The World Map for The Tree of Life is finished!

I can’t fully visualise a story set in a fantasy word until a map has been drawn, so once it is, I generally take it as a sign that I’m starting to get serious about writing it. Here’s the map for my upcoming book, The Tree of Life.

 

The story is set in the Fourth Age, when the great ceiba tree known as the Yaxche once grew in the centre of the world and bridged the heavens, the earth, and the Underworld. The First City, Tulan, had also recently risen to prominence.

Those who compare it to my map of Xibalba in The Jade Necklace might notice a few similarities—this is because when the gods transformed Xibalba into a more pleasant place, they modelled much of it after the Middleworld. But here, Xibalba itself looks almost entirely different, as it’s how it was when Yum Kimil reigned over it—in other words, more like the “place of fright” it was supposed to be.

As for the story itself, the plot outline is finished and I’m fleshing out a lot of scenes, I expect to start writing it properly later this summer, and if all goes well I’ll have it ready by the end of the year. To be honest, it’s taken me a while to move forward with this book. After I finished The Jade Necklace in the spring, I had grown so attached to Itzel and company that it just didn’t feel right to start an adventure without them (Itzel, Quashy, I’m so sorry!), especially when the new heroes were still like strangers to me. I envy authors who are able to churn out several books a year, but I now realise I could never be one of them, given that I need a lot of time to familiarise myself with new characters (just as in real life it takes me time to warm up to new friends). But now that the ones of The Tree of Life have dwelt in my head for a few months now, I’m getting well acquainted with them, and as a result I find their choices, actions, and dialogue are flowing much more easily and consistently, to the point that I’m frantically jotting down scenes as they come to mind. I had also originally foreseen this as a standalone book with a few nods to the The Jade Necklace, but as I delve into it further I’ve realised that they interconnect and complement each other on levels I hadn’t anticipated, which makes it all the more enjoyable to write it.

Hopefully that means I won’t suffer any more extended bouts of writer’s block (even if I’ve recognised such phases to just be an integral part of my creative process).

Location Inspirations

While I’ve been working on a new map for my upcoming book The Tree of Life, I thought it’d be fun to share some of the locations, mostly in my home country of Belize, that inspired many of the places of the Xibalba depicted in The Jade Necklace books.

Some of my fondest memories as a kid was taking trips to the Cayo district, especially to Mountain Pine Ridge to swim in the rivers. And that’s why if I had to choose my favourite part of Xibalba, it’d likely be the Crocodile Mountains of the West.

 

The Art of Lounging

Bright Macaw: “I don’t think birds are designed for hammocks.”

Quashy: “Just roll with it.”

 

Character Designs for The Jade Necklace

I often feel that I can’t write a character until I’ve drawn them, so I figured I’d post up some examples of the designs I made for various characters in The Jade Necklace books (as well as what is quite possibly my favourite Xibalban object—a stygian owl lamp!).

Compilation Cover Design

I’m working on a compilation edition of all three books of The Jade Necklace, and here’s an idea for its cover design!

 

Worldbuilding: the Writing Before the Writing

A friend recently asked how I manage to keep track of everything when building a new world as a setting for a story, so I thought I’d share a bit more about my method.

I’ve always enjoyed worldbuilding. For those who don’t know, it’s the rather niche hobby of inventing entirely new worlds from scratch. The most famous worldbuilding enthusiast would undoubtedly be J.R.R. Tolkien, and Middle-earth purportedly grew from his love for creating fictional languages. Throughout my teens I wrote a lot about a fantasy world of my own, drawing up maps of its nation states and going into detail about its history and its unique system of magic. I have years and years worth of notes dedicated to it, far more pages than the story itself, which I didn’t end up finishing—I was clearly so overzealous building the world that I had little time to actually write the story it was intended for!

A map of the world in which that story was set. Maybe someday I’ll return to it—if I’m feeling particularly ambitious.

