Hello, Readers! Clevenger here.

To paraphrase a brilliant author… The birth of Sainan circled around a visit. The visit was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the idea of Sainan. But it was a beginning.

While I am humbled by Graham’s thoughts of my magnanimous intentions, it wasn’t so. At least, not exactly. I certainly believed in him, and he’s always worked better when he’s accountable to someone else, so those truths were factors for sure, but like everything else, it wasn’t the entire story.

2018 was a tough year for Graham, and as a friend, I knew he needed support. He and I have seen each other rise and fall many times over the 20+ years we’ve been friends, so this was a familiar valley to both of us, and I knew together we could overcome it. But that same year, I was struggling, too. In a very different, but somewhat eerily similar, way.

You see, everything was going “well.” And sometimes, that’s the problem with me. I suffer from anxiety, and I suffer from Imposter Syndrome, and I was doing my best to keep things together. For me, this is a dangerous time. I get worried that I’m stuck or that I’m about to hit something and derail the whole thing. And that’s what got me, was that Graham had hit a derailment and was digging out of his recent past. We needed something, a life raft that we could ride on together.

So when Graham and I sat together in late 2018, the inkling of an opportunity formed. It was a mixture of intentions, both selfish and selfless, that took on its own life. I had to tamp down my excitement, because I had tried and failed before, but it felt… different. It felt better.

Creative work has been both a boon and a curse to me in the past. My wife has always been crafty. She can sit down and think of a project and then put her hands on it and build her vision. And at one point, I used to draw. But my depression and anxiety had ruined that part. My vision and the reality of my craft were never in alignment, and the results always disappointed me. And these constant disappointments destroyed my confidence in creating a work of any kind.

But I had story ideas in my head, ideas that had been around since 2004 that I felt could go somewhere, if only they had a craftsman that could serve them justice. I had attempted to pair up with another friend back when the idea had come to me, but we never got past a first chapter together. He wanted me to “write better” but had no feedback to help me in that way. I wanted someone to take my idea and make it real, and he didn’t want to write something that “wasn’t his.” And neither of us were wrong in this. It just wasn’t working.

Graham and I go way back, friends for years, and we’ve talked endlessly about the various ideas and scraps of concepts in our time together. I remember reading some of his writing back in ’99 and 2000, and realized he had a great writing style. I loved his concepts and the work he had done (work we may re-explore together after Sainan is completed), and would have shared my work with him if only distance had separated us in the mid-2000’s. Unfortunately, we weren’t togehter regularly, when the birth of Symon came to me for us to have talked about it then. But now, on a long week in 2018, he wanted to work on a project with me and I wanted my story out there. So we laid everything out.

Outlines, concepts, idea edits, merge, and loss were flooding out of us. I don’t remember there being a solid “decision” point. We just fell into the project. My war-torn backdrop, his political city-scape, my coming of age story, his romance, my magic system, and his “twist.” All started to line up quickly. We had a 3 act story. And suddenly, it looked “real.”

I rode through 2019, waiting for it to fall apart. For us to lose faith. And we faltered from time to time, but we kept going back to it. Neither of us could walk away. And it was brilliant for both of us. In time of strife, it gave him an anchor to me that we could share. For me, it gave me faith in something that I could create with my own hands (or fingers on a keyboard). I was able to absorb his prose, and we learned together. My “hand-off” project became a truly shared work. I was amazed.

So, yes. As much as I knew Graham needed this, it wasn’t just for him. I needed it, too. And I’m so happy that we got here together.

So, next week… I’ll let him lay out his core concepts. The story essentials that he KNEW that were important to him, and where they started. It won’t be the chaotic onslaught of creation that this legendary week was for us, but it’s an insight. Bits and pieces that we can share… while leaving some of it behind the curtains for mystery (gotta leave you something to read!).

Until then, Be Kind.

-Clevenger