When an Imaginary World Becomes Real

Well, Fellow Creatures.

This is actually happening.

The Scarred World Saga is no longer mine alone.

A few days ago, Kerem Beyit sent me the first color roughs for the saga’s covers, and I was blown away.

Not simply because Kerem knocked them out of the park, but because, for the first time, I was seeing my world through someone else’s eyes.

For years, the blinds have been drawn and the windows shuttered while I’ve hammered quietly away at the keyboard, creating Moonsland and the people who inhabit it.

For so long, I’ve been the only one who knew what happened to them.

What made them tick.

What frightened them.

What they loved.

And where all these strange adventures would eventually lead.

But now, after seeing the cover roughs and hearing from beta readers, I’m beginning to understand what it means for this world to stop belonging entirely to me.

People are responding to the characters.

An artist is creating his own interpretation of Moonsland.

Readers are becoming emotionally invested in stories that, for a long time, existed nowhere except inside my own head.

And now those stories exist inside theirs.

That is still a strange thing for me to comprehend.

As I’ve said throughout this process, it’s surreal!

The work itself is nearing the end.

Requiem’s Rise, Sword of the Scarred, Stone of the Scarred, and Sins of the Scarred are all locked.

Only Scorn of the Scarred remains, and I’m roughly three-quarters of the way through its final publication-ready pass.

There will always be something else I could tinker with.

Another sentence I could tighten.

Another word I could swap.

Another scene I could reconsider.

But eventually, finishing a story means surrendering it.

At some point, I have to stop trying to make these books better and simply allow them to exist.

That moment is getting very close.

And when it finally arrives, something even stranger will happen.

Every reader who opens one of these books will begin creating their own version of Elsewhere.

Their Requiem will not look exactly like mine.

Their Dash may sound slightly different.

Their Abyss will move differently in their imagination.

Some characters I love may annoy them.

Some moments I barely thought twice about may become the ones they remember years later.

That, I suppose, is one of the great joys of storytelling.

A writer can build the roads, raise the cities, populate the wilderness, and point toward the horizon.

But once a reader enters that world, part of it becomes theirs.

Maybe that’s when an imaginary world finally becomes real.

Not when the author finishes writing it.

Not when the cover is painted.

Not even when the book is published.

But when another person begins carrying some version of that world around inside their own imagination.

I’ve spent years building Moonsland in mine.

Over the next few months, I’m hoping to finally hand it over to you.

And whatever version of it you create when you arrive there, you’ll have helped make a dream of mine real.

Thanks for walking this road with me, Fellow Creatures.

Until next time,

See you in Elsewhere,

Jeff