By mid-April of 2020, two weeks into this journey, I began to realize that self-publishing the first novel I’d written, Vril, wasn’t a good idea (at least not yet). In the posts below, I began transitioning to reworking The Slaying of the Bull, the fourth book I wrote, and eventually the second book I decided to self-publish via Amazon KDP.
I began writing this book in the transition period after moving back to the US from China. In the Spring and Summer of 2007, my wife and I were working at the US Postal Service as temps while we waited to move to the Boston area and go to graduate school. We were night-shift custodians and had quite a bit of downtime. I began by handwriting the book in a notebook in between cleaning bathrooms. It is the only novel I’ve written this way. I continued working on the book all the way through the move to Boston, through my start in graduate school, and then while working at MIT when I got my first job at the Institute. That opened a huge door, because as a staff member, I gained access to MIT’s world-class libraries. It elevated the book considerably.
My original plan was to make The Slaying of the Bull the first book in an epic series called the Gospels of Mani that would span 800+ years and weave in Vril. It would begin in 1241 with The Slaying of the Bull, continue in 1258 in Baghdad, and then move into the present. That idea would change again, becoming the Tocharian Gospels when I eliminated the Vril storyline entirely and created a new character and angle for the present-day parts of the series. Philip Lacado, a retired magician, was a great character who still intrigues me and may rise again one day. Anyway, I got The Slaying of the Bull into good shape and published it, but its relative failure ultimately killed the idea. I got about 30,000 words into the second book and 21,000 into the third (I was writing them together), but then moved on to Dawn of the Lightbearer.
These things sometimes happen in writing. Maybe someday I will go back to those stories (especially Philip Lacado), but probably not. Bits and pieces have found their way into other works. At the time, I was very excited about the Gospels of Mani/Tocharian Gospels, but not enough people shared that excitement, so I made the difficult decision to focus my time and energy elsewhere. It gave birth to Lucardia, and so it wasn’t all bad.
Cheers!
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