When it came to The Jade Necklace, while I knew some amount of preparation would be necessary, I didn’t want to make the same mistake. It helped to give myself a deadline—I embarked on the worldbuilding in the first half of 2020 and aimed to start writing the story before the end of that year. Writing began that November.

Now I should point out the rather obvious fact that, in the case of Xibalba, it isn’t a world I invented entirely from the ground up—I have the Maya to thank for that. The Underworld in Mayan mythology, such as the one as depicted in the Popol Vuh, is a vast world not altogether different from ours, complete with its own rivers, trees, mountains, roads, pitz ball courts, and even a whole city run by a council of death lords with a snarky sense of humour. This paints the picture of a (somewhat) civilised society that just happens to be populated by the dead—a sort of inverted mirror image of our land of the living. That being said, it also has nine levels, and the general rule is that the lower you go, the worse it gets, with the lowest being the most similar to the Judeo-Christian hell (i.e. a massive subterranean torture pit), which is ruled by the Underworld’s principal overlord (Ah Puch/Yum Kimil/Kisin, depending on whom you ask). Beyond that, details about Xibalba are quite sparse, but it was enough to at least lay the groundwork for some worldbuilding on my part.

Early on I knew that I wanted my version of Xibalba to be slightly different from this, even though the “Old Xibalba”, as often referred to by characters in the books, is more or less exactly like the one you’d expect—a dark and cold place of misery and suffering. But things have changed since then—the Lord of the Underworld was eventually defeated, but all the gods from the world above now found themselves stuck in the Underworld for the rest of their days anyway, so it stood to reason that they would have done up the place to make it more like their old home. That’s why the “New Xibalba” has its own sun (and at least at one point its own moon), and is a lot greener, warmer, and generally nicer than it used to be.

So when it was time for me to build a world from that, the first thing I did was write up what I call a “world doc”, which was in large part inspired by what in the video game (and software) industry is called a “design doc”. A design doc is basically a breakdown of what kind of game you’re striving to make, and is especially useful if you’re planning to make a game with a more involved setting (consider the richly detailed worlds of Metroid or Zelda as opposed to, say, Pac-Man). It might contain descriptions about the overall setting and its sub-worlds, the character(s) that the player controls and how they interact with the environment, the enemies you’ll encounter and their specific behaviours, and so on. To some who read this, the video game industry might seem like an odd thing to bring up in the context of writing a fantasy book, but ever since the role-playing games of the 1990’s (among my favourites being Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI) up to more recent examples like The Last of Us and its sequel, the line between gaming and storytelling is becoming increasingly blurred. It might also be worth mentioning that my story was originally envisioned as an RPG, to the point that its world doc even includes a section for Itzel’s equipment—which, as it turns out, is quite a useful thing to keep track of throughout the story, as without it I suspect at times I might have even forgotten she was carrying around her trusty snake-stick!

 

The characters in sprite form.

 
 

Itzel’s trusty snake-stick.

 

And that’s precisely why I find having a world doc an essential part of the worldbuilding process. It can be a struggle to keep all these various details in your head, so it works wonders to have a written guide that you can easily consult and edit as you go along. I hope it helped to make the world of Xibalba feel more immersive (and as a bit of a self-professed worldbuilding nerd, I just couldn’t help myself anyway).

Teaser for The Tree of Life

I’ve been playing with ideas for possible book covers for my upcoming book, The Tree of Life, and featuring its main two protagonists, Teelo and Nikte Ha, who are escorted by Zunun the hummingbird.

It depicts a scene in the book where Nikte Ha, a rain spirit, teaches Teelo how to walk on a staircase of clouds that lead up to the Realm of Rain. Teelo is terrified of heights (as am I) so I can’t say I envy him, though watching the sunset from the cloud-tops must be quite spectacular!

