My car broke, then I found notes from 15 years ago for my next book
So one of the annoying things I’ve had to deal with the past few months is my car breaking beyond repair. That’s been a headache to deal with but I knew my car was on its last leg. Still, there was a positive little surprise that came out of that.
You see, I live in a studio apartment with essentially zero closet space. Because of that, I had a lot of stuff in the trunk of my car that I went through as I was getting rid of it. Specifically, some notes I haven’t looked at in about a decade.
These are notes from when I was first writing If You Believe in Magic, which changed it’s title to Element Keepers when I self-published it in high school in 2013, which is now Light Keeper Chronicle. I’d completely forgotten the notes were there and it was a fun excuse to go back over some old plans and storylines.
I think what was most striking was how similar everything was. The project has always been middle-grade/young-adult book series. However, way back when I intended it to be seven books long. Now, it’s a (maybe) five book long series for which I am currently finishing a draft of this November.
In all cases, the books are about four kids (seven by the time we get to book two) who discover that they are the subject of a prophecy in another world. They find they are meant to use their powers to prevent an apparently malicious wizard from overthrowing the existing order. That’s more or less been the broad idea ever since I started writing the books.
I had straight up forgotten that back in 2005/2006 when I fist came up with a lot of the base characters and title of the book, I had referred to it as If You Believe in Magic. (Probably because I was listening to too much Aly & AJ at the time.) The first book also had a subtitle at the time, albeit, one written in a made-up alphabet. Not only that, written incorrectly in my own made up alphabet if I’m understanding it right.
The made-up words seem to say “The Prophecy Will Be” followed by “Gire”? — which is presumably meant to be “Fire”—and then “Water” followed by “Gagilen” — pretty sure that’s meant to be “Garibain” — and then “Shadow, Light.” I think that’s all supposed to roughly come together as “The Prophecy of Garibain will be Fire, Water, Shadow, Light.”
If I remember right, I sketched this particular sticky note out one Saturday morning while watching the T.V. show W.I.T.C.H. in my pajamas.
I knew I decided early on that there would be seven Element Keepers (hence the seven connected orbs), but it’s a little bit of a surprise to me that I’d clearly decided even when I was conceptualizing the story that I’d only focus on four of the seven element keepers to start. (I guess props to me at that age for realizing that seven main characters would be A LOT to keep track of.)
Character Art
There’s a few other character sketches that I’ve done, but they’re in line enough with events I still intend to happen that they’d be potentially spoiler-y to post.
The first picture is of my main character, Lenzey during the third book when I planned to have the main characters climbing a mountain with the intent of finding an isolated civilization at the top. At a certain point, the Element Keepers end up in two or three distinct groups and attempt to meet back up with each other at the top of the mountain. This is meant to be Lenzey finding a cave to camp out in during the trek.
In the next in illustration you see the character Katrina. She made it to the 2022 book, but she was an oddity in the original draft. She was originally going to be the main person training the Element Keepers, the idea being that she had received some sort of other special blessing that allowed her to use diminished versions of all the Element Keepers’ powers. (Making her a sort of odd eighth Element Keeper from Garibain itself.) As she exists in the books now, she represents someone who was recruited by Zandar and is somewhat jealous of Lenzey for being more important than her. An interesting detail here is that she is drawn with a wand, something I’d completely forgotten I originally thought I’d have all the Element Keepers using alongside swords.
The next image is of Zandar, arguably the main wizard of the book series. He brings the Element Keepers to Garibain and tries to train them to overturn, Dassin, a former pupil he believes has betrayed him. It’s sort of funny that when I first designed Zandar, I’d meant for him to be a sort of sprite—not an all powerful wizard. For some reason, grade school me wanted to avoid the wizard cliche. By the time I drew this, I was leaning into the idea of him as a powerful wizard and had stopped short of giving him a beard (which he has in the book now).
The last two images that I have above are of possible villains from what would have been book 3 in the case of the man wearing the smiling mask and book 4 for the woman with the tattoos and red eyes. I won’t say more about them since there’s a chance I figure out how to incorporate them, but I will say it’s difficult to imagine how they fit in for a 5 book story.
Obviously, I’m not a super skilled character artist, but it was very nostalgic for me to be going back through these and seeing these characters as I’d imagined them years back.
