Why I thought this book was lost at sea, and how its journey to publication ended up being a bit of a voyage…
The Pirate’s Dragon cover with art by Joe Todd-Stanton, design by Becky Chilcott
I’d just started writing The Pirate’s Dragon in March 2020, and well, we know what happened next. Having this project underway became a lifeline for me in those worrying weeks and months of the first lockdown, and being able to escape to this other world, even if for twenty minutes or an hour each day, was something I’ll always be grateful for. I had a detailed plan which served as a kind of map, and this also helped give me structure and momentum, making the writing experience smoother and more enjoyable than it had been for a long time. Maybe it helped that I knew the story world already, and was determined to give my readers a satisfying ending to the trilogy. So far so good. But … a writer only has so much control, choosing how to write and when. The rest is out of our hands…
As writers, all we can control is maybe when and how we write…
The second book in this trilogy, Rise of the Shadow Dragons, was published in May 2020, when bookshops were closed. All the planned events were, quite rightly, cancelled too. This meant, in spite of the best efforts of my publisher, sales weren’t what they might have been, and everything was looking very uncertain back then. Totally understandably, the publisher put commissioning the third book on pause, till things became clearer, even though my editor liked the story and had been such a wonderful champion for this series all along. I knew that times were tough, especially for small publishers, and difficult decisions had to be made to protect jobs and stay in business – that’s a publisher’s first responsibility, after all. These are things my head reasoned, while my heart broke a little bit that this story I loved wasn’t going to see the light of day. So The Pirate’s Dragon floated here for the next twelve months or so.
Image copyright Canva
Being on pause wasn’t easy, but I threw myself into a new project that felt simpler, younger and easier, that felt like even more of a cosy escape, that felt like something my seven-year-old self would have loved – this became the Wildsmith series. I’d learned from writing The Pirate’s Dragon that, especially when I was stressed or worried, having a writing project underway was something that tethered me, that was beneficial for my mental health, that allowed me to show up more fully in the rest of my life and take care of my family in tough times.
Art by Joe Todd-Stanton from Wildsmith: Into the Dark Forest
So what happened next? What changed and how did The Pirate’s Dragon find its way to new waters? Read on to find out…
The Pirate’s Dragon is published by UCLan Publishing on 15th Feb 2024, £8.99 ISBN: 9781915235992