(Originally posted 1/1/2020)
Hello everyone!
2020 has started with me being really reflective on my writing career and the adventure it’s been. I thought I’d share in depth with everyone my journey. It’s been a wild ride that almost reads stranger than fiction but in sharing I hope that I can give hope to all the aspiring authors out there. I warn you though that I’ve never been good at being concise!
Writing is a difficult journey. Like all forms of art it varies from person to person. One person might be able to whip out thirty novels in one year, some people it might take them their entire life to finish one book. Some might not even finish one. Some might share their work. Others might hide it away in a drawer to be discovered after they pass on.
Too long didn’t read version: Don’t give up on your dreams. Don’t give up period no matter dark it is. Don’t give up if it’s hard. Don’t give up if you don’t have immediate success.
DO NOT think you can’t write. Writing is a skill learned through practice. And if you can’t afford 33 years of prolific practice of writing constantly like I’ve had that’s why you pay an editor.
The real detailed version (get some popcorn):
I’ve always been extremely imaginative. I would escape into my head/my play/my games/my roleplay, whatever fantasy world I could to try to disappear from a real life that was difficult. Making up grand adventures for glorious characters was what I did to occupy my mind and deal with things. I was also a voracious reader. I read everything my library had in mystery, animal stories, those sorts. There wasn’t a lot of children’s fantasy in the 80s. When I ran out of children’s books I moved on to adult fiction.
I’ve been writing for 33 years. I was 8 years old when I first wrote down a lengthy story.
The Adventures of Jets (Novel 1:1989):
I had read the classic Black Beauty. My 8 year old mind decided it could have been more exciting and I didn’t like that some of the characters died or were horribly treated and I thought I could do better. So my first actual written down novel (which filled an entire notebook!) was titled The Adventures of Jets. It was basically a rewrite of how I thought Black Beauty should have been. (I was 8 years old.)
Fantasy (Novel 2: 1989)
After that, while I was still 8 years old, I wrote a novel I simply called Fantasy (that was the title!). On the surface it sounds like an episode of My Little Pony (which I did watch): The Pegasus Prince came down from the sky and met a beautiful Unicorn Princess and they fell in love but their people were at war. The Unicorn Princess had a highly disturbing evil brother who went around raping and killing and kidnapping and all sorts of horrendously violent things for an 8 year old of the 80s to think of (though I suppose children’s entertainment back in the 80s was much darker too). So the ill fated lovers had to destroy her evil brothers and reunite the two kingdoms. (Note: Fantasy was the first novel based on the world Rimuldar that I will discuss below.)
Pitch to Marvel Comics (1991)
I grew up with all brothers and I ended up being more of a tomboy into boys toys and entertainment than girly stuff. I ended up collecting comic books and things and watching a lot of GI Joe and X-Men and such. I fell absolutely head over heels in love with the character Magneto from X-Men. I also grew up on my share of Disney. So at 10 years old, being the cheeky little writer I was, I wrote in to Marvel Comics and pitched my story arc idea for Magneto (certain I could write him better than they do…I still think I could but that’s a different matter). That 10 year old idea basically boiled down to Magneto got lost in what was a Disney Kingdom, where the people ruled with song magic and he met this 15 year old princess and fell in love and they lived happily ever after because he was accepted there (or something similar). I thought it was cool because it would’ve been a cross between X-men as it was and a fantasy world in a comic book.
I don’t know who was the editor at the time when I wrote in, I wish I still had that letter. But they not only took the time to reply, they sent me their submission guidelines and told me that I needed to be a published writer already with a portfolio for them to consider me (HI MARVEL I AM NOW! *waves* and I have much more adult ideas now though I still maintain Magneto deserves a happy ending.)
Little cheeky 10 year old me read it, got angry, and thought: Well if I have to already be published to work for them FORGET IT. I’ll just do my OWN stories without them then! That’ll show them.
Birth of the fantasy world, Rimuldar (1991):
So in 1991, my world Rimuldar (whose name I’m pretty sure I borrowed from the video game Dragon Warrior) was born. This world would both be my salvation and my near destruction as a writer.
