This weekend, I had the pleasure of attending a book release party where I met two standout YA fantasy authors, D.L. Taylor and Logan Karlie, celebrating the release of the second installment in Taylor’s duology, The Beasts We Bury and The Beasts We Raise.
Both covers feature floral themes – an invitation to stop and smell the roses and notice what’s often unseen.
How do paper, ink, and thread become a story bound in beauty?
Writing, of course. Then publishing. Distribution. Merchandising.
But back up to that writing part – the quiet, invisible beginning. What actually goes into that?
Sometimes it’s months. Sometimes it’s years. Depending on the book, it might require deep research, careful study, or wisdom gathered across decades of lived experience. Practically speaking, it’s the steady, faithful act of placing words onto a blank page – shaping sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into pages, pages into chapters.
But even before the first word appears, something softer and harder to see is already unfolding.
There is the inner architecture of a story – the slow layering of world-building, the tentative sketching of characters, the private what-ifs and maybes. It’s imaginative work, structural work, emotional work. It happens in the quiet corners of a writer’s mind long before it reaches paper. And there’s something deeply human about that invisible labor.
Taylor writes young adult fantasy often described as dark, gothic-leaning, character-driven, and emotionally intense. Imagine building that world! During the Q&A, Karlie, author of her own dark fantasy novel Dream by the Shadows asked Taylor about her writing process – that mysterious stretch between imagination and finished manuscript.
Some writers lean on what creativity coach Eric Maisel calls a writing ritual – a small, grounding practice that signals it’s time to begin. Others build careful routines into their days. For Taylor, the writing day begins after she sends her three children off to school. Then come four focused hours at her desk. When she feels stuck, she takes what she calls a brainstorm walk, trusting that moving her body might help move the story forward. And if the ideas still refuse to settle? She starts cleaning – letting rhythm and order gently loosen whatever is tangled.
The writing of a book is work. World-building is work. Shaping a narrative is work.
But it is also intimate, absorbing, deeply satisfying work.
The Beasts We Bury and The Beasts We Raise, a duology dark fantasy by D.L. Taylor.
For many writers, storytelling is both adventure and quiet therapy – a way to explore imagined worlds while carefully untangling very real questions. What we so often overlook, when we see a finished book glowing under bookstore lights, is not just the polish of the cover or the cleverness of the title. It’s the thousands of unseen decisions. The revisions. The doubts. The small returns to the page. The stubborn, hopeful persistence.
A book resting on a shelf is not simply the product of publishing. It is evidence of imagination meeting discipline. Of belief surviving uncertainty. Of someone choosing, again and again, to keep going until the invisible becomes something you can hold – and until the story begins its life all over again in the hands of a reader. •