When People Ask Me to Describe My Book and Protagonist in One Sentence, and the Curse of Self Promotion

You made it to the party. You’ve left your crypt for the first time in a month. You emerge pale and frizzy-haired, socially obligated to perform your routine human interaction at least once before you return to the safety of the dark hole you crave to continue writing.

They don’t know. They don’t care. How could they? They won’t ask. It’s your own little secret.

BLAST.

The blog. The Facebook page.

You’ve been sharing your writing process, the knowledge of your finished book in need of editing. You’ve been putting yourself… shudder… out there. A necessary evil.

You can’t let your mom and your dog be your sole reader forever. You had to share. You made a sacrifice. They won’t ask.

“Hey, how are you? How’s the writing going?”

W-what? MY PLAN… MY PLAN WAS FOOL PROOF.

People don’t care about your writing. Your life’s work. But someone has asked, someone has DEMANDED THAT YOU TELL THEM HOW IT’S GOING.

Think. Think. Think.

“Oh, fine, good.”

Okay. Social interaction completed. You’ve escaped unscathed.

“So, what’s your book about?”

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Good morning my beautiful readers. Today’s post is about my rickety transition from writing being my own secret hobby to something I’m plastering all over the Interwebs.

Contrary to popular belief, I am in fact, human. But I must admit my understanding of certain social constructs and communication is inherently limited.

Namely, my ability to grasp that people actually care about what I have to say, write, and do. Of course the people close to me care. And I can talk to them for hours about my passion. I share intimate details about my world, my characters, my stories, and even let them read from them.

But people outside of my bubble don’t count when it comes to that.

It’s not that I don’t care about people outside of my bubble. It’s just that I assume they don’t care about me.

Childhood trauma? Baggage? A lack of meaningful friendships? I’m not entirely sure. But either way, I have a nasty habit of not being able to wrap my mind around the idea that people actually give a shit.

I started getting questions about my writing some months ago, around the time I started my blog. Funny, that, isn’t it?

You’d think that baring your soul and sharing your life’s work in a written and published context would result in questions like this, but I’m only just now starting to be ready for these questions. To not be absolutely blindsided by them.

And it’s still the most stressful thing ever to be asked about my book. To be asked what it’s about, or what my characters are like.

And perhaps that’s the reason why I fear these questions. Because when I was younger and people would put me on the spot in the middle of everyone, I didn’t know how to begin to answer that question. So I hid my writing away, so that no one would ask.

And now I’m not allowing myself to hide from these questions. But I’m still learning how to answer them.

After all, it would be pretty odd to have someone ask about your book and respond by diving into the beginning of your childhood trauma like a bad sitcom trope.

And so, here I am, to tell all of you all at once about my book and my characters. Because I’ve cursed myself with self promotion, and because it’s freeing.

And because maybe I can memorize this shit so I can actually have a response besides bizarre squirming and umming when someone asks me these questions.

My book, yet to be named, is about a young woman named Leah, who’s strange loss of memory and the questionable actions of her business associate lead her on a quest of self-discovery in the land of the elves. She will learn of her past, and her relationships with people she doesn’t even remember. She’ll find the skeletons in people’s closets she had no idea were there, and begin a quest she hadn’t bargained for when she set out. She is stronger than she knows, but power has a cost in Feiradyr.

This book is the one that I hope will be my debut novel. The characters go to a few different places, which affords me the ability to showcase a few different cultures and some of the lore I’ve spent years cultivating.

There are over 30 stories to be told in Feiradyr already, and the number grows every day. This is a world rich with lore and culture, and showing a beautiful cross section of that particular pie is easier said than done. Too much information, and you have a bloated mess that readers will drop before they have a chance to explore Feiradyr fully. Too little information and people don’t understand your world. And some people are unwilling to give more to the stories afterwards.

Which is part of the reason I love doing this blog so much. I can talk as much as I want, and you guys can choose to read. And luckily for me, a lot of you guys enjoy doing just that. Not only that, I can write out my thoughts, which is the key for me to understanding and turning my thoughts into words spoken, not ones on the page or on a computer screen.

I can share my world with you, and you won’t be brand new to it anymore when I finally finish the edits on this book. It takes a lot of the pressure off for somebody like me. Somebody who tries to research, who puts her soul into this thing called storytelling.

You can read something and say, “oh yea, I remember that” instead of being lost. And that’s something I really like about blogging.

So basically, please don’t stop asking about my book, and my characters. I’m growing every day. My understanding, my thoughts, and my ability to convey them are growing every day.

This is the first time EVER that I have tried to come up with a brief summary of my book. It probably sucks so bad you have removed yourself from the mental list of people who want to buy it when it comes out.

But I think we should embrace sucking. Because with sucking, comes getting better.

And with that sage advice I am signing off.

Thank you for reading my ramblings, and until next time

Happy reading!