7. Launch Day

It’s official: The Locutor Series is fully up-and-running on Amazon. You can still buy paperback versions of the first three novels and now, beginning today, you can also buy their eBook counterparts at quite affordable prices. In fact, the first book, The Featherweight Augur is only $0.99 in its electronic form … and currently sitting at an average 5 out of 5 stars in customer reviews! 

If you’ve been following along on Instagram, you’ve seen excerpts of some of these reviews as they’ve been posted the past month or so. But feel free to visit the page directly to see what earlier readers of the books are saying. And here are a few of my favorites … 

If you’re landing here for the first time and want to find out more, I’d suggest starting at the beginning to learn more about the books and the inspiration behind them.

And please tell a friend, leave a short review on Amazon, or follow along on Instagram for updates. I’m hard at work on Book Four these days, and every bit of interest in the series is a vote in favor of continuing this line of work! Take good care and thanks for your time.

6. Learning from Le Guin

“It’s curious that you wrote this even before reading Le Guin. It is like your work is highly influenced by her.”

My good friend wrote me this comment right after finishing The Featherweight Augur. He had read Le Guin’s science fiction for years, and specifically had in mind books like The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. What he meant was that the books I was writing were similar to hers in important ways: they were speculative fiction, written straightforwardly, and wrestling (sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly) with “big ideas” about how societies organize themselves and orient individuals’ efforts and identities.

And he was right: it was really weird that I’d never read Le Guin before. It was an oversight that needed correcting.

I picked up these two novels – at his recommendation – well after I’d written the first three books in The Locutor Series. I loved (loved) both Left Hand and Dispossessed and, like my friend, I wondered at some of the similarities between what I had in mind and what Le Guin had accomplished so many years before. I began to read about her and her life, marveling at how her work had presaged – and, really, made possible in a fundamental, ground-clearing sort of way – so many trends that would develop within speculative fiction in the ensuing decades.

For my recent birthday, I received a copy of The Books of Earthsea, the handsome, generously illustrated, and weighty collection of all her Earthsea novels. The bookseller at The Raven in Lawrence, KS (quick shout out to one of the very best independent bookstores in the country!) handed it over the counter with eyes wide. “Wow, look at this book,” she’d said. I carried all ten pounds of it back to my car, drove to my son’s school for afternoon pickup, and started reading in the driver’s seat while I waited for the doors to open. I was transfixed. I was sucked in. It was this – this! – that I had been striving to write. And it was this that early readers of my novels were drawing comparisons to. It was an eerie feeling. A foundation-shifting feeling. It was wonderful.

I am hard at work at the fourth book in The Locutor Series, and alongside that workflow, I’m steadily moving through each of the books in The Earthsea Cycle. They provide such a rich template of mechanisms and tools for the aspiring writer of speculative fiction: Le Guin’s economy of language; her ability to traffic in, problematize, and create anew genre archetypes; her efficient approach to narrative which offers stacks of self-contained plots that combine toward a broader trajectory; her assiduous attention to how individuals inhabit, are shaped by, and in turn reshape the environments they’re born into; the deep and long eons of history that effortlessly flow from her pen; the subtle anthropological sensibilities lurking in her backgrounds; and her uncanny ability to infuse her tales with just enough of the fantastical to keep her stories otherworldly, but still accessible.

Prior to encountering her work – and as I have written elsewhere in this blog – my guiding light had been the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. But while that point of inspiration had provided me with some guidance on structure and substance, I was often left wondering how to wrestle some of that work’s “young adult” sensibilities into a more mature narrative, something that would hinge a little more fully on societal dynamics and questions of institutionalism. I was also left to figure out, for myself, how to move my story out of the high literary tradition in which Pullman situates his books, and into a more pragmatic, perhaps colder, but certainly more social theoretical framework.

I learned a great deal about how to approach writing for having sorted through some of these issues on my own. But, I can tell you, it was a damn struggle.

Now that I have found Le Guin (blundered into her, really, clumsily and truant) I feel like I’ve found my new favorite professor at university. If I could nominate myself for the role, I would be included as one of her many, many acolytes. And I hope that future readers of The Locutor Series might emerge from within the ranks of her admirers.     

