The Place Where Conviction and Insecurity Collide (Part 1)

Jan 9

It’s ironic that I released a book centered around the notion of truth during the month of December. Were you to ask my parents about my upbringing amid the holiday season, they would quickly tell you how tedious I made social encounters for them. For it was not sleigh bells, gingerbread men, or reindeer that I fixated on that time of year. Rather, the intrinsic, overwhelming compulsion to educate all impressionable children about the lie they’d been fed: Santa Clause was not real.

They deserved to know the truth, you see. And so in my little black and white mind, I made it my mission to spread the word at each wintry festivity. I even debated my second grade teacher when she instructed the class to create Santa crafts. Liars, adults were—the lot of them. Thus to my poor parents’ chagrin, every Christmas they’d sit me down to have the same talk. Car rides would entail the same message; I was not to ruin the fun of other children (even if they were being deceived). No one likes a blabber mouth, especially one wrapped in plaid taffeta and sporting a bowl-cut.

Conviction causes trouble. It threatens our comfort, sometimes our relationships. And in the case of House of Boreal…my very success. Because conviction inverted the metric of my failure.

I’ve mentioned in recent posts, and addressed during the release day live Q&A, how the third installment was the hardest to write. Most interpret that statement as a reference to a wicked case of writer’s block. How I wish it’d been that easy. No, this book was plagued by something far stronger than that.

Frankly, my conviction was at war with my worst insecurities while writing this book.

Though, to finish it, conviction needed to win. It had to reframe the definition of success. It had to conquer fear.

And that took a whole lot of time.

Readers were shocked at how long I needed to complete HOBL. They shouldn’t be. Whenever I sat down to type I was keenly aware that a subset of them would not appreciate what flowed from my fingertips. So many individuals loved HOD (Book 2) and for that I am glad. But that just raised the stakes.

I knew there would be a portion who would not resonate with its successor. The content might not be popular. The delivery method not so charitably valued. The book itself might lose the series fans. And yet, it still needed to happen this way. If I don’t write what ought to be written, then what is the point of writing at all?

What is of greater consequence…that the reader hates it, or that I do?

Someone is going to be left wanting, regardless.

“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it."
~Thucydides

This book could fail; so could the series. But conviction redefined the ultimate failure to be me writing something wrong just for the praise of someone else, however badly I desire to receive it. Sometimes we must write what won’t sell. Drafting, imagining, creating against that kind of insecurity was the hardest thing I’ve had to overcome in my author career. Each day presented recurrent collisions—hard moral impacts and artistic stalemates. The more I wrote, the more I struggled, all the way until that final finishing page.

As I’ve been asked on more than one occasion, I’d finally like to expound on what those collisions were. Thus we will plunge into an eight-part series encapsulating a snapshot of what the writing of HOBL truly entailed.