I didn't set out to write a book. I set out to understand something I couldn't name — and the book is what came out the other side.
I want to tell you something honest about what writing Lord of Water has been for me. Not the marketing version. Not the polished author bio. The real version — because I think it matters, and because I think you'll understand it better than most.
Writing this trilogy has been one of the most spiritual experiences of my life.
I don't use that word lightly. I'm a remedial builder by trade, a developer, a practical person who deals in concrete and contracts and things you can stand on. But there is no other word for what happened to me across the years I spent writing this story. Something opened. Something that had been quietly pressing against the inside of me for a long time finally found a way through — and what poured out became Lord of Water.
The story arrived the way the best ones do: not all at once, but in pieces. A feeling. A voice. A planet covered in living ocean. A guardian — ancient, patient, watching — who wanted to tell his story directly to a reader. Directly to you. I didn't invent him so much as I gradually learned to hear him.
And in the hearing of him, I found something I hadn't expected: myself.
I grew across the writing of this book in ways I couldn't have planned and wouldn't have predicted. The questions the story asks — about life, about purpose, about what it means to be a small living thing on a vast and mostly-water planet — are not questions I asked the story. They are questions the story asked me. And I had to be willing to sit with them long enough to find out what I actually believed. That process changed me. Quietly, permanently, in all the right ways.
There is a grandfather in Chapter 1 who has lived 86 full years. When his time comes, he doesn't fear it. He simply lifts — and you go with him. Writing that chapter, I understood something about endings that I had never quite understood before. Something that I find, years later, I carry with me everywhere I go.
That's what this story does. It gives you things to carry.
And now I get to pass it on.
Here is what still amazes me, every single day: I am sitting on the New South Wales coast, and because of the internet — because of this extraordinary invisible river that connects every human being who has ever typed a word into a screen — I can reach someone on the other side of the planet. I can reach you, wherever you are reading this, right now.
I can hand you something I spent years making. Something that cost me sleep and silence and many long nights of not quite knowing if I was getting it right. And you can have it — all of it — without a bookshop, without a publisher deciding whether you deserve to read it, without geography or distance or any of the old obstacles that used to stand between a writer and the person the book was written for.
That is a staggering thing, if you let yourself feel it.
I think about the person reading this in a flat in London, or on a train somewhere in Japan, or sitting in a garden in the middle of a difficult year, looking for something to pull them out of themselves for a few hours. I think about what it means to be able to reach that person. To hand them an adventure. To say: here — step inside this for a while. The world will still be there when you come back. I promise it will look a little different when you do.
That is what great fiction does. It gives people permission to leave — and when they return, they return changed.
Life is hard. I don't need to tell you that. The weight of ordinary days — the worry and the grind and the noise — is real, and it is heavy, and it accumulates in a person in ways we don't always notice until we're already bowed under it. Story is one of the oldest medicines we have for that. Not escape in the cowardly sense — not turning away — but the kind of release that comes from being fully absorbed in something vast and beautiful and completely outside yourself for a few hours.
You come back lighter. You come back with more room inside you.
That is what I wanted to give when I started writing Lord of Water. And now that it's finished — now that it's real, sitting in the world as a proper book with proper pages and a cover and seventeen chapters and an epilogue — I find that the giving of it is its own reward. Every reader who picks it up and disappears inside it for a night is a small miracle to me. I don't take it for granted. I don't think I ever will.
A personal letter is waiting for you.
I've written a page on this site for the people I've crossed paths with — however we met. If someone has pointed you to this post, chances are that page is for you.
It has a free copy of Book I inside it. No tricks. Just the book, and a letter from me, and an open door into a world I think you'll be glad you visited.
The water has been waiting. Come and see what it has to say.
"Every ocean on every world began as a single drop of water that decided to stay."
✦ Read the Letter — Get Book I Free ✦Yours in the journey,
Mike King
Author · Lord of Water Trilogy · Turquoise Era Publishing