Starting the Journey of The Sword Saint Chronicles

Well, this is the first blog post on the brand-new website I’ve built to start talking about one of the craziest and (already) most rewarding decisions I’ve ever made, and it is proving to be every bit as daunting a step as the decision itself.

On Monday, May 11th, I wrote the two most anticipated words of the first draft of what is somewhere between my first novel and my first three novels… The End. Since then, I have been trying to let it marinate and leave it alone while I wait for my upcoming retreat in June where I will begin edits in earnest. This sucker stands at 215 thousand words right now, assembled in three convenient chunks and while there is a ton of work ahead of me before it’s something presentable, its finally in a state where I can start sharing enough about my work to inspire the excitement it brings to me and the few people who I’ve felt comfortable enough up to now to let help me.

I’ve never felt very comfortable talking about my creative work. While I’m finally at a point in my life where I am starting to understand the whys of that, such enlightenment has done little to dispel those old, anxious ghosts. It may be cliché, but the first painful lesson of this journey has been the persistent reminder that bravery is not a lack of fear but persistence through it. I am determined to find ways to do what I love whether that’s for 5 people or 5 million until I can’t do work I’m proud of or don’t have anything else to say.

A couple of years ago, I quit my well-paying, leadership position of more than two decades at an exciting, growing company to do what I had always told myself I wanted to do (but wasn’t quite sure I did or could), write fiction. I was almost fifty years old at the time, and while I had studied writing in college, and dabbled in fiction writing for a few years after college, and been telling stories with friends and family for fifty years, it had been a long time since I had written anything creatively with any sort of consistency or regularity. I had a busy life; two decades of long work hours and parenting and physical illness and difficult investments and financial decisions had left little room for the kind of time and attention good writing deserves and there were half a million convenient excuses to help me sleep with that.

The first five chapters (of the book I thought I was writing) spent most of their time during those years in an old green folder that got shuffled around into more arcane storage spaces at the outer edge of my universe and a series of USB memory sticks, religiously backed up and tested once or twice a year, but the characters wouldn’t leave me alone. They were sometimes quiet, silent for days or weeks at a time, but the process that had begun in the dark, experimental laboratories in my head bubbled and percolated and nattered persistently, if inconsistently, for attention, especially in the shower, and on the trail, and the train...

Then suddenly my company was sold and going in some new directions. I was burnt out and exhausted and depressed. I had not accomplished what I had set out to do with it, I certainly wasn’t living my dreams… I wasn’t even particularly trying to live my dreams… and while things hadn’t worked out as I had planned, they had worked out well enough to set another persistent nattering in the back of my brain.

Eventually I got the courage to discuss this utterly insane idea with the most insanely supportive person I have ever had the fortune to meet and marry. Instead of the anticipated (hoped for?) reality check I had prepared myself to accept, she did the only thing I probably should have expected – she told me I had no choice but to do it.

So, I quit my job, determined to write, and vowed in an embarrassingly public way to pick up my old project where I had left off and devote my semi-retirement to it. The first six months were not an encouraging demonstration of my preparedness to accomplish this herculean task or my financial planning skills. I was passionate about my ideas, but undisciplined, it was a struggle to relearn the process and stick to the chair until the day is done. I built a Greenhouse. I read books. I lost (a little) weight and got into better shape and got most of my health issues under control, but writing is a lot harder than I remembered. I had conditioned myself to spending my days in very different ways, in meetings with people and conversations… not alone in my study with my trinkets and a bunch of babbling half-baked characters and ideas barking and rattling around in my head.

It’s not an easy thing to sit in one place for eight hours allowing a bunch of people in your head to argue or stab each other or fall in love and it’s even harder when they bleed over into your normal life and won’t leave you alone The anxiety I had about my creative work and the damage my choices were doing to my family’s safety net were a wall of Jello I had to push through to get to anything anyone would call productive. Hours at the desk with little to show for it were smothering. Slowly, with a ton of support from a handful of amazing people, and the guidance of wise folks alive and dead, I worked through enough of that to figure out how to enjoy writing again and I found a professional situation that gives me the flexibility to do it without having to completely sacrifice my family and friends to the beast to enjoy it.

So, thank you to anyone who has read this far, or expressed any sort of interest in my work, or helped me to get to point so I can do what I love. I’m truly grateful. I hope this thing gets published, and I hope you enjoy it when it does.

But if you don’t, that’s ok too, and I’m still grateful.

inspiration.

Contact

Reach out for questions or collaborations.

Email: madhuvan@martincatania.com

Phone: +1-‪(872) 246-3288‬

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