The Road to Lost

This book started a long time ago, changing forms and intentions along the way. Here's a look at what inspired my debut novel and how I got to now. ***Contains spoilers***

The road is long, but I like getting lost.

"Let's do a writing exercise," they said. "It'll be fun," they said.

Many years ago, in my first writers' group after graduating college, we all felt like we were in a rut. We kept rehashing the same things, reworking short stories we didn't have any idea what we wanted from them. We thought a writing exercise could break us out of our funk.

I love a prompt. I work well in guardrails, where stories have limitations I have to play with and break through. My prompt was from a random word generator. Feeling confident, I cranked the dial to "complex" and pushed the button.

It was like pressing play on the next 15 years of my life.

I quickly felt less than confident. I had to look up each word:

• Craquelure: a network of fine cracks in the paint or varnish of a painting

• Metage: the official measuring of contents or weight

• Thundersquall: a sudden, violent storm attended with lightning and thunder

An image began to take shape: A painting. Something big, heavy. And a storm at sea. A shipwreck. Two men on adrift on painting like a life raft. Their clothes were rags, gray, maybe uniforms. My first thought was not, "who?" but, "where?" Where were they coming from? And where were they going?

Finding My Ship

I had a small obsession with New Zealand at the time (ok, also forever thereafter). If I could plant these men in the fern forests of the North Island, I would. I also have a hole in my heart that only 19th century novels can fill, so I wanted them in that era.

If we were drifting to New Zealand on a painting, it seemed we could only start in Australia and live to tell the tale. I started googling tidal patterns and wind currents (while letting record requests pile up at the law firm where I worked). If their ship wrecked in Tasmania, they could possibly—maybe, just maybe—run into the north tip of the island before missing it for the width of the Pacific Ocean.

If these men were in ragged gray uniforms bound for 19th century Tasmania, they were most definitely convicts. I researched penal transport shipwrecks: there were four during Britain's practice of sending convicts to Australia. There was one that sank just miles from its destination of Van Diemen's Land, i.e., Tasmania.

I found my ship—George III—the historical nugget at the center of the story. I wrote a short story focusing mostly on the wreck, but knew it had so much more to give.

Now I had an astronomical amount of reading to do.

Convict Transportation

I started where any millennial would start: Wikipedia. I quickly learned the love of the citations and references sections which lead me to my true assignments.

I cheered librarians and archivists for digitizing crumbling newspaper articles, letters, and diaries—and responding to my ceaseless emails. I combed through museum, library, and enthusiast websites. I dipped my toe in Fatal Shore (and the criticisms of Fatal Shore). But there was one book entirely dedicated to the shipwreck: Imperial Disaster by Michael Roe. Thank god Astrolabe Books carried a copy.

I cannot tell you how many times I have read this book. It was manna from heaven any time I was lost in this story. It contains the inquest of the shipwreck, with accounts from multiple people aboard the ship; the surgeon's supplementary statement and narrative; and a list of all prisoners aboard with basic details. It put me in the bunks next to starving men dying of scurvy. It dizzied me with mayhem, selfishness, and selflessness of a ship going down. But most importantly, it taught me there is never one truth. All story is perspective.

The Asylum, the Prison, and the Lens of Grief

My two characters were beginning to take shape: one convict and one ... the opposite of a convict. The shipwreck would be a blessing to the convict; I wanted his foil to feel damned as the ship sinks and he drifts away from his destination.

I decided on a chaplain, not just along for the ride on George III, but running from something. I gave him a backstory stemming from Bethlem Asylum, otherwise known as "Bedlam." He seeks forgiveness, and his storyline is driven by atonement.

"How he’d wanted to save her. How he’d failed. The memory of her is what drove him to Bedlam in the first place, his work in the Church merely a means to an end, and it is what drove him from that madhouse to this ship and to Van Diemen’s beyond."

The theme of grief really grew from the chaplain, Thomas Woodlow. His mother died in Bethlem Asylum when he was an adolescent, and the shadow of that trauma looms over his life.

I started to look at all the main characters through the lens of grief, as a symptom of the many ways they were lost and the pressure they needed to survive.

