By TREVIN BRANDT
Staff Writer
On a chilly winter morning in December of 2018, I walked the perimeter of El Diamante with the rest of my PE class. As we did this morning exercise, right as I was about to put earbuds into my ears to listen to music, I overheard a conversation from behind me. It was quick, but it contained details of a very wild, very unappealing (to me at least) party they had gone to. As I continued walking along the sidewalk of Akers with a mellow song playing from my phone, a seed for a story was planted in my mind. For the past year, I had been confused and quite curious about this phenomenon I’d seen in high school students. For lack of a better way to phrase it, it seemed like a great majority of them were very careless with their actions and were not thinking about their futures. As someone who is driven by creativity, I decided “hey, why don’t I write a book about that?”
The book SubAprin is set in a world where every single person has the ability to open up a portal into their imagination–known as the “SubWorld”–and create whatever they are able to envision in their mind. After creating this object, they are then able to take this creation out of the SubWorld and into the real world through a process called extraction. Eliek Aprin, the seventeen-year-old main character of this story has created the grandest and most beautiful world of wonder in his SubWorld called “SubAprin.” Unfortunately, he does not have the consistent extraction skills needed to extract SubAprin from his SubWorld. The plot of the story begins as Eliek’s 12th and final year of SubWorld Lessons–this universe’s equivalent of school–begins.
If any of this seems confusing, don’t sweat it, because the real heart of this story comes from the themes and characters. I don’t want to go into too much detail as to not spoil the book, but throughout the story, many themes of friendship, ambition, existentialism, loss, impulsion and escapism pop up for the characters to confront. The craziest thing about writing all of this is that the overarching theme of the story was not something I had fully understood or agreed with until halfway through writing the book. In many ways, this book was not just a discovery process for Eliek, it was a discovery process for me. And with that, my view of high school students changed into something more thoughtful than one sided. To quote the final page of the book, “I feel belonged…We are all lost. But that’s okay. It’s living”
It took about two years to complete this book. I started officially writing it at the beginning of 2019 and finished by the end of 2020. Every day, I made it a requirement to write something in the large document. I got very serious about writing it during November of 2019. For those who don’t know, November is National Novel Writing Month. For novelists, it is a challenge to write 50,000 words within the month. Maybe one day I’ll write 50,000 words in a month, but with school going on, I couldn’t see myself writing over 1,500 words per day for a month while keeping my grades up. I wrote 20,000 instead. When the pandemic hit in March, I knew that this extra time had to be put to good use, so I wrote even more than I did in November over the course of a few weeks. I had a goal of Christmas 2020 in my mind and really wanted to hit it. By summer, I was in the editing process. It was rough and very discouraging, but it helped morph the book from a piece of garbage into something worth buying. When fall came, I finally let my mother–who had been very curious as to what I’d spent so much time writing–read it. Her notes and suggestions were very helpful to me, and it confirmed the one very vital thing that I needed to hear: someone other than myself is able to follow, understand, and empathize with the journey. Getting the copyrights for the book was surprisingly easy. It cost a bit, but all it took was a simple form that I filled out. My brother, Spencer Brandt, is the artistic genius responsible for the cover art of the book. It turned out way better than both of us thought it would. I am very grateful for his handiwork that is far outside of my abilities.
On December 12th 2020, SubAprin was finally released on Amazon as an eBook for $2.99 and paperback for $7.99. I am working on having it available on Google Play and Apple Books, but as of now it is just Amazon. Never in a million years did I think I could do something this big and meaningful with my life. For anyone who experiences tremendous self-doubt, I encourage you to persevere with something you enjoy. Set a goal and don’t trip over the doubt that comes with it. Once you accomplish something bigger than yourself, the self-doubt that presides in your day to day life will begin to wither away. Since we were children, we were told that if we really wanted to do something, with enough time and effort, we can do it. It wasn’t until I opened the package from Amazon containing the first physical copy of the book that I realized how true this statement rings. There were many times in the writing process where I considered deleting the whole document and forgetting that I ever had this idea because I didn’t think it was living up to the expectations I set for it. I am enormously grateful that I did not. If I did, SubAprin would be a tiny speck of an idea in the back of my mind, waiting to be nurtured and brought into this world. Much like how SubAprin sits in Eliek’s SubWorld, waiting to be extracted.
You can buy SubAprin here: https://www.amazon.com/SubAprin-Trevin-Brandt/dp/B08QGJYZRG/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=SubAprin&qid=1611276314&sr=8-1
