It took a bit longer than I expected to write this due to finals (which I’ve completed!), but I did want to take a minute to reflect now that An Outcast and an Ally is officially out in the world. The journey to get here has been a long one, and this post ended up being way longer than I anticipated, but I wanted to share it anyway.
I wrote the very first draft of the first book, A Soldier and a Liar, for NaNoWriMo during my senior year of high school in 2011. It was the largest word count I’d ever hit for NaNo at around 93,000 words, and the fifth novel I’d written beginning to end. Funnily enough, it was titled Outcast back then. And it was total crap. But unlike the first four garbage books I’d written, I didn’t want to abandon this book. There was something in it that kept drawing me back. It felt special in a way the others hadn’t. And I was fortunate enough to have some amazing friends who read that crappy first draft and encouraged me to continue.
Over the years, I lost count of how many times I rewrote this story from scratch, how many scenes I rewrote or added or scrapped, how many different plots I tried to utilize to shape this story into its best form. If you asked me to tell you what happened in any of those drafts now, I would honestly say I don’t remember. But I do remember the constant disappointment of giving drafts and chapters to friends and workshop groups and hearing all the work I still had left to do. I thought it would never end, that these characters I love so much would never quite fit into a coherent story. I worked on other projects in between drafts and wrote other novels, but none of them captured me the way this one had. So I kept coming back to it.
When I finally had a solid manuscript several years and many, many discarded drafts later, I excitedly started sending it out to agents—and it was met with over seventy rejections. Of those, only a handful asked for a full manuscript. None sent feedback, which I expected and didn’t take personally, but it left me feeling even more crushed since I didn’t know why my story was getting rejected. Was it personal taste? Was the pacing too slow? Was it hard to care about the characters?
Because I had nothing to go on, and with so many rejections, I started to grieve over this project I’d been working on for years. I thought something was wrong at the foundational level. I thought the whole thing was too bland and unoriginal, that there was nothing interesting happening with the plot or anything else, that the characters were too flat or else just boring. And then it reached the point where I wondered if it wasn’t the book, but me. Was I bad writer? Was it that the book was broken or that I wasn’t good enough to make the story and characters shine like I wanted them to?
When I posted my then-latest draft of A Soldier and a Liar—then titled This is How we Fall Apart—on Swoon Reads’s website, it was as an ultimatum of sorts with myself. I never expected it to actually get published. So many rejections had made me think that was impossible. But I wanted to know what others thought; readers who were unrelated to me and didn’t feel the need to be nice and tell me how good my book was when it wasn’t. I wanted to know what the problems were and if they unfixable. And if they were, or if there was no interest at all, it would break my heart—but I would let this book go and move on.
It was almost half a year after I posted my manuscript on the website—and with not that many comments on it after so long, I was at an all-time low and ready to give up the whole thing—that I got an email from a Swoon Reads editor asking if we could set up a time to call.
I don’t think I could describe my joy and relief in that moment no matter how hard I tried. I got the email while I was on lunch break at work and started crying right there in front of my coworkers. I tried not to get my hopes up about it; it was only a call, it could be about anything, I didn’t know how all this worked. It probably wasn’t going to be an offer for publication.
But it was. And the editors who wanted to pick up my book were already talking major edits, including changing my alternating four POVs to one and a half, which made me hesitate. I had written it through the perspectives of all four main characters for probably about four years at that point. Would it even be the same story without everyone’s viewpoints? But I accepted the offer. The fact that someone, many someones with many years of experience editing (since many people had to read my book and approve the offer before it was made), had faith in this story I cared about so deeply and had worried for so long was broken, gave me hope.
And wow am I glad I did. Especially looking back now (four years later?), I can see just how much was wrong with that draft that somehow earned an offer of publication. To be honest, I’m still not sure how it did. There were so many problems with the structure, world building, character arcs and relationships, voice, and a whole host of other issues I won’t go into that I’m honestly amazed it got picked up.
We spent about a year and a half on edits. The first round was almost a total rewrite, in great part due to cutting the four POVs down to mostly Lai’s and some of Jay’s, but also with reworking the plot and structure. It was really hard in the beginning. I had a difficult time cutting Al and Erik’s perspectives, among other things. I remember sending a very panicky email to my editor asking if we could keep just a few or do some in third person—something—and getting an incredibly patient response back detailing, with examples from another book, about differentiating voices and making them distinct. It hit me then just how fortunate I was to be working with someone so much more knowledgeable and experienced in editing books to make them the best they can be. So I sucked it up and kept going.
To be honest, I despised that first draft I turned in. I felt like a sellout. I thought I had thrown away elements of the story I loved so much just to be published. I hated the draft and myself and I didn’t look at it again until I got the next round of edits several months later.
