Mark Timmony, one of Booktopia’s customer service superstars, was born and bred on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. He’s wanted to write for as long as he can remember and has several notebooks filled with illegible scribblings from childhood to prove it. The desire to write led to work as a bookseller and he spent almost a decade working as a genre specialist in Sydney. The Blood of the Spear is his debut novel.
Today, Mark is on the blog to tell us all about his journey towards becoming a writer, his love of fantasy, and how he published The Blood of the Spear. Read on …
I can’t remember when it was that I first wanted to write, though I do recall writing the start of what I am sure would have been an amazing novel back in Year 4. Okay, maybe not amazing but it was a fiction, and I had the grand notion that I was going to write a book. And I remember a note from my teacher of that year, Mrs Zachary, to keep writing.
But I do remember when I first discovered the types of stories I wanted to tell. I had just started Year 5 in a new school and entered the library for the first time. It was there that I picked up my first fantasy novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. I didn’t know anything about the authors, I didn’t know what Dragonlance – or DnD was – but there was a dragon breathing fire above a raging battle on the front cover and I knew I had to read it.
A new world opened up for me and I devoured every book of epic fantasy I could find. I entered the worlds of Raymond E. Feist, Terry Brooks, David and Leigh Eddings, Frank Herbert, Melanie Rawn, Janny Wurts, J.R.R. Tolkien, and of course, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and I never looked back.
If I wasn’t doing homework I was reading. And with every book I read the desire to write my own stories in my own worlds grew. I have notebooks full of scribblings and half-legible words that are testament to my early attempts at fiction writing. In many ways writing was an escape for me. Not that I had a bad or traumatic childhood in a way, but I was a solitary child and when my peers were playing sports and hanging out at the mall, I was crafting worlds of mighty warriors and powerful wizards in tales of adventure!
And the desire to write and create is still with me some thirty years later.
When it came down to it though, it took me a long time to come up with a story I felt might be ‘good enough’ to try and publish. I had spent years world-building, drawing maps, crafting civilisations, fleshing out empires and writing out timelines, but I didn’t have a story.
Part of my process is to look at fantasy art. I often find that the paintings and illustrations speak their thousand words right into the creative core of my imagination, and I was looking through the online gallery of an artist when I came across a painting of two men fighting in a snow-covered landscape. One of the men was wearing the armour of a warrior/knight, and the other wore the trappings of a shaman. I was captivated by the image, and it made me wonder who the two men were and why were they fighting?
From these musings grew what came to be the half-brothers Kaiel and Darien Toranth, my main characters. One a soldier, the other a wannabe magic-user. And I had my story. Kaiel and Darien fit so perfectly into the world I’d been building it was like I had been crafting it for them from the beginning.
My story, The Blood of the Spear, was the tale of two brothers marked by an ancient prophecy, who were destined to save the world or destroy it.
Two brothers. One prophecy. A world in peril.
I got to writing. And writing, and writing. It took a long time. Okay, it took an exceedingly long time for me to finish the first draft and then to get to this finished manuscript that is being published. I don’t know why it took me so long, I watch some other authors who just seem to churn out book after book with awe, and not a little envy, but that’s not how writing works for me. While it’s a joy it is also a process filled with self-doubt and procrastination. I do, however, take solace in the advice I have received from other authors that the first book always takes the longest to write from start to finish.
In any case, I finally had my completed manuscript. What next? Well, it’s time to find an agent, right? It’s almost impossible to get a deal with a publisher without an agent. So, I sent my manuscript out and waited. And waited. And that’s the game. You wait.
It takes you however long to write your novel and then you have to wait while you find an agent your work clicks with. Then you need to wait again while the agent seeks a publisher who wants to buy it.
I never got that far. After I received a few rejections from agents who professed to have liked what they read but that my novel ‘wasn’t right’ for them, I decided that I didn’t want to keep waiting indefinitely. And with the changes happening in the science fiction/fantasy side of the book industry I didn’t have to. I could self-publish The Blood of the Spear and still find my audience.
For some time now the science fiction/fantasy side of the market has been seeing a change where fewer new authors are picked up by publishers, and more and more of them are self-publishing their work. So why couldn’t I do that? Why couldn’t I get my novel out into the market and find my readers, build an audience? I don’t plan for this book to be the only thing I ever write. I can build a name for myself and work on selling a future project to a publisher. And that’s what I decided to do.
Self-publishing is a steep learning curve let me tell you. There are so many things to decide. Are you going to go ‘exclusive’ with a particular online retailer, or do you want to go for ‘wide distribution’ (to be sold on as many sites and in as many shops as possible)? Are you just releasing an eBook, or do you want physical copies of your book to be available too? There are lots of things to consider – not least find your own freelance editor, proofreader, cover artist, cover designer and typesetter.
Luckily, many professionals are working with self-publishers these days and the self-published author community is also incredibly supportive and willing to answer questions from new authors feeling their way through the maze of getting their work out to the public. The process has been stressful at times, and mistakes have been made, but I am enormously proud of what I’ve learnt over the course of both writing a book and getting it to a publishable state. And I am excited to release it to the world.
The Blood of the Spear is the first in an epic fantasy series, The Eye of Eternity, that I believe will appeal to readers of Robert Jordan, Brent Weeks, and Peter V. Brett. I hope you enjoy it.
—The Blood of the Spear by Mark Timmony (Ravenhawk Publishing) is out now. It’s also available in hardcover here!
The Blood of the Spear
The Eye of Eternity: Book 1
Two brothers. One prophecy. A world in peril.
When Kaiel loses his chance to become part of the legendary Daemon Hunters, joining the Bronze Guard mercenaries seems like the logical alternative. It is an opportunity to put his training to use and, more importantly, as the company is currently in the employ of Prince Alesandr, it will allow him to keep an eye on his younger brother, Darien, who's determined to follow his dream of becoming a Ciralys magic-user. But the broken continent of Athmay still bears the scars of the war between the Summoners...
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