5. On Direct Publishing

It wasn’t until I finished the final (original) version of The Featherweight Augur a few years ago that I began to think at all concretely about whether and how to publish it. At the time, I was already outlining the second and third books of what I planned to be a gargantuan trilogy. I felt like Lyric’s story had some blood going to it, the end of the first book was exciting and left a whole mess of loose ends flying around, and it would take a good, long while to tie everything up. But writing fiction was not an easy endeavor for me, and – while writing for oneself is a valuable exercise – on some level stories are meant to be shared with others. I spent a bit of time researching how to publish a debut novel and quickly realized there were many obstacles. 

For one thing, as an untested first-time author, the book was probably too lengthy for most publishers to take a risk on. The full text was nearly 200,000 words long and while that works great for folks like George R. R. Martin and Steven King, it was going to be too long for no-namer like myself. I spent months mulling over whether it made sense to cut back on the novel’s content. I set the manuscript aside and reread it (for the fourth time) a year later. Mulled it over some more. Ultimately, the story felt strong to me in that form, and I hesitated to thin it out.

A second impediment was simply the time and effort it would take to either query an agent or directly submit the manuscript to a publishing house for consideration. As the pandemic set in, it seemed that literary agents were increasingly overwhelmed by submissions from folks who finally had time to finish novels they’d been working on for years (I get it!), and many publishing houses, for want of staff, had closed off their direct submission portals. It looked like very narrow bottlenecks all around.

Third, the economics of traditional publishing just didn’t seem to add up. And I’m not primarily talking about my bottom line (as the author), but rather your buy-in (as a reader). I liked the idea that directly published books were cheap and accessible. I also liked the idea that directly published books are owned entirely by their authors, who can fluidly adjust their price (that is, make them more accessible to readers) in perpetuity. The tradeoffs in eschewing the traditional publishing model are real, no doubt. But I was persuaded by the promise of greater agency and flexibility in managing my creative work.

Finally, and frankly, I’ve been wrestling with a chronic illness since May 2022 that often leaves me with little energy and even less ability to focus. The pieces of the direct publishing process (design a book cover! choose the manuscript font! learn about eBooks!) just felt … smaller, I guess … more manageable than the traditional route and its huge-seeming milestones (find an agent! land a book deal!) By pursuing direct publishing of Lyric’s story, I could work slowly, piecemeal, fill my time at the margins and feel like I was making steady progress over time instead of pursuing an ephemeral inflection point in a marketplace I didn’t understand.

So having decided on the direct publishing model, what changed about the project?

The first and biggest change was to rebuild The Locutor Trilogy as The Locutor Series and offer the story in nine (still-very-generously-sized) installments instead of three (enormous) ones. This was facilitated by a happy coincidence: the original The Featherweight Augur had been written in a three-act structure, and each of these acts quite readily stands on its own as a separate novel. I sat down with my outline of the second novel and realized it could be easily broken into three novels. From a structural standpoint, rather than weakening Lyric’s story, this approach felt like it would strengthen it.   

I also began to think about how to convince potential readers to take a risk on a first-time author: why not publish multiple books in the series right up front (and offer the first one at an extremely cheap price!) to present readers with a low-stakes entry point? If someone enjoys the first book, then the second is waiting right there for them; having enjoyed the first book virtually for free, perhaps the second book’s price tag would seem less daunting.

Finally, the nine-book approach would put pieces of the story in the hands of readers more quickly, allowing them to consume the fourth, fifth, and additional installments at shorter intervals rather than having to wait multiple years for the next large tome. Along the way, I could publish standalone stories set in The Locutor universe or offer free content to members of my email list. All told, the direct publishing route offered more dynamic and reliable ways of interacting with readers and rewarding their interest in Lyric’s story.

Now, I am not a very “online person” so it’s going to take a while to get the engine up and running. This website is one way of alerting folks to the forthcoming existence of The Locutor Series on Amazon. Another is my email list (which I hope you’ll consider joining) as well as my Instagram account (which I hope you’ll follow) that features things like book cover artwork and notable passages from the novels. My goal is to offer The Featherweight Augur, The Silent Mountain, and The Shattered City altogether on Day One. Depending on the format you prefer, that “Day One” is going to be different: Amazon KDP allows for pre-orders on eBooks, but not so much on paperbacks. So the paperbacks on going live Oct 14 while the eBooks (available for pre-order now) will launch in mid-January.

