Daniel Aegan

“I finished my first draft!” he shouts toward the ocean from some beach in a small oceanside town in Connecticut. “Kai the Swordsman is finally done!”

I did it. I finished the epilogue of my 80k word work in progress: a fantasy novel about a lone samurai. The manuscript is far from finished. It still needs a second draft before it can be edited, but the beta-reading went well.

If you ask me now, I can’t tell you where this story came from. Maybe I was watching a lot of anime. Maybe it popped in my head from nothing. Maybe it was a dream I wrote down. I can’t even tell you how long ago I had this idea. The basis of Kai’s story sat in my “to-write” pile for a while, waiting for me to obsess over.

How Kai got to be a full-length novel is a bit of a funny story. It was originally supposed to be a short story. I thought about it a but more, and it felt like a novella to me. Finally, I actually started to outline and write Kai’s tale, and I found myself wanting to learn more about him, his past, the people around him, the small fishing village of Umi no Mura, and the empire of Hojite as whole.

Kai’s journey may be over, but I’m not done with him yet. I’ll be reading, changing, and editing the book in coming months. A writer job is never done…

-Daniel Aegan
11/16/18