Kathryn Tse-Durham: My Journey with Ellanor

I’m driving to Central, and the sun is beating down as I meander through the traffic. As usual, there is another standstill. “Mummy, what is that?” my little four-year-old chirps, and I turn my head a fraction to the left and flinch. “Ow!” I groan, massaging my neck. The crick has been bothering me since I submitted my manuscript for my third book to my publisher a few days ago. I’d spent the last week staying up late into the night editing and making final revisions to the manuscript. The stress of meeting a deadline and hours and hours of sitting and typing must’ve strained my neck and upper back muscles. But alas – Huzzah! – the third installment of The Ellanor Chronicles is finally ready to come out at the end of this year! Elated and relieved, I ordered a bunch of delicious take-out and feasted with my hubby as we binge-watched Cobra-Kai and reveled in 1980s nostalgia. Amidst this pandemic, this has become the new normal – celebrating quietly and without much fanfare at home with loved ones.

People often ask me what it’s like to write and get a novel published. There are those who assume it’s an uncomplicated process where you sit down and type out the whole story in one go, and there you have it. I can’t tell you how far this is from the truth. If a writer takes their craft seriously and is determined to write a good story, especially one with a huge scope like The Ellanor Chronicles, it requires a tremendous amount of discipline and perseverance. It starts with brainstorming and planning out the story, outlining the chapters, followed by the actual writing which could take months, even years. It took J.R.R. Tolkien over ten years to write The Lord of the Rings (whose ethereal elves inspired my elves in The Ellanor Chronicles), and six years for J.K. Rowling to finish Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (which then got rejected by about twenty publishing houses until a sharp-eyed literary agent named Christopher Little snagged it).

After the first draft is ready, the strenuous process of rewriting and editing begins, and it is this last leg of the journey that can be most tedious and stressful because you want to polish your work to a shine before it gets revealed to the world. It is imperative to have an excellent, perfectionistic editor to guide you through this process to help enhance your writing, which involves correcting at least 90% of the typos and errors. But as the author, the final process becomes a personal crusade to fill in every little plot hole and inconsistency and edit every misplaced punctuation mark and inconspicuous misspelling that the editor has missed. Because even if it is fantasy fiction, the world the author depicts must still be convincing to the reader. So yes, writing a book to meet a professional standard is a great deal of hard work, especially if you are not James Patterson with a slew of ghostwriters and editors at your beck and call.

When I think back on my writing journey, I’m amazed by how much has transpired. There has been a series of triumphs, disappointments, surprises, frustrations, elations…But ultimately the journey has enriched me and made me grow. Back in 2013, I had been married for two years, working hard as a Speech Therapist and contemplating doing a Ph.D. I had already gotten in touch with some professors to see if they would want to become my supervisor. But embarking on a five-year academic journey meant that I wouldn’t have the time or the energy to do what I had dreamed of doing for years: writing and publishing a novel before I started a family. So I put aside my Ph.D. aspirations and set out to realize my childhood dream, no matter that it sounded foolish and fanciful. And the rest is history.

These days, bookshelves are overcrowded with young-adult fantasy novels about vampires and werewolves (don’t get me started) and dystopian futures. To be fair, some of these are excellent (e.g. the Scythe series by Neal Shusterman), whereas the success of some confounds me to no end. But I wanted to offer something different: a planned series in which elf and human worlds collide, and the heroine is a unique young elf much like a young female Indiana Jones, who lives out her dream of being a globe-trotting explorer after she is pushed through a portal into the contemporary human world. My protagonist is an elf named Ellanor Celendis, better known as Elly, who resides in the elven realm of Alendria. The series charts Elly’s adventures as she blossoms from an insecure twelve-year-old into a strong-headed teenager who learns to take on responsibility and fight for the people and the world she loves. Elly is sweet-natured and struggles with feelings of inferiority as she is ostracised at school for being an oddball as well as being the grand-niece of the one who allegedly betrayed his people to the goblins during a war that took place centuries ago. A recurring theme in this story is that appearances are deceitful; things are not always what they seem.

Through my story, I want to convey to readers that though there is much darkness and evil in this world, there is also light and much that is good. Through Elly’s adventures and expeditions, readers get to learn about various cultures and different life issues that affect the human experience. Through her inquisitive eyes, I want to convey to readers that regardless of race, skin colour, or social upbringing, we are all essentially the same in the most fundamental ways, and we should treat one another with respect and dignity. We live in a world where people of all ethnicities and cultures make society interesting, lively, and functional; this is something that I want to exemplify and celebrate in my story. The first book takes the reader to London, where Elly learns a bit about British culture as well as Chinese culture when she befriends a Hong Kong-Chinese immigrant family. The sequels take place in different parts of the world, including South Korea, Europe, and other places that I will keep mum about for now as I don’t want to reveal spoilers!

So you might ask – is all that hard work worth it? All I know is that one day I will be gone from this world, and if my books can make even the tiniest difference – if they can make my readers smile and dream and think and talk about things that matter – then yes, it would have been worth it. “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” – Benjamin Franklin

Last year in October, I was interviewed by RTHK Radio 3 about my journey on becoming a writer and published author. You can listen to the interview here.

Kathryn Tse-Durham
Author of The Ellanor Chronicles
17th September 2020

This blog post is also posted on Kathryn’s Facebook Page. Visit here.