With the fourth book, The Troubled Search, my goal is to make it available a few months thereafter, shooting for Summer 2025, with books five through nine coming at less-than-a-year intervals. Considering I’m about one-third through Search already, I’m hoping the timeline is workable.        

If you’re here, thank you! Please feel free to poke around on the website or navigate over to Amazon to check out the books.

4. Lyric’s Political Life

It bears mention: The Locutor Series has nothing to say about our current political moment, it is not a parable of the times. It wrestles with the same questions of power, allocation, and procedure that all societies must settle for themselves – and is, in that sense, a novel with politicking – but the circumstances of the Nine Communities are entirely their own. In writing the books, I am more interested in examining what individuals do when change threatens the status quo. I was curious about probing the strength of systems and norms, and – when these begin to fail – the burdens that individual people must shoulder to make up the deficit.

For a brief time, I was a professor of political science, and my specialization was electoral politics outside of the United States. I no longer spend my days thinking about that stuff, but there are a few key ideas I encountered again and again in my studies that inform the political order of The Locutor Series. I’d roll these ideas into a sort of thesis statement about Lyric’s political disposition at the beginning of the novel: institutions help groups of people navigate uncertainty and structure their decision-making in a way that limits chaos.

Let’s unpack in three paragraphs or less.

First: rules matter. The land of the Nine Communities has a lot of rules, as well it should on the heels of a lawlessness that allowed for a calamitous war. The rules of this land create incentives to follow (i.e. citizens should not own weapons within a pacifist society) and provides a template for decision-making, even in novel or unique scenarios (i.e. violence cannot be utilized as a problem-solving technique, no matter what). The rules remind citizens of their place in this society (i.e. individuals are part of a greater collective) and offer assurances in the face of need (i.e. collectivism guarantees that everyone will have enough to eat). 

Second: with these rules, we can tamp down uncertainty. When we think about people as social actors, we posit that they have preferences about outcomes and will take steps to achieve those outcomes. But life is rarely deterministic, so people often operate under varying levels of uncertainty: which decision will most likely lead to the result they desire? With uncertainty comes risk, and each of us have different underlying tolerances of risk. Designers of institutions try to draft guidelines that are widely robust in the face of uncertainty, so that individuals’ incentives are clear and the risks they navigate are small. But institutions that are not robust (or not sufficiently expressive) might leave individuals feeling exposed; this might cause second-guessing, conjecture, conspiratorial thinking and, yes, even an increased acceptance of risk. 

Third: institutions, guidelines, and other types of norms or traditions all help us (humans) make choices more efficiently. Especially in group settings, too many choices is a bad thing. Strong group decision-making generally comes down to two things: clear agenda setting and well-ordered deliberation. As an example of the first, compare asking a group of children “what should we do today?” (which will generate a hundred different ideas) versus “should we go to the zoo or the pool?” (which, though not perfect, is likely to cause a bit less chaos). This is agenda setting in practice: putting some guardrails on the menu so that the decision can be made efficiently. And as an example of the second, compare asking everyone to “shout over each other until the loudest voice wins” versus “everyone gets to speak for one minute and then we’ll vote.” This is deliberation in practice: once we know the curated options, how do we go about deciding between them? The Locutor Series begins by depicting very clear mechanisms surrounding agenda setting and deliberation, but quickly charts the chaos that sets in once these mechanisms begin to fail.

The Featherweight Augur goes to great lengths to illustrate political institutions working well and fluidly. Indeed, Heathland is a highly functional and successful community, largely due to its citizens’ adherence to rules. The Silent Mountain wrestles with the negative consequences of uncertainty, how pulling the template out from under people pushes them toward risk and impulsiveness. And The Shattered City spends nearly half of its length navigating the dizzying array of choices presented to the leaders of the Nine Communities once their institutions have proven too brittle and uncertainty pervades the citizenry.

