Anyone who has carried an idea for a long time knows the feeling: it lodges in your head and will not leave, and you spend years reaching in, trying to pull it out into the world in one piece. This was that idea. And now it is finally here.
The story was never shelved. I started writing it in the late 1990s, and over the years it kept finding new ways to demand my attention. Early on I began building in-house videos for it, trying to see the world before I could fully write it. When Vue 5 finally let me put motion into the plants and the wind moving through a scene, I was thrilled. One of those earliest experiments was made in 2001. It is rough by today's standards, but it was the first time this world moved.
The project kept growing. By 2019 it had become large enough that we began developing a television series based on the second part of the story. We had a team, momentum, and a real plan. Then COVID arrived and ended the production. Some of the people who were part of that effort did not survive the pandemic. The project was never restarted, and it never will be in that form, but their work was part of the road that led here, and I have not forgotten it.
The hardest part of finishing was not the imagination. It was the language. English is not my first language, and grammar has always been the barrier between the story in my head and the story on the page. For years that gap felt impossible to close on my own. I am sure a native speaker could have written it in a fraction of the time, but it would not have been this story, told in my voice. So I did the slow work. I went over every chapter, every paragraph, every word, again and again, until what was on the page matched what I had always meant to say. I wanted to tell this story myself. And I did.
What you will read is only one part of a much larger world, one I have been living with for three decades. There is more of it to tell, and I intend to tell it.
For now, the book is finished. It is called Tengu, and it is ready for beta readers.
If you would like an early look and you are willing to share honest feedback before it goes out into the world, I would be glad to have your eyes on it.
