It’s April 16, 1998, moments before dawn. As I open my eyes to another Sedona morning, I know that today is the day. It’s time, time to begin writing The StarQuest.
Once I get out of bed, walk Roxy and eat breakfast, I open my laptop on the dining room table and begin to type.
“My father has died. He died in the night. When I found him, his face had fallen onto his table, the blow cushioned by reams of inky-filled pages: his story, dedicated to me.”
I write for an hour, and the words flow easily, more easily than I ever expected them to. And as I save the file and power down my Mac, I’m excited that The StarQuest is finally underway. More than that, I’m certain that this, my second book, will write itself more quickly and effortlessly than did its predecessor, a sometimes painful exercise in surrender.
Unlike The MoonQuest, a story that hijacked me four years ago during a Toronto writing workshop I was facilitating, The StarQuest is intentional, a deliberate sequel. I didn’t expect there to be a sequel any more than I’d expected there to be a MoonQuest. Yet by the time I started The MoonQuest’s second draft in rural Nova Scotia a year later, I knew there would be a StarQuest…and a SunQuest. Still, I didn’t know anything about this follow-up story I would write, someday.
That isn’t a hundred percent true. I knew that its protagonist would be Q’nta, daughter of The MoonQuest’s main character, Toshar, and that The StarQuest would take place before The MoonQuest…although I had no clue how that could possibly work.
I still don’t.
Regardless, I continue on the story nearly every day for the next two weeks, my confidence growing with each writing session, little knowing just how misplaced my naive optimism will prove to be.
Not only, as it turns out, am I not yet finished with The MoonQuest (as I thought I was), its sequel will take me eleven confused and frustrating years to complete. Not the book itself. The first draft!
Through those eleven years, I will marry, become a father and get divorced. I will live in Sedona twice, in Albuquerque twice, in California briefly and on two Hawaiian islands. I will travel full-time across more than forty states over a thirty-month period as a sound healer and workshop facilitator. And I will start that first StarQuest draft three times, working on it not only in my various homes and in my several cars, but during slack times in the aging Ford Aerostar I will drive for Maui Taxi, during my breaks at Hobby Lobby, where I will be briefly employed as, perhaps, the chain’s oldest stockboy, and in countless cafes in countless states.
After two false starts, I finally got through a first draft of The StarQuest in July 2009…in Albuquerque, where in some weird synchronicity I find myself writing this anniversary piece. Then, I was living here; today, I’m only passing through as I complete a fifteenth month on my real-life version of the fantasy quests I write about.
In another peculiar and, no doubt, meaningful coincidence, today is also April 16 — twenty-four years to the day from those first words of The StarQuest’s first first draft and a few weeks after the release of a third edition of the book.
Why was The StarQuest such an endless-seeming rollercoaster of a journey and still one of the most challenging of my, now, twenty-plus books to write? Mostly because the plot as it revealed itself to me through those two aborted first-draft attempts never seemed to make any sense. In a strange fiction-meets-reality way, that was perfect…even if it didn’t feel so at the time: Throughout The StarQuest, Q’nta and her companions keep complaining that “nothing here makes any sense”!
It wasn’t until I was writing The SunQuest (which will be out late this summer) that I discovered the source of at least some of my StarQuest difficulties. That’s when I realized that my earliest StarQuest drafts included scenes that belonged in The SunQuest. (That unintentional head start helped me complete a first draft of The SunQuest in a record three weeks.)
If I don’t remember the exact date I finished my final StarQuest first draft, I do recall the circumstances, not to mention my jaw-dropping astonishment when the story’s final scene unfolded on my screen.
With my computer on my lap and one eye on the time (I was expecting a coaching client at any moment), I began to tap out the fate of the truly nasty sorceress who was my antagonist. I can’t tell you what emerged because that would be too big a spoiler. What I can say is that her ending (and the story’s) was nothing like anything I had expected or imagined…so much so that when my client arrived, I was in too much shock to much but grunt an incoherent greeting.
That the ending proved to be truer to the story’s theme than anything I could have conjured up with my conscious mind again confirmed something I assert in each of my writing workshops and in all my books on writing: My stories are smarter than I am.
Here’s yet more proof of that…
Although I gratefully embraced the unexpected ending, I was concerned that I would have to go back over the story to make sure that the antagonist’s character arc and the story’s plot made sense in light of this final scene. I predicted lots of pretty major rewrites.
My prediction proved wrong. As I reread the draft, I discovered that I had unknowingly written both character and story to this surprise ending. Of course, The StarQuest went through a bunch more drafts. None, however, involved altering earlier scenes to make that final scene work.
The story was smarter than I had been.
There’s more…
With The MoonQuest, a book about the brutal silencing of stories and storytellers, readers have never stopped asking me whether I wrote it as a social commentary on the times. I didn’t. I simply wrote the story that demanded to be written. Besides, I wrote it at a different time (I started it in 1994) and in a different country (Canada).
Until I began preparing this new edition of The StarQuest_ a few months ago, I had never asked myself whether I could claim it to be as timelessly current as its predecessor. Once I did, though, I realized that it was the perfect story not only for this extraordinarily polarized US election year and for an increasingly tense and tragic war in the Middle East, but for everything about these chaotic, tumultuous times.
Why? Because it’s a story about healing and reconciliation, a story that restores a natural, heartful order to a world that has tumbled into cruelty and disarray.
As with The MoonQuest, however, I didn’t write it with any political agenda, nor did I have any country or time period in mind. Rather, I wrote the story as it came to me, rarely knowing from one day to the next (or one word to the next) where it was carrying me.
That’s how I write all my books, nonfiction as well as fiction. And that’s how I will continue to write the The Lost Horse of Barn Doon, the fifth, in-progress book in a Legend of Q’ntana fantasy series I never expected to create. No doubt, this story, too, will have a timeless relevance I can’t now see. Of course, it will, for it, too, is smarter than I am!
That first-draft StarQuest opening paragraph, the one I penned in my Sedona living room all those lifetimes ago and quoted at the start of this piece? It didn’t make it to the final draft and published book. (That it didn’t is a perfect example of why I never edit as I write, something I urge in all my books and workshops.)
This is how The StarQuest now opens…
“The face in the glass was a stranger’s. The face in the glass was my own. I stared up at it, willing it to reveal itself to me. But it, like me, knew nothing. Nothing of who I was. Nothing of where I was. Nothing of how I got here. Nothing of what “here” was.”
As to how The StarQuest ends, well for that you’ll have to read the book!
Look for the new edition of The StarQuest on my website (get it signed to you or to someone else as a gift) or from online booksellers worldwide. I’ll also have a limited number of copies for sale next weekend (4/20-4/21) at the New Living Expo in San Rafael, CA.
Haven’t yet read The MoonQuest? What are you waiting for!? You’ll find it in all those same places, as well as in audiobook (narrated by me) on Audible and Apple Books.