But all of that is academic. All of that is just background. What’s actually exciting is to watch Lyric, the hero of our story, try to figure out how best to journey through this landscape. I won’t be spoiling much to reveal that we watch as Lyric’s initial adherence to a well-ordered system is gradually whittled away and replaced by a new, brave identity as an individual. It’s certainly not a straight line from Point A to Point B, and within every curve and detour you’ll find a memorable conversation, event, or decision. 

If you’re here, thank you for taking the time. If you’re interested in learning more about The Locutor Series, you can click through below to read more posts. And please consider signing up for my email newsletter here (it comes with a free preview of the first book in the series).

3. Leaning on Influences

I’ve been a writer my adult life, for different audiences, both personally and professionally. But long-form, publishable fiction is not something I’d tried my hand at before 2018. In the opening days, I oscillated wildly between “this is easy” to “this is impossible.” I didn’t have established practices or methods, I didn’t have techniques I could fall back on to break through creative logjams. When I reread my first drafts, I always found that I’d rushed the plot points or skipped too quickly through the beats of a conversation between characters. It was easier for me to see the story’s architecture in my mind than it was to get it down on paper, in a way that felt easily interpretable by a (for a long time completely hypothetical) reader.

Luckily, I’ve also read a great many books, across a wide range of styles, genres, and cultures. This accumulated body of reading was something I could draw on for analogues and inspiration. When I began to take writing seriously, I also spent months not reading, but rather thinking about what I had read, and what bits of it I could leverage to my own ends. I thought about the writers I admired most, but quickly made my peace with the reality that it would be foolish to emulate their unobtainable greatness. I thought about the specific pieces of storytelling that were especially captivating, like the battlefield melees of Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, or the juxtaposition of public and private politics in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. How could I replicate the beats of Philip Pullman’s person-versus-system quandary in His Dark Materials or the depictions of mystical processes as frank, empirical enterprises in Primo Levi’s The Sixth Day? Could I borrow something from Roberto Bolaño’s brooding, atmospheric detective tales in 2666 or from the rich, complex coming-of-age journey described by Lloyd Alexander in The Chronicles of Prydain?   

The Locutor Series draws on many of these sources, although not always directly or identifiably. It draws on other inspirations, as well, including television.

I am no great purveyor of television, but there are a handful of mainstream touchpoints that often come to mind when I’m writing. The first is the “puzzle box” show that drops its characters into deeply mysterious scenarios, leaving the viewer to speculate and guess about what’s going on across multiple episodes. Here, I’m mostly thinking of the work of Damon Lindloff (Lost, The Leftovers, and Watchmen) but also shows like Severance, Russian Doll, and West World. I also enjoy a bevy of other very popular shows like Breaking Bad and The Mandalorian, but for quieter reasons than I suspect most other people do: these shows are really good (really, really good) at depicting their characters reconnoitering, scheming, planning, and executing complex ideas. (I recently rewatched the episode of The Mandalorian where Din Djarin and Cobb Vanth spend a full twenty minutes hatching a plan to kill the Krayt Dragon and it is just glorious.) The Locutor Series is full of people testing new ideas, developing new tools, and puzzling through weird, nuanced situations. I love putting problems solvers into a puzzle box and waiting to see what happens.

If there was a single guiding light in my writing it would be Pullman’s trilogy: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass were fixtures of my young adult reading. I have returned to them often as an adult and they hold up magnificently. It is always a dangerous game trying to compare one’s book to some other, but let me hazard at least one claim: if you’ve read and enjoyed His Dark Materials, I am pretty sure you are going to love The Locutor Series. Both feature a young woman as their protagonist, both of whom are able to control mystical power as a result of careful study and practice. Both take place in a light fantasy realm, where just enough of the rules of the universe work differently than the ones we encounter in our own lives. Both stories begin in small, cramped spaces before rapidly expanding outward, geographically, temporally, even cosmically. And both present a person-versus-system narrative, where the protagonist must react against an established status quo in order that she might better understand herself.

Make no mistake: The Locutor Series is not an homage to His Dark Materials, and there are many fundamental differences in the philosophy, style, and plot. But establishing this point of comparison with a famous work was important both for me, just starting out as a writer, and for you, as well, perhaps considering reading the debut novel of an author you’ve never heard of. 