Which, as it turned out, was the correct thing to do. When I revisited that draft that I had despised so much, I realized I actually…liked it. When I had first turned it in, the memory of all I’d cut and changed was fresh in my mind. I couldn’t let go off all the things I’d loved that I’d had to excise. But having taken a step back and given it some time, now I could look at it with fresh eyes and see that the changes I’d make had made the story stronger. It was more streamlined, less convoluted in terms of plot and character motivations, and the focus was much clearer by only following Lai and Jay, who had the most going on plot-wise in the book.
It was much easier after that, even though there were still three more rounds of pretty extensive edits and the ending changed every single time. The final time, the ending that stuck was so completely different that I had to scrap the ongoing draft of the sequel I’d been working on (at around 40,000 words at that point) and start over from scratch.
The way we changed it also made me realize that this series would be better as a duology rather than a trilogy like I’d originally intended. With a major subplot now cut and the very reasonable consideration that I could ax a major thread I’d been planning, there was no need to make this story longer than two books. It’d be tighter, more focused, and more tense for it. A year and a half before, I might’ve balked at the idea of cutting out some of these major threads. Now, I was the one thinking about and making these decisions myself—and I was excited for how much stronger the overall story would be for them.
I was and am endlessly proud of the finished version of A Soldier and a Liar. It finally felt like the story I’d always been trying to write was there. I’d done it. And I could see how much all those changes I’d resisted in the beginning had made my book so much better than the dodgy draft I’d been trying to dress up as something competent. I’d learned a ton throughout the process and I went into writing the sequel with nothing but excitement, trying to put to use everything I’d learned from the last year and a half of editing.
It took a lot of conscious effort, but I was able to bring back all four points of views of my main characters without them sounding like the same person talking (I hope). I was better able to structure and pace the plot in advance. I knew exactly how I wanted everyone’s character arcs to end and the obstacles each of them needed to stumble over in order to confront their own shortcomings and ultimately overcome them.
It was still a lot of work and still took multiple rounds of huge edits. I kept learning and trying to improve—helped along by the fact that I’d started graduate school for creative writing around the same time I finished writing the first draft of An Outcast and an Ally (terribly temporarily titled A Deserter and a Friend for a while; I am the worst at naming things).
Thanks to the continued guidance of my amazing editor and the new things I was learning about crafting stories at school, I felt like this book was even better than the first in many ways. I was no longer hindered by something I’d started in high school. I had never written a version of the sequel before (other than that scrapped half of one a few months prior) and so I could write something from scratch with my improved writing without clinging onto anything old. I didn’t feel sad cutting anything because I hadn’t been attached to any of it for four or five years. The eight- or twelve-page edit letters didn’t bother me anymore. It just meant my editor was working hard to make this book better and there was work to be done.
That’s not to say it wasn’t hard. It was brutal, even as the writing came a bit easier and I became more comfortable with knowing what I needed to do. I struggled to be a graduate student working on my thesis at the same time as this sequel, an instructor teaching two undergraduate classes per semester, an officer on two different student-run organizations (neither position of which I should’ve taken up), and an author with constant deadlines all at once. I was constantly stressed. My mental health took a steep dive last fall while I was in the midst of extensive edits with tight deadlines that one of my professors deemed insane. Things were falling apart in my personal life and I couldn’t take a break on anything to just slow down and breathe. I was plummeting and didn’t know how to stop. So I kept going.
This past year was absolute hell. But while I have regrets about a lot of things, none of them apply to how an An Outcast and an Ally turned out. I’m incredibly proud of this book; how everything ended, how all the characters grew and realized what was really important to each of them, the ways everyone’s relationships changed and became stronger. This book is my favorite thing I’ve ever written and I’ve truly never felt prouder or more fulfilled by anything I’ve ever done.
It’s hard to believe Lai and co.’s story is finished after eight and a half years. It’s surreal to think I’ll never write from their perspectives again or about their struggles or friendships. It’s weird to think back to that very first draft from 2011 and reconcile it with the version of the story that exists today—a version that shares almost nothing in common with it save names and aspects of the same characters.
I love this story and these characters more than I can put into words. It’s given me hope at times when little else has in life. I’ve had the great fortune of having so many amazing, supportive, and brilliant people to help me through everything, whether it be with this series or my writing or life in general. It’s been a long, difficult road, and one I nearly gave up on several times. But I’m glad I never did. If I had, I never would’ve had the pride and joy of my life that is A Soldier and a Liar and An Outcast and an Ally. Thank you to everyone who helped me get here. Thank you for never giving up on me. And thank you for caring about this story and these characters who’ve given me so much life all these years.