Avardiverse: The Genesis
I wasn’t exactly in love with the idea of writing as a child. Sure, I loved to read, but to write? No. Every time my pen went to paper, something in the way it was taught – drilled would be a better word - made it a slog for me. Every time. I loathed the notion of attempting to confine my ideas into a claustrophobic box built to satisfy every teacher’s personal whims. Word counts and tasks to be tattily ticked off had me producing surly papers. At best, I could manage assignments which would occasionally flirt with a resentful attitude hidden under the veneer of respectable effort.
But. If I were writing what I would consider the perfect novel about my journey into writing, I’d imagine the seed of it would have been planted in my freshman year of high school. We had just finished reading Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game in English class, and my then-teacher called on us to write a journal entry in the style of one of the novel’s characters (I won’t ruin the plot nor its climax). There was a stipulated sentence count, which was marginally more liberating than usual, but as ever I went after it with my customary lack of zeal.
The following day, however, I was involuntarily volunteered to read my short passage out loud in class, and was pleasantly startled when a classmate commented on a specific phrase I had used (all these years later, it remains one of his clearest associations of our time together in school).
If I were writing that perfect novel, I would pretend this were the incident that incited it all. But it wasn’t. Of course, we write our own fictions, whether indeed we write at all or not. But it was the awakening of a certain awareness of language, lingering somewhere within my mind, that I had never yet quite paid conscious attention to up to that point.
Some years later, long after the curses of high school, I was enlisted by my sister to see some of her friends. Given that I was her ride, and therefore a temporarily higher power beholden to her timetable her for the day, I hunkered down in a bookstore, spending the next several hours highly caffeinated and deeply nosed in a book so thick I could have used it to hammer nails into concrete.
A collection of short stories, it was the perfect way to pass an afternoon, speed-dating the wildly divergent writers, appreciating and making note of some, disdaining and passing over others.
But there was one story in particular, centered around identities and masks, that spoke to me. I devoured it once, and then chewed at it a second time, sucking the marrow out of the story… until it reached its end. I felt cheated. It had just abruptly stopped, right where the really interesting ideas were taking shape in my mind. Sure, that didn’t diminish the text… but at that point right there, my imagination was unleashed.
Where would I have gone with it? What would I have done, or changed?
I picked up my sister that day – late, with the book in tow (from that day on, I would never read a book in a bookstore without giving it a new home), and a stack of coffee-stained napkins which bore the hastily scribbled notes of new worlds taking form in my mind.
A year later, after endless rewrites, mental blocks, and ceaseless conversations with editors, I had a finished novel…
…which went nowhere. In fact, it still sits on my hard drive.
But, that’s how it began.
Some years later, now with several more completed novels (or their drafts anyway), novellas, and a welter of short stories humming along on my hard drive and also going nowhere, I spent some years studying and wandering around Europe while completing my Masters degree.
The environment sparked something new in me.
Narrow winding streets through centuries-old gothic architecture; a clutter of languages and dialects of thousands of tribes living uneasily side by side; sights, smells, and sounds that still to this day bear witness to thousands of years of history… I felt “it”, finally.
It was time to write something good, and publish the damn thing. Come what may.
Upon returning to the U.S., I set about writing a new novel from fresh, inspired by all I had taken in during my stay in Vienna. The novel that would become First, Do No Harm, which, while its labyrinthine plot and multiple characters and subplots required a number of rewrites, the main thrust of writing through it hummed along pretty well.
That was, until the editors came along (groan - but everyone needs a good one). And then the endless search for and negotiations with potential publishers – no spoiler alert: the industry ain’t what it was. Literary agents? Do it yourself, buddy. Printing and publishing? Not on our dime. Advances and royalties? Lucky if I can work on my novels on a Sunday afternoon. The publishing industry worked with those already established; to them; until then, your work is the same as any teenager’s blog. It could be James Joyce and they wouldn’t give it the time of day.
Especially not if it were James Joyce.
So, belatedly: self-publish. Just get it done.
First, Do No Harm was finally published in 2020, where it went on to achieve stratospheric success… with my family and within my inner circle.
Still, it was enough to keep moving. Ideas cascaded across all manner of vistas imaginary, phantasmic, and ethereal. Short stories poured forth ranging from the historic to the mythological, from Sci-Fi to the anthropomorphic, through the oftentimes downright bizarre architecture of my mind, enough to fill a volume scheduled for publication in 2027 and the basis of my Avardiverse concept. I wrote my second full novel, Dead Noir - basically, Raymond Chandler takes a walk through Pixar’s Coco - scheduled for publication on Dia de los Muertos 2026, and a third about the Aztecs. I did all this while marrying my love, raising my little girls, and working my ass off.
And all those novels and stories sitting on my hard drive? Well, many of those are finally going somewhere too, either in revised formats or as the genesis for something new to materialise in the Avardiverse.
The point is to just get it done.