 

Character Designs for The Tree of Life

Have been working on ideas for the main characters of my upcoming book, The Tree of Life. Among them is a rain spirit from the realm of Chaac, an alux (dwarf) raised by a witch, a skilled hummingbird swordsman, and a vagrant opossum with a drinking problem.

New book in the works!

I’m excited to announce that planning is officially underway for a new book that takes place in the same universe as The Jade Necklace. It’s been on my mind for some time to flesh out a few of the events alluded to in those books, particularly involving the World Tree, or Yaxche, which translates to “tree of life”.

 
 

I won’t delve too much into it right now, especially as the details are only just being hammered out, but it’ll be set in the distant past when the gods were in their glory days and the mythical city of Tulan was at the height of its power. You’ll encounter some familiar characters—the gods, unsurprisingly, given that they were around back then, but there will be a few others with very minor roles in The Jade Necklace who’ll get to have their moment in the limelight, such as Zunun the hummingbird and Lord Yaaxu the opossum. As the title suggests, the Yaxche itself—the great ceiba tree that stood in the centre of the world and formed a bridge to the heavens—will be a big focus, and much like Itzel explored the corners of the Underworld, the main characters in this book will explore some of the thirteen levels of the Upperworld. Probably my favourite setting among them will be its lowest level, the realm of the Rain god Chaac (“Tlalocan”, as the Aztecs called it).

It’ll be a shorter story, limited to one book (and this time I’m actually sticking to that plan, or I’ll be damned to the Underworld!). If the Jade Necklace trilogy were The Lord of the Rings, then you could say that The Tree of Life will be like The Hobbit and The Silmarillion rolled into one. Like the former it tells a fairly straightforward adventure for just a handful of characters, but like the latter it also incorporates the major historic events that form the backdrop of the trilogy’s world. I’m not so keen on all the factory-made sequels and prequels (and whatever other -quels) that these days plague the entertainment industry, including books but especially films, and I’ll say definitively that Itzel’s story is at an end, but it can still be fun to explore other parts of the same world with loosely connected stories. My hope is that The Tree of Life will work as a standalone book, but it’ll be written most of all for those who are already familiar with the others.

Why I wrote The Jade Necklace in the present tense

It was only after the first few pages of The Land of the Night Sun had already been written that I realised something: it was all in the present tense. But wait, why did I do that?

When writing stories before this one, I had always defaulted to the past tense without question—as probably most of us would. Because that’s how books are supposed to be written, aren’t they? Well, that was the impression I was under. So I backed up before any more damage was done and started rewriting it in the past tense, as I’m supposed to.

Except this time it felt weird, and I couldn’t put my finger on why. Even as I wrote I was often accidentally slipping back into the present tense.

The present tense felt right. But was I wrong for feeling that way?

I stopped what I was doing and decided I ought to look into the matter, in case there were any other writers out there also suffering from a possibly contagious “present tense syndrome”. It seems I’m not alone. In fact, especially among writers of “young adult” fiction the use of the present tense isn’t so uncommon anymore. I admittedly had no idea, especially as I had never encountered it in any book I’ve read—that said, I haven’t consumed much in the way of  “young adult” fiction (and I have trouble understanding why such a thing really deserves its own category).

There has also been some backlash against use of the present tense. Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials (one of my favourite series), claimed in an article he wrote that it’s all just some silly fad these days to have an “unreliable narrator” and that it’ll pass in time when writers realise they ought to know better. After all, the past tense has served us perfectly well ever since the days our ancestors first gathered around campfires under the stars to listen to tales of brave heroes and terrible monsters. And if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Firstly, while we often rely on the past tense to tell a story, I’ve encountered many instances of people recounting a past event in the present tense without having made any conscious decision to do so. It’s a much more casual way of telling it, to be sure—ideal for the sort of story you’d hear over a pint at the pub, for instance. So although the past tense holds the monopoly, it’s never been the only option we have.

