We’re not even three months into 2022 and I already feel like it’s a contender for the worst year of the “Screaming Twenties” (as I’ve noticed many people starting to call it–I think it’s quite apt). And given what 2020 was like, that’s saying a lot. As I write this the war in Ukraine has been raging for almost a month. As someone who’s been to this country several times and met such amazing people there (and at one point even dated a lovely lady in Lviv), I am still in a state of shock and half-expecting to simply wake up from a prolonged nightmare. Yet I say this from the comfort of England, while my friends in Ukraine have been forced to flee westward without knowing when they’ll be able to return home and have something even remotely resembling a normal life again. War is, of course, nothing new, but until now it’s never felt so close. Until now I had never seen photos of decimated cities whose neighbourhoods I actually recognise because I’ve been there. Until now I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night in a constant panic that I might never hear from a friend again.
And so I’ve decided to write again. I guess it’s now become my go-to coping mechanism in a time of crisis. During the last one I wrote a story, and while I’m already brainstorming which one I ought to write this time, for now I’ll write a story about a story.
I was around 8 or 9 when I first read The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, both of which were hugely inspirational to me. Since I was a teen I had always wanted to write my own fantasy story, and there were a few attempts thrown at the wall, though none ever quite seemed to stick. Fantasy was meanwhile becoming a lot more mainstream. Being a longtime Tolkien fan, I was eagerly queuing up to see Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films in cinemas, and I then watched curiously from the sidelines when it was followed by the even bigger Harry Potter mania, but it was during the height of the Game of Thrones craze in the mid-2010’s that it struck me—the overwhelming majority of fantasy was, and continues to be, based on the mythos of Europe. But the world is much bigger than Europe. After a while I realised that all I needed to do to find an alternative was look back home. It also helped that I went home.
Off the coast of Belize is a small island called Sergeant’s Caye that my family and I would go to on the weekends when I was a kid, and each time we went the island was a completely different shape. Sometimes it was an oval, other times it was a crescent; sometimes it had a few coconut trees, other times it was nothing but a sun-scorched lump of sand. But when I went snorkelling in the sea not far from the Barrier Reef, I always knew exactly where I was. Now I feel like that whenever I come back to Belize. I haven’t been there all that much since I moved abroad at the age of 18 (first to the USA, then to England), and each time I return it seems to have taken a different shape, especially the city and the more touristy spots. And yet, there are still places that have changed little where I can regather my bearings. One of those places is on the summit of El Castillo, the tallest pyramid in the Mayan site of Xunantunich, where I can look across the rainforest over the western border with Guatemala while listening to the calls of howler monkeys. I was there in March 2020, and it was at that moment I thought, “My book* will be Mayan.”
*at the time I didn’t realise there would be three. Silly me.
El Castillo in Xunantunich.
The view from its summit, westward to Guatemala.
I had arrived in Belize a few weeks earlier to visit my mother. Shortly after that, the Covid crisis was in full swing and Belize closed its airports and land borders. In a way I was grateful for it. Unlike many I was at least able to continue working, and at first I enjoyed a few unexpected perks, one being that Xunantunich was almost completely empty of tourists on the misty morning I went. At home, when I wasn’t working, I was happily sorting and reading through my old children’s books, most notably a dusty, tattered 1960’s edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The first half of The Land of the Night Sun was a nod to Carroll’s classic, following the format of a girl stumbling aimlessly around an otherworld populated with eccentric (and arguably insane) characters, with each chapter reading almost like a short story. For the first few weeks, this whole pandemic crisis that everyone was all worked up about didn’t seem so bad.
The upside didn’t last long, however. Soon travel wasn’t permitted even within Belize between its districts, and I was stuck at home in Belize City with not much else to do but work, plan the plot outline of my book, and listen to a deranged woodpecker constantly pecking at my mother’s house (much to her dismay). But things got worse. In April my grandmother in England passed away, and we couldn’t visit the rest of the family there for her funeral.
In June the government of Belize relaxed the restrictions a bit, and my mother and I decided to use that opportunity to make a trip to the Belize Zoo. It was founded in 1983 by Sharon Matola, an old friend of the family, as one of the world’s few ethical zoos (i.e. they only take in local animals who were either bred in captivity or unable to survive on their own due to sickness or injury—and if they fully recover they’re reintroduced into the wild). Our old home was on the Western Highway and just a 20-minute drive to the zoo, and one of my earliest memories as a child was attending a birthday party for their first tapir, April. Needless to say, the Belize Zoo has a special place in my heart (and I suspect I’m hardly the only Belizean to say this). When we visited in the summer of 2020 I hadn’t seen Sharon in many years. Despite being wheelchair-bound and recovering from an operation, she insisted on giving us a personalised tour. Sharon also wrote Hoodwink the Owl, a children’s book about a spectacled owl, of which I still have an old copy from when I was little.
Hoodwink the Owl by Sharon Matola, 1988.
