How Tethered by Blood came to be
Stories tend to evolve over time. Tethered by Blood certainly did. Here’s how.
I remember as a child sitting on a sandbar and watching the ocean drift in and out. People littered the beach, playing in the surf, building sandcastles, hunting for shells. A boy sat nearby, older than me. The tides didn’t interest him. The warm day didn’t interest him. He hardly seemed aware of the sand beneath him.
He’d been led to the beach by an older woman who left his side in favor of feeding macaroni to the seagulls. I spoke with her and assisted as she spooned pasta out of a bowl onto the sand. Seagulls flocked nearer, eager for a taste. I must have been hungry, because I remember wondering why she was throwing away perfectly good macaroni rather than eating it.
I could tell the boy was mentally disabled. He didn’t talk or look around or seem aware of anything but his own world. The seagulls didn’t interest him. He just sat there and tugged at his hair and stared at a place a few feet in front of him. A smattering of self-inflicted sores covered his face and head.
The image of that boy remained with me over the years. In a college writing course, I reimagined the scene in a short story. In my fictional version, teenagers picked on a mentally disabled boy at the beach, and my character, another teenage boy, defended him. I titled it “Out of Control,” because my teenage boy character had an anger control problem.
Later, in another writing class, the professor challenged us to radically revise a story we’d written, changing major elements to breathe new life into something old. I took my beach scene and plopped it down in the middle of a fantasy world. I made the teenage boy into a wizard apprentice and the boy he defended into someone his tormentors called “the fool.” In the end the wizard apprentice realized that while everyone called the picked-on boy a fool, he, the apprentice, was the real fool.
The story was a vast improvement over my earlier attempt.
More years passed, and I decided to enter a first chapter contest. Lacking any completed first chapters that I felt were good enough, I took my short story, which I’d previously titled The Fool, and further revised it, adding in the fact that “he” was actually a girl in disguise, and tacking on an appearance at the end of the chapter of a formidable new master.
The chapter won first place. People kept asking me how much of the book was written and how soon I’d try to publish it. It didn’t even seem to be a question to them whether I would write it. The question to them was when.
And so I plotted and wrote. Then I replotted and rewrote. Finally, one day, I felt like I’d done enough.
In its new form, the title “The Fool” no longer fit, and so I retitled it “Tethered by Blood,” a nod to the core conflict of the book.
So there you go. The full evolution of Tethered by Blood to date.
I can’t believe we’re just nineteen days out from its release!
