A Traveler to Nascenza

It is so nice—so nice, I tell you—to read a book you’ve just finished writing and realize that it isn’t a piece of crap.

A Traveler to Nascenza is the third fantasy set in my medieval Venice-inspired country of Cassaforte. It’s the story of Petro Divetri, the younger brother of Risa Divetri, who was at the center of The Glass Maker’s Daughter. Petro’s main problem is that he has a remarkable sister—a hero several times over who occupies a singular place in her city’s history—when he is not at all remarkable himself. He finds himself either falsely admired for his connection, or bullied and despised for it. When the persecution gets out of hand, he’s sent away from the school where he’s lived for several years on a pilgrimage to the remote religious shrine of Nascenza, deep in the countryside. His best friend accompanies him, and Petro is so anxious not to be dogged by his own reputation that the two boys decide to play a schoolboy prank on the other pilgrims and swap identities, pretending to be one another.

It’s a piece of mischief that goes awry when Petro’s friend is kidnapped for political motivations along the way. The rest of Petro’s path to Nascenza is frantic and desperate as he tries to find his friend once more and uncovers a plot that threatens to ruin not only his country’s future, but his sister’s wedding. And boy, nobody wants to upset hot-tempered Risa Divetri when her marriage is at stake.

I envisioned and plotted the story before last year’s elections, and thought of it as a commentary on what happens when a reactionary minority group, incensed by the background of a country’s leader, resorts to domestic terrorism as a means not only to force the country’s hand, but to reduce its citizens into a state of panicked fear. It turned out to be more of a timely topic than I imagined.

The night I finished A Traveler to Nascenza, I stayed up until two in the morning to get it done. I knew early that evening I only had a little bit to go and that I needed to get it out of me while the words were flowing. Besides, I wanted to see how it ended! I’d drawn up a broad sketch of the story last year, true, but as always, I deviated some from the outline. The guard that Petro works with after the kidnapping discovers his true identity well before I originally intended—but she was smarter than I anticipated, and not easily duped. I’d planned for Petro to run across a younger child in the book who in the outline was outright antagonistic. As I wrote the story, Petro ended up treating the kid very decently and as a little brother, so I had to make the child more sympathetic than I envisioned, and give him an opportunity to prove himself worthy of Petro’s faith.

Most of all, though, I wanted to see if the story’s primary antagonist bit it in the end. I honestly had no idea whether or not he was going to die until I actually got to the sentence that decided it. When I penned the book's last sentence a few minutes later, I was so pumped up and excited—despite the fact that it was two in the morning and I'd been working since nine a.m.—that I couldn’t calm down for hours after. I finally was able to shut my eyes at six, to grab three hours of sleep.

Now that I’m reading the book a once-over before sending it off, I’m really pleased, and a little bit surprised, how exciting it all is. It’s lively, and funny, and action-packed in the parts where it’s needed. I’d been a little worried because The Buccaneer’s Apprentice was a whirlwind of swashbuckling, pirate fights, enemy armadas, and hammy acting, and I thought A Traveler to Nascenza might come off a little slow after that. It’s true that the death toll is three thousand, two hundred, and seventeen less than The Buccaneer’s Apprentice. But there’s intrigue, fireworks, teenaged infatuation, underaged drinking, an adolescent erection, and a whole page of two teenaged boys making nut jokes. How could it be anything other than thrilling?