The Agreement I Made with This Story

What I Promised Before I Began

Before I wrote the first chapter, I had already seen the last scene of the final book.

That is where this story and I began: not at the beginning, but at the end. Most writers start by searching. I started by knowing where I needed to arrive, and then turned around to find the path back. It is less like writing a story than excavating one. The shape of it already exists somewhere. My job is to brush away what covers it, carefully, until something true becomes visible.

That is the agreement. I will follow where this leads. I will stay faithful to what I see, even when I am standing in territory I have never personally inhabited.

And there is a great deal of that territory.

I have never experienced the kind of awakening my characters move through. I have never lived in Shanghai. I have never played competitive games. My protagonist is a young man in his twenties, and I am neither young in that way nor a man. Every day I write, I am writing from outside my own direct experience.

But I have come to understand that this is not a limitation. It is, in a strange way, a condition.

Because I cannot rely on memory or assumption, I have to remain in a particular kind of attention. I have to invent the physical world around them with precision: which street they walk down, what they order on a sleepless night, the small nervous habits they carry without knowing it. None of this comes from the characters directly. It comes from me. But it has to be built to fit what they are, not what I prefer.

I watch them. They accompany me.

In the hours between shifts, or in the deep quiet of a night when the rest of the house has gone still, I push open that door into their world. It is a place where they are in charge, and I am the one trying to keep up.

I am not building their story so much as recording a fragment of it. This story holds centuries within it, from the Ming Dynasty philosopher whose ideas gave these people their way of seeing, to the distant years when the last of them will have grown old and gone. What I have agreed to write is seven years of that span, 2022 to 2028. That is my portion. That is the window I was shown.

So I made one promise: to follow where the story leads, even when I do not know the ground. To keep my hands steady. To not look away from what is difficult to see. And to walk, one book at a time, toward the ending I have been carrying since before I began.

The Unveiling Passage is the first step: Book 1 of The WAI Series.

It arrives on June 10.