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A Book 30 Years in the Making by KC Cowan
Friday, December 2, 2016
Rated "G" by the Author.
How a friendship between three girls turned into a novel about the friendship between three girls.
A Book 30 Years in the Making
By KC Cowan
Most people find their “tribe” in college – making their most lasting friendships there. But for me, Wilson High School provided me with a group of people I am still proud to call my “best friends.” We were all involved in drama and music and formed a bond that continues to this day.
I would have to say that Sara Cole and Nancy Danner are the two with whom I keep closest contact, and a project we resurrected from the past has solidified that bond.
We all went to different colleges – I went to Oregon State, Sara attended Portland State, and Nancy went to U of O. In 1978, Sara had just finished reading “Lord of the Rings” and decided she wanted to write her own fantasy novel. So, she wrote chapter one of “The Log,” in which she named herself Princess Irene of Cabbage who had a best friend, Nan the Dancer. She sent a copy off to Nancy and asked her to write the next chapter.
It then came to me. In Chapter 3, I introduced myself as a character, Kay of the Crystal Seas, and we were off and running. Sadly, Nancy was a student teacher in our senior year and had little time for writing. Although Sara and I always kept her in the loop and asked her to write a chapter, she basically dropped out.
We used familiar settings from our state and changed the names. For example, the girls live in the Valley of William Etté near the Hooded Mountains. We put all our friends in as characters. Not that they were really similar to the people in the book – it was more like casting a play. If we needed a villain, well, Richard would make a good one, so let’s make him the bad guy.
We wrote chapters between 1978 and 1982, eventually filling two large three-ring binders with hand written and Xeroxed copies. Eventually though, life got busy and we dropped it. However, I never threw out my copy. It sat in my basement for decades and when I got married and moved, I brought it with me, even though I hadn’t looked at it once in all that time and we three never even talked about it.
Fast forward to 2012. I was out of work with time on my hands. Out of the blue, Sara asked me if I still had “The Log,” and if so, would I consider typing it up so we all could see it again? Both she and Nancy had lost their copies. So I did and we took great delight in seeing what we had done.
However, when we got to the last chapter, we discovered we had just stopped and not completed the story! By now, we were all invested in it again, so one time when Nancy was up from California on a visit, we mapped out the finish and thirty years after we stopped writing, we brought the story to a conclusion. Irene, Nan and Kay join forces to defeat an evil wizard and save the land. TO celebrate, I printed copies for us at Powell’s Book Machine.
That might have been the end of it, except I had a feeling there was a “real book” in there somewhere. I asked Nancy and Sara if they would let me try to polish it and pitch it for publication. They agreed and I spent the next three and a half years working on the newly renamed, “Journey to Wizards’ Keep.”
Like most first time authors, I made mistakes, pitched it too soon and got a lot of rejections. But on July 31st, 2015, I got a “yes” from Ravenswood Publishing – a tiny boutique publishing company. The past year has been a whirlwind of working with editors, cover artist, and learning how to help market it. Best of all, Sara and I continued writing and completed a sequel, with a third book nearly done.
Who could have imagined my life would take this turn? And that something we wrote just for fun would be published? I just know that when “Journey to Wizards’ Keep” comes out, I will be forever grateful that I found my two best friends at Wilson High School.
Journey to Wizards’ Keep is available on Amazon.com, Createspace.com, Kindle, iBooks, KOBO, NOOK, and Audible.com.
While uncommon, there are collaborations like yours, often for music, that do start in schools. If those early endeavors get cut off by various reasons, the work is often lost. I recall writing my first book in 1971, hand written on paper. I left to do my doctorate and that work was lost. I often think about rewriting the book from memory.
I was surprised when you wrote, “would you consider typing it up…” in 2012. I've been doing all my writing with computers since 1989 and over 100 pages of my dissertation was done on a word processor on a mainframe computer in 1973.
The Internet has made it much easier to collaborate with other authors. I do it routinely now.
I hope your book is a success. The wizard genre is quite crowded these days. And, books are not selling because personalities are and there are so many free books available. Good luck and keep writing…
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