If you’re here, thank you for taking the time. If you’re interested in learning more about The Locutor Series, please consider signing up for my email newsletter here (it comes with a free preview of the first book in the series).

2. Lyric’s Epic Story

Having dispensed with the why, let’s tackle the what.

The Locutor Series begins in the land of the Nine Communities, which is a large island populated by nine distinct population centers, each created in the aftermath of a terrible war. The land is governed by a strict legal agreement – the Covenant – which defines a pacifistic and highly regimented political structure. The first book in the series, The Featherweight Augur, opens during an Exchange Festival between the communities of Heathland and Fen, about a century after the conclusion of warfare. It is a beautiful day, full of good friends and good food, that is suddenly shattered by a violent attack from a man no one has ever met before.

The stranger is captured and questioned by Lyric, who is Heathland’s locutor. Each of the communities has a locutor, as well as a praeceptor and a consiliator. These three roles – comprising the leadership triad – are special positions occupied by individuals who have trained for years. In Lyric’s case, she is Heathland’s youngest and perhaps most talented locutor in its hundred-year existence. Each locutor is trained in the use of a special material called mind-stones, which allows them to peer into the thoughts and memories of their fellow citizens. The mind-stones are not magic; rather, they are the result of years of experimentation and refinement by the citizens of the Nine Communities. They are instrumental in ensuring peace and order throughout the land, and for this reason the locutors serve an especially important role in this world.

But in the early pages of the first book of the series, Lyric’s investigation comes up against ideas and concepts that she cannot comprehend. The stranger speaks of unfamiliar things: a sorcerer, a god, and a mysterious implement called the featherweight augur. When Lyric contacts the locutor of a neighboring community, Coppice, she discovers that they, too, have been beset by acts of violence from strangers. Something is afoot, some conspiracy is at play. It will cost Lyric a great deal of effort and sacrifice to finally understand the reasons behind this violence. In so doing, she will learn hard lessons about those things in which she previously put her faith: the Covenant’s laws, her fellow citizens, and the ideals that have supposedly guided them since the war.

The Locutor Series bends genre conventions and – quite often – is written to straddle traditional dividing lines between, say, fantasy, science fiction, and hard-boiled detective novels. The first three books in the series problematize the usual story beats of “the quest” as well as the standard “hero” narrative. Don’t get me wrong: Lyric is surely a hero, and she doggedly pursues a quest. But nothing comes easy in the Nine Communities, and for every moment Lyric seizes, she inadvertently sets in motion events well beyond her control.        

The first three books in the series – The Featherweight Augur, The Silent Mountain, and The Shattered City – hang together as a large “first act” in the story. Thematically, the books wrestle with the role that Lyric plays in the Nine Communities: what does she owe tradition? When do old practices wear thin and require updating? What responsibility does she bear for her fellow citizens, and how can she weigh this responsibility against being true to herself? How much can one person push against big problems, how much can any of us reasonably hope to shape the course of the times we live in? Lyric feels her responsibilities deeply, she is endlessly curious about the world, and she is quick-witted to boot. All this to say: Lyric answers these questions in her own unique way, set against the backdrop of a world that is rapidly evolving alongside her.  

The Featherweight Augur is set entirely in Heathland, past and present. We learn about Lyric, witness her keen skills, and gain some insight into what makes her tick. Portions of the book’s timeline are presented out of order, which allows the reader to experience some carefully constructed backstory at the same time as explosive action and tense dialogue. The Silent Mountain moves well outside of Heathland – both geographically and temporally. Readers get to see what life is like in at least one other community (no spoilers!) and learn about the rich history of the mind-stones. And The Shattered City opens with a chaotic fever dream of narrative before delving into a battle, a genre-shifting revelation, and a grand deception.

If you’re here, thank you for taking the time. If you’re interested in learning more about The Locutor Series, please consider signing up for my email newsletter here (it comes with a free preview of the first book in the series).

1. Introducing The Locutor Series

I should begin with the why.

