About AC Gaughen

AC GAUGHEN is the author of the Elementae series (Reign the Earth, Imprison the Sky) and the Scarlet trilogy (Scarlet, Lady Thief, Lion Heart).  With a strong passion for community engagement, Annie serves as the co-director for Kindling Words East, a retreat for professional writers, illustrators and editors, and works for a Boston-area university in alumni engagement. She holds a Master of Letters in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews (Scotland) and a Masters in Education (Arts in Education) from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Excerpt from Acknowledgements from Reign the Earth 

This is my fight song.  

So this book sold in March of 2015; April 1st of the same year, I found out that because of a long and tumultuous history with diabetes, my retinas were bleeding into my vitreous fluid and blocking my vision.  I spent almost a year with extremely compromised vision, getting laser treatments, injections and surgeries in both eyes—I spent a year not knowing if I would be completely blind within a few years (I guess I still don’t really know that, so keep your fingers crossed).  I spent a month not lifting my head because to do so would be to disrupt a gas bubble that was keeping my retina attached.  

            Let me repeat—I looked at the floor for a month.  

            And all this while desperately trying to get my diabetes under control, and deal with an insidious sense of my own guilt and shame—I had done this to myself.  

            Through this all, I had this book.  I worked on edits while I was face down, making notes on post-its since I couldn’t even use a computer because of the angle of the screen.  Thinking constantly about this book, primed for the day I could raise my head—ready for the chance to heal.  

            It’s virtually impossible to, in a few public paragraphs, explain what a dark time that was for me, and the kinds of fear and depression I wrestled with.  But in writing my acknowledgements, I somehow need to acknowledge what this book really became for me—it wasn’t escapism.  It was proof that I was still capable.  It was my ability to function.  It was my measure of worth for myself.  

 This is my fight song.

            And yet, there’s so much more to the story of this book, and this series.  I wrote the first draft of Shalia’s story when I was sixteen.  It took me fourteen more years to learn how to tell her story the way it needed to be told—and I can’t even express how many false starts and dead novels lie strewn in the wake of this final version.  I mean, the first draft was handwritten across two composition notebooks.  COMPOSITION NOTEBOOKS.  I think one has my history notes from high school and plans to go to a party in my freshman year of college in the margins. 

            And now you’re reading this in the back of a published novel.  So for writers everywhere, never give up on a story that you want to tell.  You may not know how to tell it just yet, but don’t ever believe that you don’t know how to tell it period.  We learn craft and practice our skills to get better at this.  

For myself, for many reasons and in many ways, I will always need reminding that my pen—and my heart—will never fail me.  And this book is a testament to that.