Overyear, My New Fantasy Adventure Novel

To find your home, you have to leave it.

I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics.

Today, something a little different. I’m sharing the first offering exclusive to paid subscribers (more to come!): a free e-book download of my new novel, Overyear. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, you can always become one. Or you can find the book on Amazon here.

Every couple years I feel a novel welling up inside me, and I get to work. I got this feeling around February 2020, and I started compiling notes. It was going to be a contemporary drama story about people who are struggling to find the meaning in their existence. Psychedelics and a doomsday cult were going to feature, if I recall.

Then March came, and life turned upside down. What I needed was not to sink into a bunch of characters’ existential crises, but rather some way to escape from the existential crises that were all around.

So I started writing a fantasy story. I’ve always enjoyed reading the genre, but my own writing has tended more toward magical realism. But this story would be pure fantasy. Simpler times, a quest, a coming of age. It was a pure joy to work on.

For the first time, I wrote without any sort of plan. I found myself developing a village called Eidolon and a nineteen-year-old boy named Reed who had yet to go through the coming-of-age rite that most boys in Eidolon did by age fifteen.

I finished the first draft in about six months, then wrote some academic stuff for a while, and then began a long process of revision and refinement, going through various drafts and enlisting people to read and give me feedback—and switching back to academic stuff every now and then. I got really into the Story Grid methodology to make the story more coherent and compelling. I learned so much!

And so here we are, nearly three years after I started this book, and I’m excited to share it with you. If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll find a link to download the e-book for free below.

If you’re not a paid subscriber, or if you’d prefer a print copy, you can order paperback or hardcover on Amazon here (also available on the various regional Amazon sites).

And I’m hard at work on a sequel to Overyear, as it happens; I’m about 65,000 words into draft one-and-a-half.