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).
