It starts with a rift that burns a thousand scars into the sky. It makes the winds stop. It makes the stars go dark. It awakens an ancient beast. And with it, a new reign of blood. It is the Summoning. And at the heart of it is fire.
Temperamental dragons. Enchanted forests. Blood mages. Dove’s list of problems just keeps growing. As Summoner General, Dove must team up with Valerya the Fireborne to protect the realm from its newest threats. Wars will be waged. Heads will be parted. Allegiances will be tested.
Against the fury of interdimensional dragons, all the fire in the world may not be enough.
Today we’re welcoming Kerstin Espinosa Rosero to the blog for a guest post, and this one’s a bit special to me. Kerstin and I actually met through SPFBO, and funnily enough, it happened at BristolCon and Worldcon, both in the UK, even though these days we both call Germany home! Small world.
And what a fitting day for her to stop by: FALL RED EMPIRE, the third and final book in the Burn Red Skies series, has its birthday today! Congratulations to Kerstin on finishing the series.
In this post, Kerstin gets honest about the long road to finishing this final book, and shares the one thing that helped her push through when the passion just wasn’t there. If you’re a fellow creative feeling stuck, this one’s for you.
Looking back on my journey between 2020 and now, I realized the reason why I took such a long time to finish FALL RED EMPIRE. The “outside” stuff didn’t help, of course; like many authors, I had a full-time job, and that was around the time my physical and mental health joined hands and decided to hop in a roller coaster, first row, without a lap bar.
No, the real reason it took forever was because I thought my passion for writing would come naturally. As I was writing my first draft, I didn’t quite feel that spark I was convinced all writers needed, so I put it away until “after.” After that stressful phase at work passed. After my health improved. So many “afters,” after which (hee, hee) I thought I would reach some magical point where I would fall madly in love with writing again.
It never came, though. In fact, it was the opposite. In the tiny pockets of time I had to myself, I absolutely hated what I wrote. Why wasn’t it good? Why wasn’t it doing what I wanted?
And that was the pitfall I am desperately warning you about, especially if you’re a fellow creative who feels stuck or burned out. I definitely understand the urge to make something beautiful from the get go, to create prose that sings on the first try, but in the end, you can’t refine what isn’t there. Second-guessing every sentence in a rough draft is a quick descent into burn-out territory.
What was my game changer?
Word vomit. I bombarded my laptop with every word, every story-related idea, that entered my mind, until I finished my first draft. When I read through it again, FALL RED EMPIRE was, quite frankly, a dumpster fire of a book. Continuity errors galore! And there were things I wrote that, looking back, I’m not entirely sure were in English. It was awful.
But I had something to work with. I loved the idea behind the words, even if I didn’t like the words themselves. I started editing my draft until it became something I liked, and eventually, I refined it into something I loved.
The moral of the story, which is starting to sound a lot like word vomit (oops), is that writing is a labor of love, but you won’t love everything you write. Sometimes, waiting for that spark, that “perfect time,” is what might kill your actual love for it in the long run.
And remember, if all else fails:
WORD VOMIT
If this made you want to dive into the Burn Red Skies world (and honestly, how could it not), you can start with our review of book one here, or catch the whole series here.
Filipino American author of debut novel Burn Red Skies somehow finds herself in odd places—whether it be hiking across Germany to draw castles, training in a Muay Thai boot camp in Thailand, or practicing the fine intricacies of Chinese calligraphy in Taiwan. This Bay Area native left home with undefined dreams and somehow ended up studying Chinese in Germany.
Through her experiences, she realized that the story was in the journey, not the destination. It is her dream to one day turn her sketches into stories.
