There’s a new This Wasted Land, and it’s out today. Not a sequel, but a new edition, with a new cover, new (and revised) material, and–of course–new monsters. Why the upgrade?
Because though TWL came out two years ago, and has had good sales and great reviews, I was only 90% satisfied with it. I developed the germ of the story in 1988, as a senior in college, but I struggled with it on and off over the next few years, doing a lot of research and developing a lot of backstory, but unable to gain any traction with the actual characters and plot.
Somewhere in the early 2000’s, I decided to set it aside, and went to work on other writings. After publishing Dragontamer’s Daughters and Lost Dogs, I finally felt like I had the chops to take on what would become TWL.
But even after gaining that experience, TWL was still not easy to write. It’s a seven-layer cake of teenage angst and romance, piss-yourself-horror, Norse mythology and Viking history, ancient Sanskrit epic (The Ramayana), modernist poetry (T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land–which also references Arthurian legend), the NFL, and 70’s/80’s/90’s hard rock (the title of the book comes from Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”).
TWL has a lot of moving parts, a lot of emotion, and a lot to keep track of. By the time I was wrapping up the final draft, in the fall of 2018, I was crawling toward the finish line, exhausted from this 30-year marathon I had been doing, but desperate to get this thing finally done. Rather than let the perfect be the enemy of the good, I published TWL in November of that year.
I was happy, but not satisfied. Parts of it nagged at me. Re-reading it highlighted what to me were flaws. It was 90% what I wanted. But I wanted more.
Now, two years later, is the book it was meant to be. So, what’s changed?
New cover art. The old cover (above) was good, but to me, it seemed more apropos for a suspense thriller or straight-up horror novel, rather than a young adult dark fantasy. The new art portrays Our Feisty Teenage Heroine, Alyx; her main antagonist, the witch Freydis; and the wasted land itself. It identifies the book as very solidly being in its genre.
New (and revised) material. The extended climax of the book, where Alyx confronts [REDACTED] and struggles to [REDACTED], was the hardest part for me to write, taking literally months to do. Though readers were good with how it turned out, I felt I hadn’t quite nailed it.
So, I went back, re-geared it, and wound up adding a whole new chapter. Which necessitated some new monsters, because, though TWL is wall-to-wall creatures, you can’t have too many. And man alive, are the new ones just as freaky and skin-crawling as the others….
Reviewing TWL (which is almost 120K words, and a smidge over 400 print pages) showed me where it needed a little more fleshing out, and where it could be tightened up. If you thought that TWL started quickly before, now it’s faster than Alyx’s Ninja 250 motorbike.
Some readers thought that the ending chapters had “Return-of-the-King Syndrome,” going on a bit too long, but there’s a lot happening in TWL, too much to simply have Porky Pig pop up and stammer, “That’s all, folks!” Nevertheless, I trimmed some of the wrap-up where I could, and it flows a bit better.
Looking at TWL again after two years also revealed several very embarrassing typos, which neither I nor my beta readers caught (it’s not their fault: in my rush to get TWL published, I had only given them two weeks to review the manuscript). I’ve scrubbed the typos, and now TWL reads just fine.
Leonardo da Vinci is supposed to have said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned,” and there’s a great deal of truth in that. There are more tweaks I could make to TWL, but at this point, it would be gilding the lily. TWL is as finished as I want it to be, and I’m eager to move on to new projects, specifically Stray Cats, the follow-up to Lost Dogs.
Speaking of Lost Dogs and Stray Cats, there’s something you should know about them, and Dragontamer’s Daughters, in relation to This Wasted Land. And that is, that characters from LD and elements of DTD cross over and appear in TWL, as does Pimmi, Our Feline Heroine from Stray Cats.
I can’t say more without giving away spoilers, but if you’ve read the other books, keep your eyes peeled while you’re going through TWL. And if you haven’t read LD or DTD, TWL will be even richer, even better once you have. You can find all of my books on Amazon.
A new version of This Wasted Land awaits. Let me take you there.
Kenton Kilgore writes killer SF/F for young adults and adults who are still young. Follow Kenton on Facebook for frequent posts on sci-fi, fantasy, and other speculative fiction. You can also catch him on Instagram.