I never planned to write a neurodivergent book. I didn’t mean for Larissa to be autistic.
But it happened.
And I didn’t realize it until I was reading the edits because all I’d done was write Larissa true to me. As someone who wanted to solve fights with words, and not swords. As someone who cared too deeply, who didn’t know how to meet the expectations, the world lay at her feet.
When I wrote her, I didn’t know just how big a piece of me would be in between the lines.
When Meg Trast read this, she was one of the first, and I remember exactly what she was wearing, and how she made me feel, when she said; this book is not for everyone, but for those who read and connect to it, they will never forget you.
That was when I started to understand who these people were, and what this story meant to me. When these characters came to me, Larissa, Valare, Jyan, they came in a rush.
I remember walking home from work, in a torrential downpour, listening to music, and all of a sudden a poem entered my brain. It didn’t exist and then it was there.
Run little runtling
Flee with all your fears
Mother’s gone a-hunting
Won’t be back for years
Sigh little weakling
With a pocket full of tears
Hear the wolf howling
When the orb appears
Die little darkkin
After the echo clears
Debts will be a-settling
When the Evercry nears
And I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Who these people where, why they cared about magic, and why the Evercry was a threat to them. I wrote the whole story in twenty one days. I poured a sliver of myself into that story and I didn’t know how great a slice until I reread it four years later.
It held my anger. My female rage. My resentment of society. My disappointment in myself.
But that I was trying. So fucking hard. I worked to fit in, I worked to meet the norms. I wore a mask every day while inside a demon of creativity begged to be let free of it’s chains. And despite all the failures, amid them all was success. There were people who wanted to read my work, who could see what I saw in this story.
They could see how much I loved it, and they loved it too.
I worked very tirelessly with Jennica, the lovely editor at Literary Wanderlust who took this monster 110k manuscript and said she wanted a part of it. Little was I to know how we’d break it down, tear it apart, put it back together, and not produce some Frankenstein’s monster, but the truth. The truth of how I felt, without the garbage of my unresolved issues, just the story.
Don’t read this because you follow me on Twitter.
Don’t read this because you follow my blog.
Don’t read this because I will bend over backwards to provide you a free ecopy.
Read it because all your life you never felt like you fitted in. Read it because you were sure there was something else the world had in store for you and you couldn’t find it. Read it because when the world puts pressure on you, you fear relying on your friends. Read it because your friend betrayed you, and you still don’t know why. Read it because… your mother set you on a path, without whispering a word. And maybe you didn’t know what that was until you had to find out the hard way…
This book is for my neurodivergent sisters finding their place in the world, their truth.
I see you – I believe in you, and what you fight for.
Echo of the Evercry is available for ARC readers on Netgalley and Booksirens. If you reach out to me you can request an ecopy. I hope you enjoy it and can post a review on my Goodreads page.
The preorders are available on Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and reviews can be left on Goodreads.
E. J. Dawson 