As for his argument about the “unreliable narrator”, I fail to understand how the present tense is inherently any less reliable than the past. When you listen to the play-by-play of a football game on the radio, do you really have doubts when a team scores a goal just because the sports commentators didn’t announce it in the past tense? With all due respect, Mr Pullman, I’m not convinced that’s the reason, and while there might have been some bandwagon-hopping involved, I don’t think the growing popularity of the present tense can all be chalked up to a simple urge to be trendy or different either.

On the other end of the spectrum I’ve come across arguments that support its usage, yet frankly I’m not all that convinced by those either. Chief among them is that the present tense feels more, well, tense. Because it gives the illusion that things are happening moment to moment, like one experiences a film, it will make scenes in the story more exciting or suspenseful. I don’t think that’s the case—how exciting or suspenseful a book is will ultimately depend on the skill of the writer, not simply what tense they’ve chosen to use. What can be achieved with one tense can also be achieved with the other, so it seems to be little more than an arbitrary stylistic choice.

Well, maybe that’s not entirely true—I did come across one actual use for it. There are a few chapters in The Jade Necklace that were written in the past tense, particularly stories that are being recounted by other characters to Itzel, and I found being able to switch from the present to the past tense in these situations made it all the clearer that they’re set in the past relative to the story’s main timeline. But those occasional moments aren’t enough to justify almost a whole book being written in the present tense. There’s something more to it.

After giving it some thought I found a possible explanation for why I had unwittingly done it myself: Itzel’s adventure is as much an animated film on paper as it is a book. I put the emphasis on “animated” because there are, of course, countless books that have become films, and many were likely envisioned as such when they were written, and I still would expect very few of them to be written in the present tense. But I have an animation background with years of drawing characters frame-by-frame, and in this case I believe it’s leaked unconsciously into my writing style. The scenes in the books visually play out in my mind as an animated film (complete with its own original soundtrack) and practically every single person who has read them and shared their thoughts with me has specifically mentioned that that’s how they imagine it too. I suspect the use of the present tense plays a large part in that.

Of course, I have little doubt that it’s also the characters themselves. I imagine Itzel and Quashy just as I draw them—as, and I am hesitant to use this word due to its unfair preconceptions, “cartoons”. In my books there’s no shortage of characters who are completely over-the-top, most of all the gods and animals of Xibalba (there’s even a self-referential joke about it in the second book where Itzel, who has at this point grown accustomed to talking animals, wonders for a brief moment if she’s now in one of her Saturday morning cartoons herself). The cause for my hesitation using the word “cartoon” is that, with the notable exception of Japan where there’s more of a cultural acceptance that manga and anime can be enjoyed by all ages, cartoons are commonly viewed as something that can never be taken seriously, especially by adults. But that’s simply not true (and I think anyone who argues that has clearly never watched Grave of the Fireflies). Though my books are intended as a lighthearted adventure first and foremost, they’re not without their serious moments, and I don’t believe such moments carry any less emotional weight just because they’re enacted by characters who at other times are portrayed as cartoonish.

Some films work better because they’re, well, “cartoons” (a lesson Disney has seemingly forgotten with all their live-action and hyper-realistic CGI remakes—or, much more likely, it’s been intentionally ignored for the sake of more profit). Likewise, The Jade Necklace for me works better as an “animated film in book form” because it was influenced by the classic animated films (from Disney, Don Bluth, Studio Ghibli, et al) just as much as it was by other books, and the present tense was the most suitable way to convey how it unfolded frame-by-frame in my head.

Also, as I said, it felt right. And sometimes you just have to trust your gut.

