Second Look: The Beacons I See

tyunglebower ♦ June 5, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

With this novel I return to the light fantasy elements of my first few works of fictions. The Beacons I See is a novel of many firsts/onlys as of this writing.

To begin with, it is the only work of fiction that came to me as the result of a dream.

Partially.

I’d fallen asleep in my chair watching TV, and woke up with the first sentence of this novel in my head, though I didn’t know it would be a novel yet. I liked the line enough to write it down right away. I was determined to start there and continue from it until what I wrote felt complete.

The result was this novel, one for which I had no outline of any kind at the start, and never wrote one. I wrote as it cane to me the entire time. The only novel in which I did so.

More firsts? Though in Flowers of Dionysus I had included multiple points of view, some of which were of women characters, they were in third person. Beacons is the only time I’ve written an entire novel in first person from the view of a female character. To that end it has been my only novel so far read by a sensitivity reader as they are called. A female friend of mine read a draft to see if I was in any way being accidentally unfair to a female perspective.

It features my Autistic protagonist.

Finally, is the only one of my novels with a cover designed 100% out of “house.” Most of the time I design at least part of a cover.

All of that makes for a unique book among my catalog in many ways. Yet even if all that were not so, I think it is both the most personal novel I’ve written, as well as the prose I am most proud of.

Vanessa can see remnants of promises made by people. They hang in various colored lights in the air where the soul stood when the promise was made. She comes from a long line of such “Seers.”

But oner day she is stunned to see one of those imprints of a promise high above the forest near her grandmother’s cabin. How in the world did somebody make a promise all the way up there? She makes it a point to look into this mystery herself.

The first full novel of mine (there’s a first I forgot to mention earlier) written after my official Autism diagnosis. I wanted to convey the nature of Autism in both a universal sense, and in a manner particularly suited to the main character. In this world of this story, Seers exist. Autistic people exist. Vanessa is the only currently known Seer that is also on the Spectrum.

A rare power in the mind of a neurotypical person is often explored in fiction. Yet once I started writing the first paragraph or so, I knew I wanted to explore what a rare power would look like in the not0so-typical mind of someone with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

I don’t consider Vanessa a hidden version of myself. She is calmer, more able to navigate certain situations, and probably in the end smarter than I am. On the other hand Vanessa needs more time to recover than I, and is probably out of commission when things do not go as planned to a greater degree than I am.

So we are not the same person. But Vanessa is among my brethren, as it were. Through her, I was able to tell a story not about Autism, but about a woman with a gift, and a mystery to solve that happens to have Autism. It was important to me in the wake of my official diagnosis to embrace fully what made folks with ASD different, without spotlighting it as freaky.

That is why it is my most personal novel as of now, even though all of my work is personal to some degree.

I wanted to reach fellow Autistic people that felt like me, or at least like Vanessa thought the course of her story. The usual marketing issues I mention all the time got in the way a bit, though I did my best. Maybe even more than usual, entering it into a forum in search of a review. (I barely ended with what I paid for.)

How very Autistic of me.

Nevertheless, by the numbers, though it trails for behind Murder, Theatre, Solitaire, at last check this novel is my second-most popular in terms of purchases. I like to think that at least some of those people are also on the Spectrum.

The ebook is currently prices any 2.00. The paperback you can get for 4.50.

In the off chance you decide you want to read one and only one of my books ever, (odd as that would be) make it this one.