For the convict, J—, his grief stems from a loss of self. His foundation is in the years prior to his transportation in Millbank Prison, where the bizarre "separate system" kept prisoners in solitary confinement, silent, masked, and under belligerent religious instruction. J— suffers more extreme isolation when he is put in the dark cells of the prison, a cruel practice which used the absence of light as punishment. Without the ability to be perceived, J— loses the idea of himself throughout the novel. He seeks escape and storyline is driven by his quest for freedom.

"The more Thomas studies the man, the more he disappears. He is a void, a blank spot in the universe."

A third character lay in wait. She has been there since the beginning, waiting without knowing that these two men will appear in her life and change it forever. She is the unsuspecting catalyst, one who can draw J— and thus Thomas through the eye of a needle and who pulls them ashore to New Zealand.

Kekeno's grief is shaped by her loss of loved ones and ancestral connection. Kidnapped as a baby, she is raised in a tribe which—aside from her father—neither accepts nor trusts her. The death of her husbands and children only deepens the tribe's suspicion of her. She seeks belonging among her people.

Kekeno rested her head in the tattooist’s lap. She bravely bore each tap of the chisel as Rāhiri stroked her feet and recited their whakapapa, singing down their family line from the first canoe that arrived on these shores, through the ages of love and birth, down to his father and to him, and now to his daughter, his beloved Kekeno. As the blood wept from her blackening chin, he willed his words into those wounds, planting the seeds of names in her flesh. Kekeno willed them to take root, to hold her in this family, in the only tribe she had ever known. When the scars healed, she often found herself running her fingers over the grooves, whispering the whakapapa to herself, the words blooming to life on her lips.

Lost in Aotearoa

I have never been to New Zealand. Before embarking on this book, I had a novice's understanding of the country as a former British colony and the land of the Maori. After all my research, I probably still only have a shred of insight into this complex and storied country. But it had its hooks in me, and in a book about being lost, I had to fling myself somewhere I knew almost nothing about.

When I really dug into this section of the book, it was at a time in my life where I felt like I had to choose a path. I'd been working in tech marketing for more than ten years, chipping away at writing my book on nights and weekends. My company was going through an identity crisis I didn't care to weather again, I'd survived layoff rounds which piled on yet more work, and AI seemed to have blown up the world. I felt that path withering as finishing the book was getting a harder due to the amount of research I wanted to undertake.

I quit my marketing job. People tell you not to, that you can write a book on the side, that you can be a parent, a partner, an employee, and somehow a debut novelist (plus a happy, contributing member of society to boot). Those people were on the internet and, thankfully, I did not listen to them. Because I could not do all of those things well. Thankfully, the people in my life were supportive in every way you can imagine. And so I was able to get lost in my book.

Researching and writing the section in Aotearoa (New Zealand wouldn't become a British colony until six years after the story of Lost concludes) showed me what this book really was. Kekeno was the driving force, tipping dominoes all the way back to the beginning.

My life shrunk to an oversized chair in my dining room, with a copy of James Belich's Making Peoples in my lap, my laptop balanced on the arm of the chair, open to the Te Aka dictionary, Te Ara encyclopedia, and a litany of requests to the National Library of New Zealand. I was so damn happy. And I wrote like a storm.

I'm done! Now what?

I finished my manuscript, then set to work chopping it to pieces. It was way too long. I killed darling after darling, and looked at my word count that was stuck stubbornly at 123k words. I thought, "There's no way I could possibly cut another word!" Then I started querying agents.

I knew I was breaking too many rules. Aside from the word count, my original title was "Makere" (Maori for lost); every beta reader asked gently, "How do you pronounce it?" I didn't know how to boil the crux of the story down to a book jacket summary, let alone a hook (and maybe I still don't!). I was iffy on my comp titles, finding similar historical fiction but that always included a dual storyline in the present, or a style I didn't like, or magic (no). I was guzzling agent webinars, blogs, and newsletters.

I felt (shocker) utterly lost.

After a long, deep breath, I went back and cut again. I got it down in the 100k territory. And like all edits, I didn't miss what was gone. It's a better, tighter book. I changed the title. I found comp titles I was happy with. I found newsletters that gave me tactical, unique advice not just on my query letter but pages (thank you Jessica Berg and Nathan Bransford). I added in a second writers' workshop focused on getting published.

Oh, and I started a second book. Because nothing crushes spirit like querying. And nothing buoys mine like discovering a new story in my head.

I feel I'm on the path again. I'll probably stumble off it. The road is long and uncertain. But I like getting lost.