Welcome to the very first issue of my newsletter! Here is where I’ll be talking about my writing process, giving sneak peeks at upcoming projects, and providing writing and publishing tips. This installment will be short, sweet, and sparsely formatted, but future issues will grow in content. Like the way mighty books sprout from the seedlings of ideas. That’s how it works. I think.

Questions From The Avatarverse

I recently capped off a string of travel to promote AVATAR, THE LAST AIRBENDER: THE RISE OF KYOSHI. It was a delight to appear on panels with Michael DiMartino, Faith Erin Hicks, Gene Luen Yang, and Michelle Wong. Certain questions about Avatar come up fairly often at these sessions, so I thought it would be nice to share some of the answers. Like a Q&A held within the comfort of your own inbox! For this issue, we’ll get started with the one that I get most:



“How the heck did you get to write for Avatar!? That's a dream job!”



The honest truth: Luck, mostly. I published my debut novel THE EPIC CRUSH OF GENIE LO with Abrams, and it was Abrams publishing who made the project happen with Nickelodeon. I personally contributed very little to how THE RISE OF KYOSHI was pitched.



“That’s not a helpful answer!”



Okay, granted. But there was one aspect of the creative process leading up to THE RISE OF KYOSHI that did remain firmly in my hands. And that was my drive to finish projects. By writing EPIC CRUSH and its upcoming sequel THE IRON WILL OF GENIE LO, I could at least show publishers and IP holders complete examples of my work. In this case, my debut series demonstrated I could write an Asian-inspired action-adventure with comedic and supernatural elements. Otherwise, I probably would not have appeared like a very good choice for the next contributor to the Avatar world.



That’s why the best advice I can give aspiring creatives who hope to get involved with their favorite IPs, companies, or do their own independent projects, is that you have to build a body of completed work. Finish your projects. Get them under your belt. Then start on the next. It’s very, VERY likely that your creative skills will improve by leaps and bounds with each iteration. If you’ve got a book you’re working on, I would bet you a whole unblemished cabbage that finishing it and rewriting it will produce a better version than spending an eternity in the Fog of Lost Drafting, waiting for perfection to strike.



So the writing and publishing tip for this issue of the newsletter is the one I think is the most important. Clean your plate. For the next issue, I’ll talk about what it was like trying to create a new Avatar story from scratch with Mike, my publisher, and Nickelodeon.