The Locutor Series is a project I’ve been wrestling with since the summer of 2018, a handful of months after my daughter was born and declined to sleep overnight unless she was held by one of her beleaguered parents (she was a “velcro baby” in contemporary parenting parlance). To keep myself awake during those nights, I re-read and read for the first time many children’s and young adult books, including The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Prydain, the Redwall series, and especially His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (which to my mind remains one of the best, most epic yarns in all of literature). It was during one of those nights, half-delirious from lack of sleep and with my daughter bundled up in my arms, that I finished reading Suzanne Collins’ excellent trilogy and asked myself a dangerous question:

What would a series of books look like that was set in a light fantasy realm and wedded some of the grandiose, cosmic conflicts of His Dark Materials with the sophisticated, highly regimented politics of The Hunger Games?

And very quickly, a second question:

How could one write such books in a way that hewed closer to an adult readership, perhaps an audience that had read Collins and Pullman some years ago, but had since found, say, The Buried Giant by Ishiguro or The Blind Assassin by Atwood?

I grabbed a pad of yellow legal paper and a pen and started scribbling. First came the geography of a large island with different climates and cultures. Next came thoughts about the political organization and history: this was a land that had survived a calamitous war, and to avoid another in the future, had adopted a very rigid and prescribed set of laws. Then the spark to set things in motion: an act of violence in a nonviolent land, a moment of surprise in an otherwise well-ordered and predictable society. This small moment would trigger another and then another, until there was an avalanche of plot and developments that would raise the stakes, broaden the scope, and deepen the implications of the story’s telling.

And finally, the opening line of the book, a simple declaration that I felt could become its calling card, something that would raise questions and pique interest in a reader’s mind: I am Lyric, locutor of Heathland. What is a locutor? Where is Heathland and what is it like? Are there other locutors in other places? Who is Lyric? Could she be anything like Katniss Everdeen from Games or Lyra Belaqua from Materials? To whom is she speaking in this moment?

I looked down at my infant daughter and challenged myself: could I write a young female protagonist in a way that would speak to the person I hoped she would become?

What began with my daughter was finished about two years later with the arrival of my son, just six weeks into the height of the Covid pandemic. The country was convulsing, I was struggling to work from home while caring for my two young kiddos, and I was determined to finish what had become an enormous, nearly 200,000-word novel. Much like his older sibling, my son would only sleep during midday naptime if I was holding him; and so, I used the opportunity to crack open my laptop and quietly tap out the last 50,000 or so words, a little at a time, over the course of dozens of naps.

If I had sought to write a protagonist my daughter would be proud of, I wanted to write a world fit for my son. One of the great things about fantasy (and science fiction, for that matter) is that it readily allows for the exploration of political structures, how a society is organized, how it responds in the face of challenge, and the roles that individuals play within the broader collective. My characters navigated these tensions with their actions and decisions; they debated their nuances with one another; and – rather than prescribing clear rights and definite wrongs – The Locutor Series paints complicated settings that, I hope, prompts the reader to consider what they would do. These are questions we all struggle with in our own lives, of course, but I thought of my son beginning from scratch in a world that felt out of control, and I let that inform the direction of the writing.

I’ll have a lot more to say about the plot, development, and structure of The Locutor Series before the release of the first few volumes, but it’s worth mentioning that I hit a temporary stopping point in the waning months of 2020 with one (provisionally) completed, (overly) long and unpublished novel called The Featherweight Augur and -- were it not for a couple of people offering some encouragement -- that probably would have been the end of things. I had never written a novel before, I was working full-time, and breaking into the publishing world seemed more than just a little daunting.

Foremost was my father-in-law, Don Davis, who has written fiction for years and spent more time reading and thinking about The Locutor Series than anyone. His edits and advice on drafts of the first three books in the series prompted me to revise and edit those volumes repeatedly before deciding to publish them. A close friend, Lorie Vanchena, read drafts while she was fighting her way through treatments for brain cancer. When I would visit her in the hospital, she was sufficiently generous (and humorously sardonic) to introduce me to the nursing staff as “this is Josh, he’s writing a novel – a good one!” And my spouse, Rachel, who gifted me copies of Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead (perfect for when writing feels like conjuring myths from the ether) and Stephen King’s On Writing (perfect for when … it doesn’t).       

If you’re here, thank you for taking the time. If you’re interested in learning more about The Locutor Series please consider signing up for my email newsletter here (it comes with a free preview of the first book in the series).