From Sacramento to ‘City of Dragons,’ an author comes full circle with first graphic novel

If you ask most authors if they always wanted to be writers, they’ll say yes. Maybe they didn’t know if they’d be able to make a living at it, but they’ll say they’ve been creating and writing stories their whole lives. They can’t help it.

Jaimal Yogis, a Sacramento-area native, knows that feeling. His new book, “City of Dragons: The Awakening Storm,” comes out this month and while he calls it the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, it’s not his first book. His writing career has had plenty of twists along the way.

While attending Rio Americano High School, it was not his English teacher who had the biggest impact on him.

“I had an amazing French teacher at Rio. Monsieur Alec. He got me excited about French culture,” Yogis said. That sparked a love of learning about other cultures.

As a teenager, Yogis said he managed to get into a fair amount of trouble and, at 16, he decided to run away.

He scraped together enough money for a plane ticket and then a surfboard, and headed to Maui to learn to surf. He was only there for a couple of weeks before his father went to retrieve him.

But the surfing bug had bitten. What started off as a stupid teenage decision would actually be the impetus for his first big break years later.

Once back in California, Yogis’ parents figured he needed a fresh start and a new environment so they allowed him to do a student exchange program in France. The immersion in French culture turned out to be just what he needed and poured fuel on his love for learning about other cultures.

Following high school, he headed back to Hawaii for college – and more surfing.

“I was a mutt in terms of wanting to do a little bit of everything,” Yogis said of his interests during his college years. He started off as a marine biology major. Eventually he managed to get accepted at Columbia where he earned a dual degree in journalism and religious studies.

Studying other cultures inspired him to want to try his hand at writing a fantasy book, he said. But then it was just an idea – a dream for later.

Yogis spent a decade as a magazine journalist, writing for San Francisco magazine. His work also appeared in the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, Surfer’s Journal and ESPN magazine. At the same time, he studied Buddhism and meditation, and an article that he wrote, “The Zen of Surfing,” ended up going viral.

It gained so much attention, he was offered a book deal to expand on it, resulting in “Saltwater Buddha.” Yogis said he remembers thinking about the transition to writing books, “This is more fun than always being on a deadline.” He ended up writing three books about a blend of surfing, travel and courage.

“Saltwater Buddha” was turned into a documentary movie, released in 2015.

Even after that level of success, Yogis said he didn’t feel he had reached his dream. After the birth of his first child nine years ago, in the Chinese year of the water dragon, Yogis began exploring Chinese mythology. On a visit to City of 10,000 Buddhas monastery near Ukiah, inspiration hit.

He said he was so drawn to his new experiences that he started writing about it, only this time not knowing if what he wrote would ever be published.

“It really gripped me, and I knew it was ‘the one,’” Yogis said. Much like a new relationship, it felt right and worthy of hard work.

He started the book as a prose novel but turned it into a screenplay at one point after running into someone who wanted to gauge the story’s movie potential. Yogis said he found the story was easier to plot out that way, and he liked the format.

Although he had never thought of writing a graphic novel before, he opted for that genre following another person’s suggestion. He reached out to illustrator Vivian Truong the way so much business is done today – on Twitter. The partnership was a good fit for both of them, Yogis said, and they found an agent together.

“You have to trust the feeling that it’s a good story,” Yogis said of the hard work both of them put in. They created a full script, three color pages and 15 black-and-white pages to be pitched to publishing houses.

Scholastic Books ended up buying the story. Yogis said he remembers circling books in the Scholastic catalog pages in elementary school, as so many of us did.

“City of Dragons” will be a series, with the first book coming out this month and the second one written but not completed.

Yogis said he found writing for a series to be a challenge, noting, “Every step you take into the world you’re creating has repercussions ... the hardest thing I’ve ever done is keep trusting this book.”

“City of Dragons: The Awakening Storm” will be released Sept. 21. The author will be at Capital Books Sept. 23 at 6 p.m. for a book signing event. For more information on that event, go to capitalbooksonk.com.

This story was originally published September 15, 2021 at 9:35 AM.