molten Flux and The Hytharo Redux ready to be in your hands, or in writing the sequel to the former, which I’m delighted to say I’m halfway through the first edit of.

But I wanted to take a break from it all for a day to tell you more about The Hytharo Redux.

Not that it was originally called that. It was once called The First Hytharo, a title which now takes residence as that of the series itself. I’d strayed away from that name for the title of this book as it didn’t seem right for the story. It’s protagonist, Spiric, isn’t the first Hytharo, nor will he be the last. What he represents is a chance for renewal. Revolution. Redux.

The same that he’s represented to me.

This is a story that I’ve been wrestling with for the better part of a decade now. The visions of red dunes sweeping through the buried remains of the skyscrapers that pierced them came to me almost as a vision back in 2015. At the time I was abandoning the first novel I’d ever attempted to write, finding the world created initially by my 15-year-old self to be contradictory and shallow. A nest of trinket-like ideas that’d been stolen from other books I’d read growing up.

The only thing I knew was that I needed to destroy it. To bury it and start anew. What better way to do that than with the sands of time itself? It would be years until I discovered the significance of this action, both as a reflection of myself and in comparisons to other works I was yet to experience, either because I hadn’t found them, or they were yet to be created.

Nevertheless, I hurled myself bodily into the world that would become the Droughtlands, writing the first third of the book, a whole 33,000 words, in a matter of five days. My brother was the first to read this portion, and was so taken in by the world that while we were driving out to pick up some pizza, he drove straight past the place because he was so distracted talking about it.

I completed this first draft three months later, and as I delved into the arduous process of editing, I began to find a familiar problem.

The plot wasn’t working. Spiric simply wouldn’t “stick” to it. Who would’ve thought that a boy from the distant past with no recollection of his origins would have no binding ties to the world he’d found himself in? To make matters worse, Spiric never even found out about his past over the course of this version of the story.

This was because I didn’t know what it was, either. I’d simply forgotten about it. It was easier to get on with life without worrying about the past.

It would be a long time until I realised how wrong I was about this, and just how personal this was.

More than eight and a half years is a long enough time in which everything can change, so I’m grateful that writing, and the story of Spiric and the Droughtlands especially, has stuck with me. I won’t cover what’s happened in the world since 2015, because I think we’re sick of hearing about it, but for me, I matured a great deal, and now feel like an entirely different person.

I’d found what would turn out to be my wife, graduated university, spent three months bouncing around the UK on the holiday of a lifetime, before staggering backwards into a retail position at Microsoft that would lead me down the rather well-compensated path of a career in tech sales, before packing it all in to truly dedicate myself to writing.

It was a moment of insanity in the midst of a season of burn out, where I was forced to reckon with the fact that if I didn’t find out if I could be a writer now, I might never get the chance again. By then, I’d already spent too much time waiting for myself to get to this point, so I wasn’t going to wait for anyone else to give me the thumbs up for it, which is why I went down the rather empowering, if more solitary, route of self-publishing.

It was a choice made out of a lust for control, a theme which shines through in the book Molten Flux, though that’s another story. (Yes, that was intentional.)

Rather typically, I’ve forgotten one of the most important pieces I’d discovered about myself in this time. I was diagnosed with ADHD, which went a long way to explain the constant daydreaming, the ever-shifting focus of my attention, both in the literal sense and where my interests lay. It was why I struggled so much in school, why I was always so racked with swirling bouts of anxiety and panic, why I simply forgot the bulk of my adolescence.

Don’t worry, I’m about to tie all these threads together.

Wouldn’t it be a little bit ironic that a writer who’d purposely buried the more sour memories of his anxious past would be struggling to write a character that he’d inflicted with the very same thing?

It was only after this diagnosis that Spiric’s story finally clicked into place. Up until then, I’d made three different and rather substantial attempts at telling it, and also wrote the entirety of Molten Flux, a purposely tangential project that existed so I wouldn’t have continue trying to glue Spiric to the world I’d thrown him into.

But just as Ryza’s story was about his endless, rage-filled fight for control, I discovered that Spiric’s was a quest for memory so that he may reckon with it, rediscover what brought him into the world in the way that it was, and to have a chance to recreate himself.

To this end, writing The Hytharo Redux was a cathartic exercise that I undertook in the middle of the aforementioned burn out. In this time, after spending over eight years with him in my head, I finally discovered who Spiric was and also who he is.

While it may seem like an insufferably long time to take to tell (what’s only the beginning) of a story, I’m glad I waited that long. I became a much better writer in that time, learning the power of particular phrasings (as with the end of the above paragraph), the narrative parallels that I could create between the world of the Droughtlands as it is, and the world from which Spiric had come, and then also the world left by those-of-glass, on which everything is built.

As I ready myself to write the next volume of Spiric’s tale, I am keenly aware of how all these layers, all these buried and forgotten worlds that serve as foundations for the next, are a reflection of my own consciousness. That I am not just a series of impulses that are bound by the present moment, but a long line of experiences, remembered or not, that’ve led me to the now. Forgetting them, purposely or not, only serves to dull my own character, and subsequently that of the stories I tell.

So, no matter the scarred memories or the bruised feelings, it was through writing this book that I learned to not shy away from them, to embrace them and create a version of myself that I could embrace as well.

I just hope that Spiric can do the same.

The world he now walks through is the layered remnants and ruins of a decade of writing. The characters he meets range from being creations that were invented only a sentence before he was introduced, to being concepts that were conceived long before him.

But what remained consistent was the endless dunes of the Droughtlands, the buried skyscrapers that dot them and the strange magics contained within them. Spiric’s story, just as Ryza’s, is all part of a larger tale that delves into those-of-glass, the wiped-out people who left these ominous ruins behind.

The Hytharo Redux will finally be set loose on the world on October 24th, 2023, and I simply can’t wait to have more people to talk to about it. Many secrets, puzzles and cryptic hints lie within its pages and I find myself constantly referring to them as I lay out the next set of mysteries in future books.