 
 

A story about a story

We’re not even three months into 2022 and I already feel like it’s a contender for the worst year of the “Screaming Twenties” (as I’ve noticed many people starting to call it–I think it’s quite apt). And given what 2020 was like, that’s saying a lot. As I write this the war in Ukraine has been raging for almost a month. As someone who’s been to this country several times and met such amazing people there (and at one point even dated a lovely lady in Lviv), I am still in a state of shock and half-expecting to simply wake up from a prolonged nightmare. Yet I say this from the comfort of England, while my friends in Ukraine have been forced to flee westward without knowing when they’ll be able to return home and have something even remotely resembling a normal life again. War is, of course, nothing new, but until now it’s never felt so close. Until now I had never seen photos of decimated cities whose neighbourhoods I actually recognise because I’ve been there. Until now I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night in a constant panic that I might never hear from a friend again.

And so I’ve decided to write again. I guess it’s now become my go-to coping mechanism in a time of crisis. During the last one I wrote a story, and while I’m already brainstorming which one I ought to write this time, for now I’ll write a story about a story.

I was around 8 or 9 when I first read The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, both of which were hugely inspirational to me. Since I was a teen I had always wanted to write my own fantasy story, and there were a few attempts thrown at the wall, though none ever quite seemed to stick. Fantasy was meanwhile becoming a lot more mainstream. Being a longtime Tolkien fan, I was eagerly queuing up to see Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films in cinemas, and I then watched curiously from the sidelines when it was followed by the even bigger Harry Potter mania, but it was during the height of the Game of Thrones craze in the mid-2010’s that it struck me—the overwhelming majority of fantasy was, and continues to be, based on the mythos of Europe. But the world is much bigger than Europe. After a while I realised that all I needed to do to find an alternative was look back home. It also helped that I went home.

Off the coast of Belize is a small island called Sergeant’s Caye that my family and I would go to on the weekends when I was a kid, and each time we went the island was a completely different shape. Sometimes it was an oval, other times it was a crescent; sometimes it had a few coconut trees, other times it was nothing but a sun-scorched lump of sand. But when I went snorkelling in the sea not far from the Barrier Reef, I always knew exactly where I was. Now I feel like that whenever I come back to Belize. I haven’t been there all that much since I moved abroad at the age of 18 (first to the USA, then to England), and each time I return it seems to have taken a different shape, especially the city and the more touristy spots. And yet, there are still places that have changed little where I can regather my bearings. One of those places is on the summit of El Castillo, the tallest pyramid in the Mayan site of Xunantunich, where I can look across the rainforest over the western border with Guatemala while listening to the calls of howler monkeys. I was there in March 2020, and it was at that moment I thought, “My book* will be Mayan.”

*at the time I didn’t realise there would be three. Silly me.

 

El Castillo in Xunantunich.

 
 

The view from its summit, westward to Guatemala.

 

I had arrived in Belize a few weeks earlier to visit my mother. Shortly after that, the Covid crisis was in full swing and Belize closed its airports and land borders. In a way I was grateful for it. Unlike many I was at least able to continue working, and at first I enjoyed a few unexpected perks, one being that Xunantunich was almost completely empty of tourists on the misty morning I went. At home, when I wasn’t working, I was happily sorting and reading through my old children’s books, most notably a dusty, tattered 1960’s edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The first half of The Land of the Night Sun was a nod to Carroll’s classic, following the format of a girl stumbling aimlessly around an otherworld populated with eccentric (and arguably insane) characters, with each chapter reading almost like a short story. For the first few weeks, this whole pandemic crisis that everyone was all worked up about didn’t seem so bad.

The upside didn’t last long, however. Soon travel wasn’t permitted even within Belize between its districts, and I was stuck at home in Belize City with not much else to do but work, plan the plot outline of my book, and listen to a deranged woodpecker constantly pecking at my mother’s house (much to her dismay). But things got worse. In April my grandmother in England passed away, and we couldn’t visit the rest of the family there for her funeral.

