Arts / Air traffic controller turns fire festival fever dream into debut novel
Rachael Boxall will release The Generation Archives in January 2025
HAVE you ever woken from an intense dream convinced it could have been a blockbuster film or best-selling book?
Rachael Boxall has – and the first-time author has literally turned her fever dream into a 350-page reality.
Her debut book The Generation Archives will arrive on bookshelves in January next year, the first of a planned young adult fantasy trilogy.
The 34-year-old, from Sandwick, has been a keen reader since her teenage years and had only ever written for herself until recently.
But an action-packed dream after a big weekend at the South Mainland Up Helly Aa festival several years ago set her on a path to writing her first full-length novel.
“I’ve always had a big imagination, but that weekend we’d been at SMUHA and I might have overindulged myself over the festivities,” Boxall admitted.
“I had this mental dream and when I told everyone at work about they said, ‘oh my God, that would make a brilliant book, you should totally write that’.”
Incredibly Boxall not only did just that – she did it while also studying to be an air traffic controller at Sumburgh.
“It became an itch that niggled at me, and once I started it I couldn’t stop,” she said.
“It took me between one and two years to write while I was training for my air traffic control licence.”
She said some weeks she would write for an hour every night, while others – when “life got in the way” – she could go whole weeks without writing a word.
“Is this a scam?”– Rachael Boxall’s reaction to being offered a publishing deal
Boxall’s path to becoming an author was unorthodox in more ways than that. She said she had “my struggles with English” coming through school, and had even had to resit her English exams after failing it the first time.
“It’s not something that came easily to me,” she explained.
“My mam is a primary school teacher, and she would help me during the school holidays.
“The love of doing it helped me, alongside a good editor…”
But before Boxall could secure that editor, she had to first find a publisher – a journey that took another year.
“I obviously had a lot of rejections,” she said.
“Most of the big publishing houses, you can’t just submit anything – you have to try and find yourself an agent first.
“I had a lot of agent rejections, but they were all really positive. There was nobody that said ‘this needs a full overhaul, forget it’.”
Boxall moved on to independent publishers, and finally received an offer to publish The Generation Archives from Cranthorpe Millner – a Cambridge-based company who released the autobiography of Shaun Wallace, who appears on TV show The Chase.
Asked for her reaction to the offer, she responded in typically honest fashion.
“I thought, ‘is this a scam?’
“Then I looked them up and saw they had published books by Shaun Wallace and Ollie Locke (Made in Chelsea), so that was two names I could recognise.”
At the heart of the story is The Generation Archives, which has been described by Boxall as a young adult dystopian fantasy tale.
She reluctantly compared it to the hugely popular Hunger Games series, and to Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn novels.
“I always think, ‘how do you compare your book to something without sounding like you’re bragging or being trite’,” she added.
The story focuses on Rin, who finds her life thrown into chaos at the unwelcome arrival of three new guests into her life – leaving her questioning everything she knows and unable to outrun her past.
She described it as the kind of story that she would want to read herself.
But for Boxall that proved to be the scariest part of the whole experience – letting anyone else read her story.
“This was the first time I’ve ever let anyone read my writing. It was absolutely terrifying,” she said.
“The publisher was the first person to read it, so for them to say ‘this can actually go somewhere’ was massive validation for me.
“It’s been out to data readers and authors, and it’s had really positive feedback, which has made me feel like, ‘wow, okay’.
“But I still have the fear about it.”
She has envisaged The Generation Archives as the first in a trilogy – called the Immutavi Series – with part two already penned.
“I’m working eight hours a day as an air traffic controller, publishing book one, editing book two and I’m halfway through writing book three,” she said.
“I don’t have a contract for book two yet, it’ll be dependant on how book one goes.
“But I know the series will end with book three.”
The Generation Archives will be released on 28 January 2025 – Lerwick Up Helly Aa day, bringing the fire festival links full circle from dream to reality.
She joked that she “can’t compete” with Shetland’s biggest event in terms of news exposure, so will likely hold events to launch the book on another date.
Boxall said she cannot wait to get her hands on a copy and – whatever the response – she will be delighted with what she has accomplished.
“Some people will hate it, and some people will like it,” she said.
“I wrote the book the way I wanted it to be written though.
“I like it, and I’m proud of it.”
The Generation Archives can be pre-ordered here.
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