We spent much of that afternoon looking for the elusive grey fox and tayra (we saw the former but not the latter). At the time I was wanting to incorporate Belizean wildlife into the book, and was entertaining the idea of the Mayan gods taking the form of various animals. The Feathered Serpent would of course be a snake with feathers (duh), Chaac would be a frog (or toad, depending on his mood), and Kinich Ahau a jaguar, but I was left wondering about the form of Hurakan, the one-legged god of the winds. When we went to feed the harpy eagle named Panama, for a moment she stood on one leg. Sharon laughed and said, “The one-legged harpy eagle!” So it seemed fate had decided what Hurakan would be.
Sadly it would be the last time we saw Sharon Matola. She passed away the following year. I wish I had thought to bring along my copy of Hoodwink the Owl to show her I still had it.
Panama the harpy eagle, who was the inspiration for Hurakan.
Mister Sparks the tapir, the inspiration for Cabrakan.
A margay, here basking in the sunlight, would be one of the forms of Kinich Ahau.
Scratching Lindo the jaguar’s underbelly (and hoping I don’t lose any fingers in the process).
Coatis lounging (almost as expertly as iguanas).
That trip to the Belize Zoo was a refreshing glimpse of familiarity in what was otherwise a surreal year. But 2020 was only halfway done, and there was more to come. In July we lost my aunt in the USA to cancer. Again, as the borders were closed we couldn’t be with family for it. I watched as my mother broke into a thousand pieces like one of her ever-growing collection of jigsaw puzzles. We had at least been prepared for my grandmother’s death—she suffered from Alzheimer’s, so her condition slowly deteriorated over many years—but my aunt’s death was much more sudden and unexpected. Combined with the isolation and mass hysteria brought about by Covid, I felt like I had been pushed off an edge. As it turned out, it was the edge of a cenote. I withdrew from reality to wander through an underworld—it was an odd coincidence that the story to which I was escaping was already going to be about death and family. In my mind I was building a second home, and later that month I drew its floor plan.
The first map of the four-cornered land of Xibalba, from July 2020.
It’s said that a lot of fantasy stories start with a map. Now I know why. The basic premise of The Jade Necklace traces back to a simple idea I had in 2015: a girl falls into the Mayan underworld to look for her grandmother, and her magical necklace gets stolen by a coati. She would encounter Mayan gods, folktale characters, and a giant jaguar. That was about all I knew. But when I drew the map, suddenly Xibalba seemed like a real, tangible place. Now, just like when I was standing on the summit of El Castillo in Xunantunich, there was somewhere where I could get my bearings. If I stood atop the pyramid in the centre of Xibalba and gazed in any direction, I’d see a vast lake. Beyond it, to the West, were mist-shrouded mountains. To the South, a rainforest. To the East, swamps and lagoons. And to the North, a black desert. After that, the details of this world and its inhabitants seemed to fall into place almost on their own. The story became too big for one book, so I planned for it to be two (my naïveté strikes again).
A girl and a coati. Early concept art from 2016.
Itzel meeting the great jaguar Kinich Ahau. Concept art from 2016.
Itzel meeting the king of the gods, Kukulkan, atop a mountain. Concept art from 2016.
While developing the story I was also delving deeper into Mayan mythology, a subject in which I found myself immediately enrapt. It’s a crying shame it had never been taught in schools when I was a student. In the textbooks of Belizean history, the ancient Mayan civilisation was normally brushed over in a chapter or two—a disservice to the people and culture that are, more than any other, inseparable from this land. Fortunately I hear that things are slowly changing for the better in that regard, and their mythology is now part of the curriculum at my former high school, St John’s College.
One of the most interesting things I learnt was that there’s really no singular mythology for the Maya, as it can vary quite considerably between tribes—the creation myth for the Kʼicheʼ is very different from the Yucatec, for example. Certainly there is much overlap where you can spot similar underlying themes as well as familiar tropes (such as the Feathered Serpent and the Hero Twins). But what I quickly came to realise was that it was difficult to weave a story that was necessarily “accurate” to their mythology, because even within the same tribe it can not only be self-contradictory, but even embraces and encourages flexibility in one’s personal interpretation. This is one of the core differences between the ancient Mayan and Christian views of the world (and it seems, between polytheistic and monotheistic religions in general). The rigidity of the latter is one of the foundations of European colonial thought—for them what’s “right” was predetermined by the inarguable Word of God, and as the indigenous peoples of the Americas didn’t know what that was, they deserved to be conquered and taught it, essentially enslaved or destroyed. For the ancient Maya what’s “right” often seems to be subject to change—after all, there are many gods with each one having many aspects, so who’s to say which is the right one? For the sake of the story I decided on a more syncretic approach, plucking ideas from different tribes and meshing them with my own in order to sculpt a new world and lore that was, at least to the best of my ability, internally consistent.
