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Scars of Cereba by Rachel Emma Shaw




With only seven days to go until Scars of Cereba comes out, I thought I might share this insight with you.

Although I cannot speak for other authors, I can say that, for myself, writing is both my salvation and my damnation. Never has this been truer than during 2020. In a year of pandemics and isolation, I found sanctuary in the pages of my books, escaping from our world and into the creation of others.

When I started writing Scars of Cereba, Last Memoria had yet to be released. There wasn't even a hint of the love it would receive from the incredible people who took a chance on an unknown author and her book.

All that changed partway through Scars of Cereba's first draft. The reviews of Last Memoria started coming in, then it made semi-finalist, and later, finalist in SPFBO6. All while I was quietly working on the sequel in a pandemic-induced lockdown, all too aware of the unexpected pressure that kept growing.

Although I'm still largely unknown as an author, there is a huge difference between where I am now and where I was before. While writing Last Memoria, the idea of anyone ever reading it was a pipe dream. I didn't have to worry what people would think because dreams can do many things, but preparing us accurately for reality isn't one.

So, halfway through Scars, I was met with the brick wall of expectation. As an author who reads every review, good or bad, I knew exactly what my readers were asking of me for book two. Just as I knew that wasn't the story I was writing. Sure, it's the same places and people (well, sort of, but more on that later), but I wanted to do more. I wanted to push both my ability as a writer and use memory-magic to attack the very boundaries of fantasy itself. For the first, I know I succeeded. I'm a better author now because of it. For the second, you'll have to read and let me know. Write a review. I'm sure the threat of a thousand lockdowns wouldn't stop me from reading it.

All that to say that I wrote a book knowing it wasn't the safe choice. Perhaps I could have done otherwise and written it differently, probably ending up with a higher rating on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ for it, but I doubt I could have done that. I know what the safe choices are. I can plot those stories out, but I can't bring myself to write them. I've tried, but I can't shut off that part of me that needs to make the hard choices. I get too much thrill out of taking my readers into the unexpected. Scars of Cereba is the story of a man with too many memories. A man who is fractured into three and who believes for a good portion of the time that he is a woman because her memories are in his head. It is not a book written for market, nor is it a book that will gain wild success and take the world by storm. Instead, like all my books, it is the story I needed to tell.

Ambitious and imperfect, Scars drove me to the extremities of anxiety when it was time to send it out to reviewers. I fully believed it would be massacred by critique. But it wasn't. I made a mistake I will never make again, which was to underestimate my readers. I believed that since I walked a lonely road while writing it, nobody else would want to walk that path with me. How wrong I was.

In the months that followed, I watched and read as the reviews came in. Not all loved it. Some picked up on the slow pacing in the first third (something I had already long wished I had found a way to fix without breaking the rest of the story, but never managed to do). For so many others though, their response was better than I could have dreamed. They admired the ambition. Loved the places my words took them to. For me, that will be the legacy of this story, since now, whenever I sit down to write, whenever I fear I'm being too ambitious or too different, I no longer have the same terror I did while writing Scars of Cereba. Instead, I look forward to the day my readers get to join me on the strange roads I've dared to tread. I know that my stories aren't for everybody, but I also know that doesn't matter since they will always be right for some.



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