The Chosen One (Novel 3: 1991 – Book one of the Dragonslayers Trilogy)
In 1991 as a ten year old I would take my idea I pitched to Marvel and I would twist in and turn it. I started with the idea of Magneto (and even kind of ripped off his real name, Eric, though I made mine Erik with a k and it was only half a rip off I did have a friend when I was very young that I had kind of a crush on that was named Eric too, hope he never reads that…ahem anyway.) So basically Erik was the king of a magical floating continent that served as guardians to the ‘normal’ humans below and he was sort of a magical version of a mutant. He ended up fleeing his kingdom and getting hurt, getting found by a girl (who was a mixture of what I idealized being myself with a little Disney Princess thrown in), fell in love, and ended up helping her free her kingdom from a nasty villain. It also featured a huge cast of characters like a roleplaying game which I was fond of playing and honestly might have made a better video game.
Book Two and Three of Dragonslayers (Novel 4 and 5: 1991)
I’m really fuzzy on book two and three and what was in them at this point. I rewrote TCO at least 20 times over the 10 years that followed so that one I remember better. Basically this introduced Erik’s evil younger brother Ash who had been kidnapped as a baby and raised by a really abusive ‘dark king’ with the sole goal to kill Erik and take his kingdom. ORIGINALLY Ash was supposed to die and Erik was supposed to kill him and be a hero. Erik also had a wayward anti-hero son named Sephiroth that I added in 1997 to the rewrites (bet we can’t figure out where I ripped his name off from..I was 10 okay?) There was a sub plot where Seph tried to steal Erik’s princess, Ash tried to kidnap/rape her (actually Ash did a lot of that).
So I had a whole trilogy I wrote when I was 10 years old. Well I made some friends through another hobby that also wrote and read fantasy. This was amazing. I think I was 15 at the time? So it would’ve been around 1996.
The Earth Shall Tremble (Epic Fantasy, Novel 5 for simplicity– 2006-2008):EST was my baby. It was a coming of age story about four Elven boys from different backgrounds that went off on an adventure to save their world. I had this novel in a critique circle for TWO YEARS, perfecting and tweaking every bit of it so it was perfect so I could submit it to publishers. In 2008 I was prepared to do just that but then Rimuldar came crashing down on my head…
Two side notes before I start the drama:
On Roleplay as a writing tool:
Note: I used to be a very big advocate of roleplay for honing characters and writing. Now I prefer to caution writers that are thinking about this. Roleplay is awesome because you have a live audience of other writers with unique characters so it allows you to develop your own in ways you can’t any other way. However..read on for why I think you need to be extremely careful with this:
THANK YOU:
I also found Holly Lisle’s amazing Forward Motion for Writer’s website (it's still here:https://fmwriters.com/fm/ though I haven't visited for years, I don't think Holly runs it anymore but I could be wrong) during this time which was just an invaluable resource for a young writer like myself. I spent the next several years honing my skills and my stories through a Fantasy writer’s circle for novels. I think I actually had The Chosen One in it at first but as things progressed with my friends and RP and things got complicated I switched to other projects that were less murky.
Side note: Holly Lisle is amazing as an author and also at giving back to the writing community. If not for her and everyone on that site I would not be where I am. So please check her out too (no I'm not sponsered! I'm just a fangirl...have a link:https://hollylisle.com/).
So if they come across this, thank you, all of you amazing people of that community and especially Holly.
Okay settle in for The long sordid tale of a dead world:
Rimuldar: (1991-2008, entirety: 2 trilogies, at least four standalone novels, 16 cross-over novels with one friend, and 17 years worth of daily role play through emails and texts either on my world or transplanting my characters into a new world, thousands of short stories).
I was a very sheltered home-schooled child with very overprotective parents. I still don’t know how I was writing all this dark stuff but I was. And then the internet came along and I made friends. Well one of them was another writer named Amy, who is my age, and we were both young and excited and didn’t understand how any of it worked so we wrote like 16? Novels back and forth through email of crossovers between our worlds over the next several years. Then we moved to roleplaying those characters.
