The Magiq of Aenya Production Diary #4

I am hammering out the details on the last chapter of my latest book (42 of 42), which currently stands at 165k words. While it’s a bit dense for a YA debut novel, stories are organic things with a life all their own, and often go places I don’t intend. I hope, however, my future agent or publisher will appreciate the quality of the work and the tightness of the storytelling and that I am not the type to write fluff. My beta readers have been thrilled with it so far, and I believe this may be my most relatable and “marketable” work to date. And this matters a lot, because in this industry, it seems, marketability is everything.

Unfortunately, I am still battling the EVIL algorithm. I tried posting this video to DeviantArt, and the algorithm lumped it in with smut. — Yes, this saccharine-sweet video, made by my daughter and inspired by Studio Ghibli, ended up in a bunch of folders with nothing but NSFW content in them. But hey, that’s the Internet for you! So I took the whole video down and posted it here.

My plan is to try to get this thing picked up by a big-name publisher like TOR, Bantam, or Del Rey, because it’s a hell of a lot better than most of the dreck they release. Due to the glacial pace of sending and receiving queries, I’m giving it two years before I go the indie route. This doesn’t mean Lilliea and Rose will never grace the shelves of your local Barnes & Noble, only that I’ll need to impress the big shots in NYC with my indie sales, the way the recent Harry Potter fanfic, “Alchemized,” did after receiving 70k Goodreads reviews. In the meantime, I’ll be turning my focus to my first non-Aenya book in twenty years, a modern take on the Greek myth of Theseus. To escape the dreaded algorithm, I will also be renaming the book and possibly using a pseudonym. For now, I am keeping the new title secret, but it won’t have “Aenya” anywhere on the cover.

Finally, I am thrilled to share this promo video made by Jasmine. In this scene from the book, LILLIEA and ROSE share a heartfelt moment under the stars on the roof of their grandmother’s home.

‘The Magiq of Aenya’ was inspired by the ten-year D&D adventure I ran for my wife and kids. It tells the tale of Lilliea and Rose, the daughters of Merowin Mathonway, the town stargazer. When a mysterious comet streaks across the sky, terrifying the superstitious people of Graton, Lilliea’s younger sister, Rose, and her father disappear. Lilliea’s quest to uncover what happened to her family leads to one shocking revelation after another, altering everything she thought she knew about herself, her father, and the nature of reality itself.

THE MAGIQ OF AENYA is the FOURTH novel in the AENYA SAGA, which continues the tale of the Zo, an ancient civilization lost to the pages of myth, and the vast and forgotten powers left in the wake of their extinction.