Hey everyone! If you subscribe to my newsletter, you would have received a notice this past Monday that King Eyes is now live on my website and available for download through Bookfunnel! I'm so excited to be able to share this story with everyone. Dalon and Kari, and the challenges they face, are quite different from any I've written before. But I'm hoping that their story resonates with you.

This is a lengthy post, so I'll give you the TL;DR here: I'm going on a year-long break from original writing.

The Cover

This is the cover I was able to come up with! Took me two months to make it, haha!

At the outset, I only had the barest intuition of what I wanted the cover to feel, what I wanted its vibe to have, but I wasn't sure what elements needed to be there. Since I also plan to continue writing stories in this world, I wanted the cover to have a repeatable template so that subsequent installments would look like they are part of a series.

Almost the entire time I was working on the illustration, I felt like it would fail. I doubted my art skills could convey the cozy little beach scene at the bottom. I spent two days just practicing how to get the curve of the palm leaves right. I still have a lot of room for improvement, but from afar, I think I managed to get the silhouette somewhat correct.

When I finally dumped the illustration in Inkscape, it took me a frustratingly long time to find an appropriate text treatment for the title. Even now, I think a real designer would have done a hundred times better than that, but I promise you, that was the best I could come up with. Everything else I tried looked gaudy.

I'm pretty happy with what I ended up with, all things considered. I think the cover does a decent job of attracting the eyes, making the title pop out, and conveying the right feel of the book. And at the end of the day, that's all I can ask a cover to do.

Post-Release Thoughts

It's been almost two years since I first started tending the seeds of this novel. It's a little funny to read that I intended this project to be a series of novellas I can release every year. Yet King Eyes is a 50k word story, which puts it squarely out of the novella category, and it took me two years to produce. Hah! Even when I tried to downsize my projects, I still ended up taking longer than I expected.

That said, I didn't anticipate many of the life events that took attention and energy away from my writing. I lost a couple of relatives shortly after I started writing the first draft of King Eyes. During the winter that followed, I experienced a new low in my mental health, and at the cusp of spring of 2023, my mother herself got a cancer scare. Thankfully, it turned out to be pre-cancer, so there were no malignant cells in her body yet, but she still underwent some treatment for it in the latter half of 2023. And then there was that Philippines trip we had in the middle of last year, the preparation for which took up a lot of my free time and spare energy.

In a way, I found the last two years even harder than 2020-2021. During the pandemic, there was a sense of stasis to my life, like the world stopped moving and I could catch up. I was able to focus quite well on writing, because there was little else to do outside of my job. But while I was working on King Eyes, half the time it felt like I was trying to dredge water from a dry well with a broken bucket. Maybe all the anxiety and stress that everyone else felt during the lockdowns caught up to me late. I once thought I did comparatively better than other people in handling the lockdown (admittedly, I have a few advantages like being able to work from home and living in a comfortable house), but maybe I didn't cope as well as I thought. Maybe I covered up a lot of that stress, and it manifested as something else down the line.

I'm truly thankful for the little bursts of energy that allowed me to write King Eyes slowly but surely. Because every time I would read a bit of what I wrote, I could feel a sense of warmth and lightness, and I knew I was writing the story that I had set out to write, the story I really needed.

I'm hoping that King Eyes would be this story for you too. I don't know much about my readers, about what you might be going through in life, but if my little novel can bring you a bit of joy, that's enough for me.

What's next?

I'm doing a bit better now than I was at this time last year, and there are a few things that spark hope in me for 2024. However, I think I still need to continue my get-well journey.

I'm burned out. I can't believe I am, because if I tally up the number of days I spent writing last year, they would sum up to about four months. That's a third of a year. I can't wrap my head around the fact that I spent only a third of the year writing, and I still barely have any creative energy.

But the physical signs are there. When I was applying the final edits to King Eyes last month, I still felt like fetching water from a broken bucket. I don't know how burn out feels to others, but to me I feel a hollowness at the bottom part of my chest, near my diaphragm. Normally when I'm creative and energetic, this part feels full. In fact, I'm not even aware of that part of my body usually. It's just there. It's just a part of me. But lately, any time I need to be creative, my body tries to muster some energy from there, and... nothing. It's hard to explain, I'm not really good at describing bodies, haha! I don't even know if there are real physiological reasons for what I'm feeling.

I used to think I was the type of writer who can push through in times of crises. I remember back in 2015 -- which is still the worst year of my life -- I regularly updated a fanfiction that had a pretty complex storyline, studied for the GRE exams, applied to a Master's program in three different Universities, and kept up a full-time job. I did all this while my entire life was basically falling apart around me.

I thought writing was my bulwark, what I needed to do to keep sane. And there are so many writers out there who tell you not to wait around for inspiration to strike -- you have to write even when you don't feel like it. That used to be me.

Maybe I changed. Or maybe my circumstances are different enough that the coping strategies I used before just aren't working now. After all, I have been diligently working on some writing project during all of my conceivable free time since 2016. It's been eight years. Maybe I've been running on my backup generator, and even that has gone out. Anytime life throws a new challenge at me now, I feel too overwhelmed.

So, this is a really long-winded way to say that I'm going to go on a hiatus from original fiction. I'm not entirely sure how long, but I'm prepared to give it up to a year. I say "original" writing, because I still plan to translate King Eyes this year.

That's not to say that I would no longer be around in cyberspace. On the contrary, I'm hoping this will free up time and energy for me to be a little more engaged in the writing community. One of the funnest things I got to do last year was participate in the October Inklings Challenge. Unfortunately, as soon as I posted my entry, I went right back to working on King Eyes. I didn't give myself time to check out what other people wrote, which is a great shame, since so many supported my entry!

In fact, a lot of the things that have brought me a sense of fulfillment the last couple of years are building connections with other writers. I joined two writing discord servers and I became someone's critique partner. I made a couple of new writer friends on Tumblr and BlueSky. And I really cherish these relationships, no matter how new and unexplored.

And then there are all the other things I've tossed to the backburner: making my website more legible, figuring out what to do with my newsletter, writing all my blog post ideas, improving my art skills, reading more indie author works, etc.

There was a time when I felt like these things didn't matter so much, because they wouldn't serve any purpose if I couldn't deliver my own stories. I was afraid to delve into the writing community, because unless I could show that I've written something, people might think I'm a poser. Or I would be envious of those who were ahead of me on the writer's journey, and I would feel discouraged.

I regret that now. I wish I had been more sociable, been more curious about others, been more helpful.

To be fair, I think the presence I managed to establish helped me form many of the connections I made recently, so... I don't know, perhaps there's no use dwelling on the past.

In the present, however, I sense a perfectly good time to pause. And breathe. And celebrate my accomplishments. Yes, I think this year will be about recharging and making friends. It's time I apply Dalon's lesson from King Eyes to myself: for now, I am all right, and it's okay to let go a little bit.