AOH - What It Is To Me

When people release a book, they always want to critisize it and critique it. That's fine. People are going to do that whether I like it or not. My own phobia against knowing people have read my work (as ghastly as the pessimist in me thinks it is) keeps me from reading these reviews. So what is AOH from my perspective?

AOH is a good read. Not the best, but it's good. To me it's more of a kid's book than anything; a young adult read. It isn't serious and the writing isn't serious. I wrote it when I was fifteen and spent two years updating the writing style, not to mention five years actually editing the damn thing. It's the book that me and all my editors are sick to tears of, because we've been working on it for too long. Our opinions hardly matter anymore - we've worked too long on it. I'm not working on it anymore. If I ever do again, I will be surprised. The only thing that can get me to is full publication - which is in my plans mind you, just not anytime soon.

As short as AOH is, a lot of stuff is just breezed over. I regret this and the writer in me twitches terribly, but that's just how AOH is. It's streamlined. Future books will be much better written. As my editor Alyssa Windsor said "AOH is where you (me) learned to write plot. Emperor's Blood is where you learned to write story." I did consider completely rewriting AOH, but in the end I decided not to. AOH is the beginning of a story about the world of Rimer, with the characters merely being catalysts. In the future, I want people to read its sequel Born of Fire, realize that there is a book before it and seek out AOH just to find out what happened then. Later books are better written, better plotted and better devised than AOH.

I will say it again - I wrote AOH when I was a kid. I grew up with it and it will always be just that - the book I wrote when I was a kid. A good book but not a great one. That's how I feel about it.