It Was Now or Never: A Guest Post from Kacen Callender

Kacen Callender always knew they wanted to write YA fantasy, and their essay brings us behind the scenes of how their YA fantasy debut finally came to be. Here’s Kacen, in their own words.

About fifteen years ago, I wrote a ten-page submission for a summer writing workshop where the guest professor gave me the note that I should consider writing young adult novels. It’s incredible how much one comment from a stranger changed my life. 

I did some research, and I discovered a love for novels like Graceling and Finnikin of the Rock and Daughter of Smoke and Bone. So, I decided to throw myself into the world of YA books. I became a bookseller at a children’s independent bookstore, became a student at a graduate writing for children program, and started work at a children’s publisher. Children’s and YA books became my life. 

All the while, I’d worked on expanding the ten-page submission. The story had a promising idea: on a quest for revenge, a young woman realized she was becoming a jumbie, a monstrous spirit inspired by Caribbean folklore. Unfortunately, younger Kacen struggled with execution, and I’d spent about five years writing and rewriting this novel until it became a frustrating, tangled knot of words. 

I finally took a breath from the fantasy and wrote a few unsold manuscripts, before trying my hand at middle-grade. Hurricane Child was sold and published, and my career as an author began, giving me the opportunity to write books like King and the Dragonflies and Felix Ever After and even an adult fantasy, Queen of the Conquered. 

Still, over the years, the need to write a YA fantasy kept swelling in my mind. It’d become my main goal, my purpose; the desire to finally, successfully write a YA fantasy had become a tangled knot, too.  

The pandemic began. I returned to my childhood home in St. Thomas, an island I’d always needed to escape. It felt like it was now or never: I forced myself to sit down in a chair, and told myself I would not get up again until I started writing this manuscript. 

I’d already had the idea of a world where magic was a science, and where there was no chosen one concept—that everyone was magical, chosen. Maybe it was because the concept had been percolating for so long that Ash’s story finally flowed onto the page. I felt a release and freedom and ease in writing Infinity Alchemist, unlike when I wrote about the world of jumbie. It was a massive triumph, to finally write and complete a book in the genre that had stumped me for over ten years. 

Maybe if I hadn’t started with a fantasy, but a contemporary manuscript that I couldn’t finish, my writing journey would’ve been different; maybe contemporary would have felt like a tangled knot, my own frustration and swollen desire blocking my process, until I finally decided to let go. Maybe fantasy would have come with more ease, if I hadn’t wanted to write the book so badly; if the story hadn’t had the weight and stakes of being my main goal, and feeling like my purpose.