Well as teenagers do we grew up. I was still stuck in my sheltered (abusive) environment and my friend grew up and moved on to adult things as she should have and that caused problems and we ended up not speaking for a while (happy to say we have made amends and are friends again though we don’t write together anymore).
Someone (I think it was Amy) talked me out of killing Ash and he became my main roleplay character for the next 18 years. Please note: Ash is a sadistic violent narcissist, sado mascochist, rapist, killer. Anything I found horrifying and terrifying I put into this character because Erik the good knight was supposed to kill him and defeat evil.
Well….that didn’t happen. He was more interesting than the goody two shoes knight and would inspire an entire horde of grown women to want to redeem him. He became my outlet for dealing with the real life frustration I had over my abusive situation and for some reason people got OBSESSED with him. I had one person tell me they wanted a life sized naked statue of him in their house, that kind of obsessed!
After he had successfully destroyed a number of friendships through RP I ended up making the mistake of roleplaying him with my best friend of several years at that point.
Please note: I completely trusted this person because I met them very young, they were quite a bit older than I was, we ended up in an abusive online friendship when I was a minor. The main point though is I had shown this person EVERY work I had done up until that point (which went into my mid-twenties?). I had at least two trilogies I was working on to get published in Rimuldar plus several stand alone novels (I remember at least three). Do not do this. I don’t care how much you trust your best friend.
In 2008 I met a new friend and they helped me see that the online roleplay relationship I had going on with the above mentioned best friend of 18 years, was an abusive one and I needed to get out. Which of course ended badly. That person I had trusted 18 years with every scrap of my writing turned around and had a hissy fit, said she posted every single one of my works online under her name for free (to destroy my first publication rights) AND claimed she would sue for plagiarism if I ever tried to get them published.
That’s right folks. 17 years of prolific writing, my entire life’s work, was stolen. I went on Forward Motion, explained my situation, and got told my work was forfeit because I was so naïve and trusting. I was advised I could still try to publish and I could probably even win a plagiarism case but that would destroy my career as a writer (because back then independent publishing was still kind of taboo).
I was absolutely devastated. And I won’t go into the evil that occurred from that person in her insidious quest to make sure Ash was never my crutch for my real life abuse again too (which in a way was even worse than losing my work).
I was also stalked by that person online for the next 10+ years.
So there’s the cautionary tale part of this journey, guard your work even from your best friends. And if you roleplay as a tool by all means DO NOT USE THINGS YOU WANT TO PUBLISH. Not worlds, not characters, not names, not ideas. Keep all of that separate.
I was two weeks away from being prepared to send Earth Shall Tremble out to publishers after polishing it for two years. And then I couldn’t because she had it.
Taboo (version 1: 2008 NaNo winning project):By the time I wrote Taboo I would estimate I had at least 30 novels started, and over half of them finished but most of them were in Rimuldar. Taboo was set in an entirely new world with my character Durriken and I had kept it mostly out of roleplay. This was the first version of Taboo which ended up being completely different than the final version.
Because of the fallout of Rimuldar and all of that I fell into a few years of just roleplaying with my friends being the only writing I could force myself to do. It was a very dark hole I had to climb out of when I lost Rimuldar and it took years of writing other characters in roleplay to convince myself I could move on without it and it wasn’t the only idea in my head.
Unspoken (2013 NaNo winning project, published 2019):Unspoken and Forbidden would not exist if not for my awesome writer friends supporting me and telling me how much they loved these characters. Durriken is my first love of my new world, he always will be. I created Bram on a whim for some roleplay because people liked Durriken’s backstory and wanted more (Diajik too). So in 2013 they encouraged me to write Bram’s backstory which was a prequel to Taboo (Forbidden, Unspoken and Taboo all have several years in between the events in the books). Bram is an audience favorite, he’s silly, he’s flashy, he’s a ray of sunshine in the darkness. So I did, I wrote his novel and enjoyed it, even though he’s much more toned down for the trilogy than he was just so he’d fit the world a bit better and because he’s young there.