In June the government of Belize relaxed the restrictions a bit, and my mother and I decided to use that opportunity to make a trip to the Belize Zoo. It was founded in 1983 by Sharon Matola, an old friend of the family, as one of the world’s few ethical zoos (i.e. they only take in local animals who were either bred in captivity or unable to survive on their own due to sickness or injury—and if they fully recover they’re reintroduced into the wild). Our old home was on the Western Highway and just a 20-minute drive to the zoo, and one of my earliest memories as a child was attending a birthday party for their first tapir, April. Needless to say, the Belize Zoo has a special place in my heart (and I suspect I’m hardly the only Belizean to say this). When we visited in the summer of 2020 I hadn’t seen Sharon in many years. Despite being wheelchair-bound and recovering from an operation, she insisted on giving us a personalised tour. Sharon also wrote Hoodwink the Owl, a children’s book about a spectacled owl, of which I still have an old copy from when I was little.

 

Hoodwink the Owl by Sharon Matola, 1988.

 

We spent much of that afternoon looking for the elusive grey fox and tayra (we saw the former but not the latter). At the time I was wanting to incorporate Belizean wildlife into the book, and was entertaining the idea of the Mayan gods taking the form of various animals. The Feathered Serpent would of course be a snake with feathers (duh), Chaac would be a frog (or toad, depending on his mood), and Kinich Ahau a jaguar, but I was left wondering about the form of Hurakan, the one-legged god of the winds. When we went to feed the harpy eagle named Panama, for a moment she stood on one leg. Sharon laughed and said, “The one-legged harpy eagle!” So it seemed fate had decided what Hurakan would be.

Sadly it would be the last time we saw Sharon Matola. She passed away the following year. I wish I had thought to bring along my copy of Hoodwink the Owl to show her I still had it.

 

Panama the harpy eagle, who was the inspiration for Hurakan.

 
 

Mister Sparks the tapir, the inspiration for Cabrakan.

 
 

A margay, here basking in the sunlight, would be one of the forms of Kinich Ahau.

 
 

Scratching Lindo the jaguar’s underbelly (and hoping I don’t lose any fingers in the process).

 
 

Coatis lounging (almost as expertly as iguanas).

 

That trip to the Belize Zoo was a refreshing glimpse of familiarity in what was otherwise a surreal year. But 2020 was only halfway done, and there was more to come. In July we lost my aunt in the USA to cancer. Again, as the borders were closed we couldn’t be with family for it. I watched as my mother broke into a thousand pieces like one of her ever-growing collection of jigsaw puzzles. We had at least been prepared for my grandmother’s death—she suffered from Alzheimer’s, so her condition slowly deteriorated over many years—but my aunt’s death was much more sudden and unexpected. Combined with the isolation and mass hysteria brought about by Covid, I felt like I had been pushed off an edge. As it turned out, it was the edge of a cenote. I withdrew from reality to wander through an underworld—it was an odd coincidence that the story to which I was escaping was already going to be about death and family. In my mind I was building a second home, and later that month I drew its floor plan.

 

The first map of the four-cornered land of Xibalba, from July 2020.

 

It’s said that a lot of fantasy stories start with a map. Now I know why. The basic premise of The Jade Necklace traces back to a simple idea I had in 2015: a girl falls into the Mayan underworld to look for her grandmother, and her magical necklace gets stolen by a coati. She would encounter Mayan gods, folktale characters, and a giant jaguar. That was about all I knew. But when I drew the map, suddenly Xibalba seemed like a real, tangible place. Now, just like when I was standing on the summit of El Castillo in Xunantunich, there was somewhere where I could get my bearings. If I stood atop the pyramid in the centre of Xibalba and gazed in any direction, I’d see a vast lake. Beyond it, to the West, were mist-shrouded mountains. To the South, a rainforest. To the East, swamps and lagoons. And to the North, a black desert. After that, the details of this world and its inhabitants seemed to fall into place almost on their own. The story became too big for one book, so I planned for it to be two (my naïveté strikes again).

 

A girl and a coati. Early concept art from 2016.

 
 

Itzel meeting the great jaguar Kinich Ahau. Concept art from 2016.

