The last post here is from 2021. I know. I looked.
The honest version is this: the pandemic did a number on all of us, and I was no exception. When the dust started to settle I found I didn’t want back into the world I’d stepped out of. The noise of it. The constant churn. Social media had become a place I couldn’t think inside of anymore, and thinking is most of what writing is, so I quietly closed the doors and walked away from the feeds.
What I walked toward was smaller and slower. My garden, which had been waiting for me. The woods around my house. My design business, which needed my hands more than my opinions and which asked for a completely different part of my brain than fiction does—the part that makes things, the part that solves problems you can see. I traveled, often and unhurriedly. I read more in those years than I had in any decade of my life, not because I was researching anything, but because books were the only conversation I still trusted. I spent long evenings with the handful of people who matter to me, the ones who don’t need me to perform anything. I learned how to sit with my own mind again without needing anyone else’s voice in the room.
And then last year, my father died.
I’m not going to write about that here in any detail. Grief of that particular kind is not something I’m willing to hand to the internet, and anyone who has lost a parent knows why. But I will say the thing I learned from it, because it’s the thing that brought me back to the desk: grief clarifies. It strips out whatever in your life has been running on habit, on obligation, on the hope that you’ll get to it later. It looks at you and asks, plainly, what matters?—and the answers are usually humiliatingly simple. Mine was that I had a book I had been writing, off and on, since 2017, and that I didn’t want to die without finishing it.
Her name was Lyssandra then. Her brother was Darion. The estate she fled toward was already called Arjona, the village she fled from was already called Enllóce, and the first chapter—the one I wrote during NaNoWriMo 2017 and posted to this blog, and which is still up if you scroll back far enough—opened with raiders coming out of the fog and a young woman climbing into a hidden chimney shaft while her mother died at the doorstep. I won that NaNoWriMo. I thought I’d finish the book the following year. I didn’t finish it the year after that either. Life kept interrupting, and the book itself kept refusing to settle. It had no ending. It had no outline. I knew the opening and I knew the world and I knew the feeling of the thing, but I had no map to the other side of it, and so I wrote a chapter here and a chapter there, and over the course of nine years I accumulated something like 145,000 words of a book that was still, by any honest measure, a mess. I was in an editing loop of epic proportions—fussing, rewriting, polishing the same passages over and over because polishing was the only kind of forward motion I knew how to make without an outline. I told myself I was working. I wasn’t. I was hiding inside the work.
When I came back to the manuscript after my father died, I did the thing I should have done in 2017 and had been refusing to do ever since. I didn’t sit down and write. I sat down and outlined. Fifty-eight pages later I had wrangled the monster into shape. I had a direction. I had an ending—not just for Book One, but for all three books of the trilogy I now knew this was always going to be. The mess hadn’t been the writing. The mess had been the writing without a map. Once I had the map, the rewriting went fast, because I finally knew what every chapter was for. The bones turned out to have been correct all along. I just hadn’t been able to see them.
The protagonist had a truer name waiting for her too—she is Liriel now, Liriel Sabina Sanzari—and the world she lives in had grown teeth while I wasn’t looking. I understood, finally, what I had been reaching for in 2017 and couldn’t quite catch. I wasn’t a better writer than I had been then, exactly. I was a more patient one. I had lost enough to be patient.
It is, I should say plainly, a book for adults. Daevil’s Tears is a literary dark fantasy about belief and complicity and the slow theological seduction of a young woman by a cult that knows exactly what it is doing. It is also, unapologetically, a sensual book—explicit where the story demands it, lush where the prose can bear it, in the tradition of writers like Jacqueline Carey and Angela Carter and Anne Rice, who understood that the body is where faith is built and broken. If that is not the kind of book you want to read, I will not be hurt by your absence. If it is exactly the kind of book you have been looking for and rarely find, then I wrote it for you, and I am glad you are here.
It is Book One of a trilogy called The Laughing God. I’m thirty-three chapters in and about 211,000 words deep, with only a handful of chapters left before the finish line — close enough now to see it clearly, close enough to start thinking about what comes next. And what I’m thinking about is something I’ve never done before: rather than waiting for the whole trilogy to be polished and published in the traditional way, I’ve been considering releasing this book to readers as a serialized novel, chapter by chapter. I’ve been looking closely at Ream (reamstories.com), which is a subscription platform built specifically for serialized fiction, and the model fits the kind of slow, immersive unfolding this book wants. If I go that route, it would mean weekly chapters, audio narration for higher tiers, and a slow drip of the worldbuilding material I’ve been accumulating in notebooks for nine years. I’m still working out the details. I’ll post again when I’ve made the decision and the page is ready — but I wanted to write this post first, before any announcements, because it felt wrong to come back talking about subscription tiers before I had said the true thing.
The true thing is that I needed the silence. I needed the years away from the shouting. I needed the design business and the travel and the reading and the garden and, eventually, I needed the grief, because without it I might still be telling myself I’d get back to the book next year. I might still be in the editing loop, polishing the same paragraphs and calling it progress.
I am still here. Liriel is still here. The book is almost ready. And the only thing I have to say for my long absence is thank you, to anyone who waited, and to anyone who is just now finding their way in.
More soon.
—Narcisse
