Inside The Writing Life: The Pilot Star

Toward the end of Daughter of Blood (The Wall Of Night #3)there’s a point where the Sea House’s pilot star gets mentioned:

USA

“Nimor stopped, intent on the solitary star that could be seen through the Gray Lands’ cloud. “The pilot’s star,” he said softly, as even the wyr hounds turned their silver eyes skyward, following his gaze. No one spoke, but Faro knew they all understood that Nimor had not expected to see it again.”

The Sea House are mariners and navigators—and Nimor their envoy to the rest of the Derai Alliance—so their pilot star is like the Pole Star in this world: an important navigational aid and way of determining “true north.”

Similar to “true north”, the pilot star has an emotional and spiritual connotation, as well as a physical meaning.

(Faro, for any that don’t know, is an orphan caught up in the preceding traumatic events.)

UK/AU/NZ

In the approximately eighteen months between completing writing Daughter of Blood and the book being published, I was asked to identify: “The most important lesson you have learned in the process of becoming and being a published author?”

Given the question’s connotations and Daughter being very much on my mind at the time, it may not surprise you that “pilot star” featured in my answer:

“Just this: it’s the story that matters. It’s your only pilot star.“

I hope my meaning may be self-explanatory, but what I was thinking of was the often long, solitary (so yes, sometimes lonely!) slog of writing a book in the first place, and then getting it through production and into the world.

Even then, once writing, production, and publication are all a “wrap”, there is no assurance of fair winds and following seas—sales may not be steady, reviews may be hard to come by and not all will be favourable, so building a readership may prove proverbially tough.

Production: first-pass-proof manuscript

So what I was—and am still—saying is that it’s vital a writer feel passionate and positive about the story they’re telling, because it’s only that passion, commitment, and love of the work itself that will keep the project on course and get the author through the rough patches.

I would go further and say that in my (potentially misguided! :D) view it’s all any author can truly rely upon, since everything else is either ephemeral or outside our control, or both.