What is Darkwana?

Welcome to my latest blog, Darkwana.blogspot.com. Here, I will discuss my most ambitious project: Diaries of Darkwana.

I’ll backtrack for those of you who've never heard of it.

My name is Martin Wolt, Jr. I aimed, all my life, to entertain people via my fiction, to create characters the world would love and with whom they would bond.

A billion years ago, or thereabout, I wrote a terrible, fantasy series called Hunting Sakura. My interest in Japanese mythology helped fuel the idea, but the books I produced for it didn’t work at all.

I tried to write a short story that explained how kitsunes arrived into Sakura’s world. That short story turned into a full-length novel, which ended up in my digital shoebox while I worked on my next project.

My eventual return to that shoebox led me to take another shot at a series separated from Sakura, one that sprang from the short-story-turned-novel. I ended up with a similar novel I called Daughters of Darkwana.

This served as only the beginning.

While I tried to polish Daughters, I couldn't help but ask “What happens next?” in regards to Daughters surviving characters. I started to outline a sequel, and then another.

I took a step back, decided which morals served as my story(ies)’s premise, and realized that I had a much larger series on my hands than I originally thought.

I outlined an entire, fifteen-novel series. The sheer size of the project overwhelmed me—for about two seconds. I afterwards nosedived into it as only someone with no social life could.

One of the other sergeants at my Army Reserve unit hooked me up with a security company that needed someone to work 12 hours a day, all alone at a UPS hub, from 6pm to 6am. I took the job. It left me nothing to do but work on my series.

I brought my laptop to work and spent a concerning amount of time writing my series. I realized, along the way, what I needed to make it snap.

I knew so many people who loved manga, comics, fantasy movies, fantasy shows, but they avoided most fantasy novels. These people read books, but they cowered from those phonebook-sized novels filled with unnecessary information.

Plenty of fantasy fans loved all this extra information (world building). No shortage of it existed. Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, and other such works offered rich, fictional history and culture in their worlds.

Not everyone wanted that stuff, though.

“I love the story," someone might tell me, "but I hate to read all this information that’s not important. Who cares how the capital city got its name? I don’t need to know the elves’ favorite songs and how they’re sung. Just tell me what matters.”

Few fantasy authors answered these cries. I decided to become one of them. I already exercised a minimalist’s writing style.

I wrote all fifteen novels in my Diaries of Darkwana series, and afterwards took an ax to them. I shaved out every single line that didn’t feel important. If the story worked without a scene, the scene went to the chopping block.

I managed to knock the books down to about three hundred pages apiece.

A return to school afterwards coaxed me from my security job. I enrolled at the University of Central Florida, earned my Masters in creative writing, and moved to Seattle, certain of my inevitable success.

Almost every literary agent, editor, and publisher to whom I sent my work responded with the same infuriating response, which went to the tune of:

“Fantasy is a male genre. About 70% of your characters are female. That won’t work. No one will read this.”

Other concerns existed. Japanese mythology felt “untested.” People questioned my demographic's existence. A few people even sited a “furry issue” with my kitsune (humanoid fox) characters.

I thank goodness that I live in such a wonderful, electronic age. I self-published Daughters on Kindle and Nook (I eventually took it off Nook, but you can still find it on Kindle. I had my reasons).

I decided to spend a year on each novel, polish it up, and publish it electronically. You can now find the second book in the series, Dreamers of Darkwana on Kindle. The third book arrives the first month of 2015. I'll release the final book in 2027. A bit of a commitment, I admit.

My project continues to grow. I’ve started to beta-test a prototype for a card game based on the series. I hope to produce a short run of the product soon (perhaps with the aid of Kickstarter).

I’ve considered the creation of Twitter accounts for a few of my characters.

I created, as the final project for my Masters degree, a film script for Daughters (I had to scoop out even more scenes to fit it into a 100 page script).

Now, I offer this blog (as well as several others), in which I will chronicle (don’t you love how epic that word makes everything sound?) my writing process, as well as those that regard self-publishing and promotion.

I will, most of all, discuss the world of Darkwana. As I mentioned above, I took a lot of world building out of those novels, but all that world building still exists in that world. I have, consequently, plenty to discuss.

I also want to discuss some of the inspirations for my characters, settings, and plots. I believe those muses merit mention.

I hope to see you here next week. Thanks for reading!