Armis is Finished!

It has taken me a few days to write this post as I have been basking in the glory of completely finishing my very first novel, The Catalyst – In Search of the Armis Trinity. I set myself the goal of having the first book done and ready to submit to literary agents within a year of starting it. I first put pen to paper (or more appropriately fingers to keyboard) on 22nd April 2020 and completed the final draft of the manuscript on 13th March 2021. The book was started in the first UK lockdown and finished in (hopefully) the last UK lockdown. It has been an obsession and joyous experience providing a focal point for my mind during a year where we have had our civil liberties, that we all took so much for granted, taken away.

The final word count is 88,700 words and the last edit proved to be merely grammatical and spelling corrections with very little change to the story. That was the benefit of such a thorough second draft, the third and final being much more mechanical than creative. Again, I must heap praise on my dear friend Dr Joy who made the corrections by hand on a hard copy for the final version to be as near perfect as I can make it. Rob must have read through this novel dozens of times now, in all its different guises, and I will be forever grateful.

The next part of this journey is actually the scariest for me. It is one thing having an old friend critique your work but to send it out into the wide world, I feel like a parent dropping their child off at school for the first time, losing total control over its destiny. That’s the funny thing about being a fantasy author, at times you feel omnipotent, in complete control of creating this new universe from scratch, moulding it, shaping it, into anything I liked. Now I feel the exact opposite, I have very little control from here on in and will have to rely on others sharing my vision and falling in love with this story and characters as I have. I will begin to approach agents in the next few weeks, and we shall see how far Freya et al. can take me. However, I still have four more books to write and whether they do get published or not, I owe it to all the Connected Worlds to finish their story.

Written by J. J. Westerman