When I was nine years old, I picked up a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit in the U.S. Ballantine edition:
Something about Bilbo riding on the barrel along the lazy river with the fantasy trees spoke to my young self.
Well, I loved it. Loved it all. Gollum, Smaug, the dwarves, Beorn, giant spiders in the forrest, it all spoke to me. So when I finished with a ‘what else he done’ look on my face, it was staring at me right there on the cover. Hey, this is a prelude to more books! Cool!
So I got the set:
Book one looked friendly enough, and yes (!) it began with Bilbo again, back in the Shire and lots of hobbitty shenanigans. Then we hit Bree, and started marching toward Mordor, and oh my, I lost some interest in the details of the world building (‘what happens next?! Never mind another song!’), but I got enough of the action to finish the books by age 10 having perhaps absorbed maybe 50% of it.
I mean, I was at the age where Éowyn was annoying to me, constantly pestering my guy Strider. Hey, I was 10.
Needless to say, I re-read the books as a teen and got more out of them. I re-read them in my 20s and got a lot more out of them.
And then something funny happened in my early 20s. An idea had been growing in me through my teen years. Although I could never hope to even come close to Tolkien in anything I did, there were a few things about LoTR that I was not as fond of:
Nine in the fellowship and they couldn’t get even one woman in the group?
Whaddya mean the good guys wear white and the bad guys wear black? Really?
An elf marrying a man requires that tragic an ending?
I wanted to play in that world, but tell my own story. So one Saturday afternoon I sat down — and I’m not kidding — I wrote the entire outline of Tranith Argan in one sitting. Oh sure, things changed later, but I got the idea all at once, even a scene in the last book that I knew had to be there. I drew a pencil map of the world, and yes, it looks very, very much like this:
So I set about trying to write the book.
And utterly failed after a couple of chapters.
Why? I hadn’t lived enough yet to talk about love and loss and tragedy and fear and growth and triumph. I went right back to my 10-year-old self and started writing “the action” and ignoring the characters. Whom I did not yet know.
So I waited.
15 years.
After I had fallen in love and gotten married, lost loved ones in death, had experienced triumphs and pitfalls, setbacks and all the rest of the messiness we call life.
And since I had been thinking about these characters for 15 years, now I understood Felanar (who has my emotional state, and no, I wouldn’t want to be king either — wait, what, you say, what do you mean? Just wait for books three and four…), and I understood Alessa’s frustrations with her lot in life, and I understood Kara yearning for more, and I knew how to write villains with nuance (just wait until book six).
In short, I wrote the books. Well, I wrote a 330,000-word epic trilogy that in book form was about 500 pages for book one, 400 for book two, and 350 for book three. I mean, if LoTR could be that long…
So yeah, now that I took the trilogy out of the bookstores, repurposed them for Substack and today’s impatient readers who think a Web essay is deep learning, and turned it into six books about 200 pages long each. I even cut most of the chapters in half. Hey, if this is all one long tale, what difference does it make in the end with a little rewriting?
So now with book two (and more to come) artwork by Niccolò Hilgendorf:
(That’s Alessa on the left and Kara on the right, and yes, that is a scene that comes from late in book two)
That’s how Tranith Argan came into being, beginning as a trilogy that sold over 1,000 copies, and now is here on Substack.
So please subscribe so you can read books two through six and see what popped into my early-20 head way back when. It really has been inside me all this time.
Thank you for reading.
Love this flashback and insight on your younger self and origins of Tranith Argan. Thanks for the shoutout!