I still wasn’t ready to try publishing again and I felt like Unspoken and Taboo were too dark for most traditional publishers to want to handle so I left that alone and they sat in my drawer.
Dreams Like Dust (2014 NaNo Project, 34k words):Dreams is an entirely different project that’s a dark fantasy about a young man that has the magic to walk in people’s dreams. I love this project and character, but I actually don’t know if I have a copy of this project anymore. It’s been a project I’ve been kicking around since I was young and this was my only real attempt that got anywhere on it. I’ll probably finish it one day so I don’t want to get into too much detail.
Failed to win that one and finish it so I dropped off of writing anything commercially viable for a long time again. I was mostly writing fan fiction shorts which of course aren’t saleable but hey if they were stolen it wasn’t as big of a deal. I did have quite a following among my friends but they were my friends.
Taboo (version 2: 2015 – 0 words)I made an attempt at rewriting Taboo for 2015’s NaNo and got nowhere. So back to writing fanfiction shorts I went.
Forbidden (2017 NaNo, published 2018)so in November of 2017, I was finally free of the horror that was my real life up until that point and doing much better so I gave it a real honest attempt at writing something for publication again. This was the prequel to Unspoken and Taboo.
Taboo (version 3: 2018, published 2018):I completely rewrote Taboo so it fit better with Forbidden and Unspoken because by this point I was a much better writer. I actually wrote two different versions, in two different point of views, entire novels.
Then once they were polished and I had all the covers and formatting and all that done I went ahead and self published the trilogy on Amazon.
Why?
I still think Fading Lights is such a dark trilogy in such a niche genre still that I would have had trouble marketing it to a big publisher. But I do believe in it. I KNOW there are people out there that will enjoy it and love it as much as I do. My friends and beta readers certainly did. And it has a message in it that the world desperately needs right now. Don’t give up, no matter how dark it seems.
Current Projects:
Restless Dreams of Darkness: (2018-current):Restless Dreams is my pet project. My novel I’m posting each week on this website a chapter at a time as I write it because I taught myself how to do that by writing new short stories and posting them online every day. I wanted to see the interest that marketing tactic would garner and give an example of my writing for free. I’ve been very happy with that one so far and I’ve gotten enough good feedback I will be releasing it as a paid book on Amazon once it’s finished. And I’ve always wanted to write a novel from the POV of a villain who is convinced he’s right and doing good and honestly that’s a hard concept to sell.
Regret (2019 – current, 40k words as of this post, hoping to release in 2020):Regret is my first attempt to revive some lost characters as something else. The main character Rubei is in a situation that is very like what I survived the first 35 years of my life though so it’s been more difficult to write then I’ve expected. It’s a dark tale of two young friends that get into a lot of trouble (one becomes an assassin and the other a pirate and they have to save each other). I’m excited to share this with the world because Rubei will always be one of my favorites among the crowd inside my head.
Sins of Man and Dragon (2019 Nano Attempt, 20k words):In all honesty I could have finished this with more effort. But when I hit this point I realized I was lacking something very important, motivation to keep my heroine from running away from one of my most horrific villains yet. I know how to fix it. But I have to start all over and rewrite those 20k words I fought so hard for. So I’ll get back to it but I’d rather finish Regret first.
Coming soon: Working Title: Lady-Killer (2020 project).Lady-Killer is the revival of at least one other lost character that happens as a stand alone project set 15 years after Regret in the same world, which is a dark novel about an assassin. Who was originally a vampire…but I don’t think he will be this time..I don’t know. Debating still. Who votes for vampire!? I need a better title though.
I have written a lot of things. At least 20 full length novels, a dozen half started novels, thousands of short stories. I have enough detailed characters in my head that I will never write all of their stories before I die. There’s at least 500 of them knocking around in there each with fully detailed unique stories that I know but just haven’t written.
Thanks for reading this ridiculously long rambling tale of one author’s misadventures. Best wishes for the new year!