 
 

Itzel meeting the king of the gods, Kukulkan, atop a mountain. Concept art from 2016.

 

While developing the story I was also delving deeper into Mayan mythology, a subject in which I found myself immediately enrapt. It’s a crying shame it had never been taught in schools when I was a student. In the textbooks of Belizean history, the ancient Mayan civilisation was normally brushed over in a chapter or two—a disservice to the people and culture that are, more than any other, inseparable from this land. Fortunately I hear that things are slowly changing for the better in that regard, and their mythology is now part of the curriculum at my former high school, St John’s College.

One of the most interesting things I learnt was that there’s really no singular mythology for the Maya, as it can vary quite considerably between tribes—the creation myth for the Kʼicheʼ is very different from the Yucatec, for example. Certainly there is much overlap where you can spot similar underlying themes as well as familiar tropes (such as the Feathered Serpent and the Hero Twins). But what I quickly came to realise was that it was difficult to weave a story that was necessarily “accurate” to their mythology, because even within the same tribe it can not only be self-contradictory, but even embraces and encourages flexibility in one’s personal interpretation. This is one of the core differences between the ancient Mayan and Christian views of the world (and it seems, between polytheistic and monotheistic religions in general). The rigidity of the latter is one of the foundations of European colonial thought—for them what’s “right” was predetermined by the inarguable Word of God, and as the indigenous peoples of the Americas didn’t know what that was, they deserved to be conquered and taught it, essentially enslaved or destroyed. For the ancient Maya what’s “right” often seems to be subject to change—after all, there are many gods with each one having many aspects, so who’s to say which is the right one? For the sake of the story I decided on a more syncretic approach, plucking ideas from different tribes and meshing them with my own in order to sculpt a new world and lore that was, at least to the best of my ability, internally consistent. 

In the autumn of 2020 I bought myself a copy of the Popol Vuh, which is the closest thing to a bible in the Mayan world. It tells the “mythistory” (where the lines between history and myth become blurred) of the Kʼicheʼ, starting with the story of the creation of the world, then of humankind, followed by the adventure of the Hero Twins who descend into the Underworld to defeat the death gods. Twins are a recurring trope tied to the Mesoamerican concept of duality—the two Paddler Gods symbolised night and day, and one could argue that the Feathered Serpent and Tetzcalipoca (the Aztec version of the god Hurakan) symbolised order and chaos. For my book I took this concept a step further by having each pair of twins consist of a male and female—Kukulkan and Hurakan, Kinich Ahau and Lady Akna, and lastly, Miguel and Itzel, with each pair being diametrically opposed in their outlooks and choices. This is perhaps one of the biggest departures that my books take from Mayan mythology (in which both Hero Twins are brothers, and Hurakan is a god rather than a goddess). But it’s a change that I think worked best for the story.

I was also astounded by just how wildly entertaining the Popol Vuh could be, full of details that seem to have been added simply to enrich the tale, such as when the death gods in the Underworld decide to send a message to the Hero Twins in the world above. We are then treated to this delightfully elaborate scheme in which the message is carried by a louse who’s gobbled up by a toad, who is in turn eaten by a snake, who is then in turn eaten by a falcon. Then when the falcon comes before the Hero Twins the whole process sets off in reverse: the falcon regurgitates the snake, who then regurgitates the toad, who finally regurgitates the louse who passes on the message. There’s just something appealing to me about the way the ancient Mayans married the sublime with the bizarre, and the sacrosanct with the satirical. The Popol Vuh has many instances of this, and it’s one of the great tragedies of colonialism that many other texts like it were burnt and forever lost to time, all at the whim of a few 16th and 17th century Spanish missionaries who deemed them heretical to their inarguable Word of God. Clearly they lacked a sense of humour.

