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SHOW NOTES

In this week’s episode I talk about why I stopped writing my latest series and why I have no problem failing in public.

TRANSCRIPT

Sometimes you’ve just got to call it quits on a novel.

I don’t normally believe in quitting, but in this week’s episode I’m going to talk about why I stopped writing my Sound Mage Sonata urban fantasy series, and how I failed miserably in public.

***

Hello, and welcome to episode 28.

I wanted to give you guys an update on my Sound Mage Sonata series.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you probably heard me talk about it a lot. Some of you wrote me and told me that you were interested in it.

And then I stopped talking about it.

Why?

I take pride in the fact that I don’t usually quit my novels. I write them from start to finish, even when things get rough.

I just prefer to finish what I start, and I’m always glad that I did when I look back on the project.

But this project proved too difficult for me to continue.

In episode 3, I talked about the research I was doing for the Sound Mage Sonata series. I talked about the research I’d done into Islam, Dubai, Middle Eastern customs and culture, and music.

At this point I had spent a fair number of hours on research and I had a lot to show for it.

I was about 10,000 words into the novel when I hit a roadblock. At first, I couldn’t figure out what it was.

So I did some more research, and I discovered a problem.

It would be a very bad idea to mix Muslims and magic together.

In Islam, Magic is something to be feared. It’s the mark of dishonesty. To even dabble with it invites danger into your life, and it is frowned upon. Now, not all Muslims feel this way, but I started researching magic use and Muslims and most sources I found agreed.

That was a problem because my main character was a Muslim and he used magic. I mean, you can’t have urban fantasy without magic.

So I had a problem.

***

I played around with the idea of inventing a religion instead—but that didn’t work because the setting was very clearly in a city inspired by Dubai. To set something in a Middle Eastern setting and use any other religion than Islam just didn’t feel right. It also didn’t help that the story featured jinn prominently.

I couldn’t put jinn in the story without the culture that they came from. While that works for Western mythology and creatures, it doesn’t really work for Middle Eastern folklore, at least not in a way that feels genuine.

I realized it would be exceedingly difficult to do this story without crossing some kind of line.

It’s important to me that my stories are inclusive and not misappropriation in any way, so I ultimately made the decision to quit writing the series until I could make it work. And in order to do that, I’d have to do a lot more research, something that would require travel and a lot of time I didn’t have.

So I stopped.

That was a career first for me, but it’s important to me that I write stories that respect my readers. The last thing I want to do is offend or insult someone who has spent their hard earned money on my work—at least not intentionally.

But I learned a lot of things about the Middle East that I can use for future novels, and I look forward to that day.

Until then, the Sound Mage Sonata series is going in my someday pile.

Sometimes failure happens. I definitely failed with this series.

I mean, I talked about it in public, put myself out there. Most people would wait until the book was done before talking about it.

I definitely failed in public in front of all of you guys, but it doesn’t bother me. I don’t really see it as a failure. In fact, the idea that I failed never even occurred to me until I was writing this episode. I learned a lot about a culture, wrote 10,000 words of a novel, and ultimately made a hard decision with my readers in mind. That’s a win in my mind, and practice for the next time something like this happens.

So at the end of the day, I’m going to keep on keeping on, and I’m going to write a new urban fantasy series that I know you guys will love.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

 

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” Winston Churchill

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