Tolkien spent something close to twenty years writing and shaping Lord Of The Rings. In many ways, I have been working on A Country of Eternal Light for the same amount of time.

The novel isn’t easy to describe, and I’ve never been good at describing my writing. But here goes. The world is ending. A rogue black hole is careening through the solar system. The Earth has less than a year to survive. In the midst of this, Mairead, a young woman living on a remote Irish island, is grieving over the loss of her child. She meets by chance Gavin, an American who has come to scatter his father’s ashes.

What follows is complicated, fraught, and cast in the shadow of the inevitable.

This book wasn’t always inevitable, though it feels that way in some respects. The first seeds for the book were planted when I spent a weekend on Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands, in the summer of 2000. I was instantly captivated by the stark beauty of the island, as many people are. I wanted to go back. I needed to. This germ of a story set there began to form shortly after, mostly as way to hold to the intense memories of my short time there.

It was a labored story about a nurse who had gone to Inishmore to escape some painful episode in her past. Throw in some magical realism ala Neil Gaiman or maybe slightly Ali Smith and that was the story for quite a while. Around 2006, I came up with this idea of a story about the world ending due to a black hole. I imagined something like this long, painful wind down similar to On The Beach. The two ideas were disconnected at first.

I made attempts at both stories independently, for years. My writing had become paralytic in that time. A disastrous experience followed selling my first novel, The Book Of Elizabeth, to a publisher. The stress and uncertainty of what would come of the book – I eventually published it on my own, years later – infected my writing.

I don’t remember exactly how I decided to combine the two ideas. I do this a lot in stories, where I mashup different concepts. Around 2013, after my dad had passed away, the pressure of not writing, of not doing what I needed to do become acidic. I didn’t realize how disconnected from my grief and art that I was.

I wasn’t processing anything. I wasn’t functioning in any real way, except as a creature of routine. I wanted to reconnect. I wanted to go back to Ireland, to Inishmore, and the story was in some way maybe a way of holding on to the dream. Finally in 2014, I left my job and moved to Ireland. I went to Inishmore.

I planned to be on the island only five days. I ended up staying there months, well into 2015. I fell in love with the island all over again. It’s a beautiful place, home to beautiful people. So much of my experience informed the book, which was morphing in front of my eyes from a nebulous speculative concept what if to something much more real and grounded.

I wrote a version of the book while I was there, a truly awful grab bag of ideas, scenes, and impressions that was held together only by a thin thread. But it was a book. I had finally finished a new book.

I continued to revise the book over the next couple of years. I refined the book, I wrestled with it, I learned and unlearned it again and again. I tried to find an agent and publisher and came close a few times. More time went by. Years. I was as paralyzed as I had been before. What to do with the book? Trunk it? Try again to find a publisher? Or do it myself, as I had finally done with Ever The Hero?

WandaVision decided for me.

WandaVision is in many ways about grief and trauma. It brought up all of the pain and memories that had sublimated in the process of writing this book, in trying to publish it, in trying to move on from it. There isn’t any moving on from grief. It exists, like gravity, though in places its force is less. There isn’t any such thing as closure. There is simply living, and part of living is acknowledging the past. Your pain. And so that’s what I’m doing here.

I hope people find something in the book. I hope it has some value. I’ve carried it a long time, and now I hand it off, though the weight doesn’t seem any less. At least not now.