 
 

By January of 2021 I had completed a rough first draft of The Land of the Night Sun. No one else had read so much as a single sentence of it, but I felt it could now really use a second pair of eyes. Holding my breath I sent it to three friends. I only heard back from one of them—my friend Carmen whom I had met a few years prior in Spain—but the sheer amount of feedback I received from her more than made up for it. As much as the Belize Zoo was integral to the early stages of writing these books, Carmen was integral to its later stages, and I highly doubt I’d have completed them at all without her help. As she read the first book she sent me several in-depth emails to share her thoughts, starting from its general concepts and going all the way down to the tiniest details that she either liked or thought could be changed. Finally having someone to share it with, and who was as invested in Itzel’s journey as I was, meant I couldn’t simply abandon it now.

With the first book out of the way I dove straight into the second (not least because several chapters of the first book ended up being shifted over to the second anyway), but it didn’t take long for me to realise that the story couldn’t be covered in two books either. The main concern I had with writing a trilogy is that usually the one in the middle is the weakest—it carries neither the novelty of the first, nor the closure of the third. I tried to make The Lord of the Underworld stand out on its own as more than just a stepping stone from the first to the third. Whether or not I succeeded is for others to decide, but it will always have my favourite chapter: The Colour of Ku. This chapter is the heart of the series, and despite it having little relevance to the overarching plot, I feel the story would have greatly suffered without it.

I finished the second book in the summer of 2021, shortly before I left Belize and returned to England—roughly 16 months later than initially planned. Now it was England that felt like a different place, and for a moment I worried that I might have left my muse all the way in Belize. It’s remarkable looking back at just how much inspiration I had drawn from being there—even that hard-nosed woodpecker (pun intended) in my mother’s garden pecked its way into the books. In truth I struggled for a while to get anywhere with the third book, and thought I’d end up having to just go back to Belize to work on it. But by late October I somehow hit my stride again and never looked back, and I finished The Mystery of the Missing Moon in early January of this year. By February I had finished the editing, and currently I’m in talks with a publisher to get it translated into Spanish, which was one of my big hopes (Belize is an anomaly in Central America for being an English-speaking country). If there will someday be an edition in a Mayan language such as Yucatec Maya, then even better.

So what have I learnt about writing a book? This might come as no surprise to anyone else who’s given a go at writing, but the hardest part was actually starting the damn thing. Even after several months planning out the story, I was still intimidated by that first blank page staring back at me. It might be a bumpy ride in the beginning, but as you go along, the words begin to flow more easily. Eventually it reached a point where the characters were speaking for themselves, and I felt not so much an author as a reporter scrambling to jot down what’s already been said. If I can think of another valuable piece of advice, it would be to cherish the people who are willing to read your unpublished work. Most wouldn’t, and understandably so, as it’s quite a commitment—especially for those who don’t even know if you’re a competent writer or not! And if they have feedback, listen to them. Writing a book might seem like a solo journey, but it really shouldn’t be. To quote the Nightkeeper: “Greatness is not something that can ever be achieved alone.” I don’t know if I made something great, but I definitely made something that was . . . me. And at the end of the day, I suppose that’s something worthwhile.

Now if I can only figure out what to write next. I just hope I won’t always need a crisis to do it.

 
 

Custom bookmarks!

As part of the promotional push, I’ve designed and printed some bookmarks. I might consider making more if anyone has any specific requests!

Poster for The Jade Necklace

Now that the books are finished I’ve been working on some promotional art as of late and whipped up this poster design over the weekend. Now to get it printed!

 

Alphabet Flash Cards

I’ve recently collaborated with Cubola Publishers in Belize to create a series of flash cards to teach schoolchildren the alphabet. Here they are!

Sounds and Letters

The "Sounds and Letters" series of books, published in Belize, is designed to teach young children how to read, through the use of short stories with accompanying illustrations. Due to their popularity across the country it was recently announced that there will be a fourth book in the series. Here's a preview of one of the illustrations for the next book, for the short story "Tapir Crossing"!