In the autumn of 2020 I bought myself a copy of the Popol Vuh, which is the closest thing to a bible in the Mayan world. It tells the “mythistory” (where the lines between history and myth become blurred) of the Kʼicheʼ, starting with the story of the creation of the world, then of humankind, followed by the adventure of the Hero Twins who descend into the Underworld to defeat the death gods. Twins are a recurring trope tied to the Mesoamerican concept of duality—the two Paddler Gods symbolised night and day, and one could argue that the Feathered Serpent and Tetzcalipoca (the Aztec version of the god Hurakan) symbolised order and chaos. For my book I took this concept a step further by having each pair of twins consist of a male and female—Kukulkan and Hurakan, Kinich Ahau and Lady Akna, and lastly, Miguel and Itzel, with each pair being diametrically opposed in their outlooks and choices. This is perhaps one of the biggest departures that my books take from Mayan mythology (in which both Hero Twins are brothers, and Hurakan is a god rather than a goddess). But it’s a change that I think worked best for the story.
I was also astounded by just how wildly entertaining the Popol Vuh could be, full of details that seem to have been added simply to enrich the tale, such as when the death gods in the Underworld decide to send a message to the Hero Twins in the world above. We are then treated to this delightfully elaborate scheme in which the message is carried by a louse who’s gobbled up by a toad, who is in turn eaten by a snake, who is then in turn eaten by a falcon. Then when the falcon comes before the Hero Twins the whole process sets off in reverse: the falcon regurgitates the snake, who then regurgitates the toad, who finally regurgitates the louse who passes on the message. There’s just something appealing to me about the way the ancient Mayans married the sublime with the bizarre, and the sacrosanct with the satirical. The Popol Vuh has many instances of this, and it’s one of the great tragedies of colonialism that many other texts like it were burnt and forever lost to time, all at the whim of a few 16th and 17th century Spanish missionaries who deemed them heretical to their inarguable Word of God. Clearly they lacked a sense of humour.
By January of 2021 I had completed a rough first draft of The Land of the Night Sun. No one else had read so much as a single sentence of it, but I felt it could now really use a second pair of eyes. Holding my breath I sent it to three friends. I only heard back from one of them—my friend Carmen whom I had met a few years prior in Spain—but the sheer amount of feedback I received from her more than made up for it. As much as the Belize Zoo was integral to the early stages of writing these books, Carmen was integral to its later stages, and I highly doubt I’d have completed them at all without her help. As she read the first book she sent me several in-depth emails to share her thoughts, starting from its general concepts and going all the way down to the tiniest details that she either liked or thought could be changed. Finally having someone to share it with, and who was as invested in Itzel’s journey as I was, meant I couldn’t simply abandon it now.
With the first book out of the way I dove straight into the second (not least because several chapters of the first book ended up being shifted over to the second anyway), but it didn’t take long for me to realise that the story couldn’t be covered in two books either. The main concern I had with writing a trilogy is that usually the one in the middle is the weakest—it carries neither the novelty of the first, nor the closure of the third. I tried to make The Lord of the Underworld stand out on its own as more than just a stepping stone from the first to the third. Whether or not I succeeded is for others to decide, but it will always have my favourite chapter: The Colour of Ku. This chapter is the heart of the series, and despite it having little relevance to the overarching plot, I feel the story would have greatly suffered without it.
I finished the second book in the summer of 2021, shortly before I left Belize and returned to England—roughly 16 months later than initially planned. Now it was England that felt like a different place, and for a moment I worried that I might have left my muse all the way in Belize. It’s remarkable looking back at just how much inspiration I had drawn from being there—even that hard-nosed woodpecker (pun intended) in my mother’s garden pecked its way into the books. In truth I struggled for a while to get anywhere with the third book, and thought I’d end up having to just go back to Belize to work on it. But by late October I somehow hit my stride again and never looked back, and I finished The Mystery of the Missing Moon in early January of this year. By February I had finished the editing, and currently I’m in talks with a publisher to get it translated into Spanish, which was one of my big hopes (Belize is an anomaly in Central America for being an English-speaking country). If there will someday be an edition in a Mayan language such as Yucatec Maya, then even better.
So what have I learnt about writing a book? This might come as no surprise to anyone else who’s given a go at writing, but the hardest part was actually starting the damn thing. Even after several months planning out the story, I was still intimidated by that first blank page staring back at me. It might be a bumpy ride in the beginning, but as you go along, the words begin to flow more easily. Eventually it reached a point where the characters were speaking for themselves, and I felt not so much an author as a reporter scrambling to jot down what’s already been said. If I can think of another valuable piece of advice, it would be to cherish the people who are willing to read your unpublished work. Most wouldn’t, and understandably so, as it’s quite a commitment—especially for those who don’t even know if you’re a competent writer or not! And if they have feedback, listen to them. Writing a book might seem like a solo journey, but it really shouldn’t be. To quote the Nightkeeper: “Greatness is not something that can ever be achieved alone.” I don’t know if I made something great, but I definitely made something that was . . . me. And at the end of the day, I suppose that’s something worthwhile.
Now if I can only figure out what to write next. I just hope I won’t always need a crisis to do it.