Maps of Garibain
As far as I can tell, I pretty much always referred to the magical world as Garibain (though the spelling has fluctuated a lot). Probably the biggest change has been whether Garibain refers to the whole world, the region, or the continent. (As things stand, I believe it is just the continent.)
I believe the partially colored map is the earliest map of the world. You can tell I would have made this around the time of early middle school based on the names of things like having a place marked just “Old Castle” (I assume this was meant to be the Light Temple), or “Mt. Top City”, or “Black Tower,” or a city of great importance simply called “Sparks.”
You can also see stuff like “Lifling Village” — “Lifling” being the sprite-like species I imaged Zandar belonged to at one point before I decided that the Warlocks existed and he could just be a human man.
While I don’t think any of these maps are technically fully up to date on what’s “cannon” in the books, it is interesting the things that largely stay the same. (Including “Black Tower” somehow remaining a place on all the labeled versions of the map. I must have really thought I cracked something there.)
From what I can tell, the second to last map here (which is only partially labeled) represents the closest thing to the “canon” map of the books as they are now.
As much as I’d like to have a map I can point to now as fully canon, there’s been so much that’s had to change over the years to fit plot changes, that I don’t know that I’ll ever have a fully finished map until/unless I get to the end of the series and am able to know which places all end up being where I thought they were.
Lore and notes and such
I made A LOT of notes. Like, so many notes I wonder how I passed as many middle-school classes as I did considering how much effort I was clearly putting into this made up world. Let’s go through some of what’s here real quick.
The first two images in the top row shows that I was really interested in the history of Garibain, specifically the relationship between humans and elves. (Elves, in the current book, have mostly been replaced with dryads.) An interesting thing that was pointed out to me recently is that, between Light Keeper Chronicle and The Wilderlands, I seem fairly concerned with race relations. (In the case of The Wilderlands, I think that’s implicite, and in the case of Light Keeper, I think it’s largely downplayed but still present.)
Shortly after that, you can see my pre-occupation with history and the age of things. I mention’s the first rulers of Garibain and I assign very specific ages (that I think are still canon today) to the Warlocks of the world. These are the effectively immortal wizards that have ascended to power and now oversee the progress of Garibain, tilting it when they feel things have gone astray. After that you can find some magic words and items alongside, getting into row 2, some made up alphabets.
There’s a little bit of a page on two characters who will probably never find their way back into the books: Ja and Ti—a set of Garibainian twins who were ultimately supposed to end up on opposite sides of the conflict over the course of the books.
There’s also some more history of the Warlocks and Ithgare—the head of the Warlocks—specifically, detailing his history becoming the first historian of Garibain and then, eventually, discovering the secret to extending his own life. There’s more notes on future plots that will never really come to fruition based on the space and time I likely have.
Again, just a fun time going back over these and seeing what stuck!
Items
I know there’s some other art that exists elsewhere, but these three magical items I managed to find images for with me.
Clearly this was a point where I was prioritizing Lenzey and Zack (since they both got swords and kingstones) and a little bit Ellean (since she got a kingstone, too).
I think I did this illustration of Canldus (Lenzey’s sword) around 8th or 9th grade and I think the illustration of Zack’s sword (which hasn’t shown up in anything written yet and doesn’t have a name in my notes) in 11th or 12th grade. I don’t remember doing the kingstone illustrations, but the concept of kingstones was a (relatively) late addition to the story, so I’m guessing it would have been around 9th grade as well.
While none of these are particularly great sketches, I ended up including the sketch of Canldus in the published version of Light Keeper Chronicle. More for my own edification and to get a bit of the work I’d done WAY back when into the book.
It’s not evident from these illustrations, there was a point where I had far to many things for each Element Keeper and didn’t fully appreciate the work it would be to replicate those items across seven central characters. (Or maybe I thought I’d feel a lot more empowered to write 350,000 word books, rather than the 80,000-100,000 word books they’ve been trimmed down to.)
Anyway, all of this is running pretty long already. I have a few other sets of notes that I know of that I might go through if I think they end up being interesting, but if any of this piqued your interest and you haven’t read it yet, check out my book Light Keeper Chronicle: The Unspoken Prophecy and wish me luck on finishing the sequel the rest of this month!
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Light Keeper Chronicle: The Unspoken Prophecy is available for physical purchase from Schuler Books, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon or wherever you read ebooks.
The Wilderlands is available for physical purchase now from Barnes & Noble and Amazon or wherever you read ebooks. The audiobook is also out now on most major platforms.