Where it began

Sunlight poured through my window, over a desk that I didn’t use, over a shelf of lego castles and pictures of scenes from Harry Potter that I had cut from a calendar. Sitting on my twin bed, I was doing what I had been doing for years; starting over a new story. At twelve, I’d loved writing since I learned how to sting sentences together to create new places, people, worlds, but I’d never finished book. Just a pile of beginnings and they never were finished.

There was no way of knowing that book would be different at that time, no telling it would be the first one I saw all the way through to the end. Characters came to life and my story line fell aside as I wrote, none of what I had expected ever happened, and, when I was done writing my first book, I found myself staring at the screen of my laptop. I had written it in about four months and suddenly needed to write the second book, needed to continue with these characters.

Perhaps it was something to do with moving to a new state months before and knowing few people, perhaps it was just perfect timing, but suddenly I was finishing books. Books with the same characters. In six years I wrote six books, my emotions torn to pieces at times as characters came into my life and were ripped out of the pages again. Soon there was a whole series and I was staring at them, my pride and joys, loving what I had before me.

But they just stayed before me. I didn’t publish them, I barely edited the first, and they were in my bookshelf, no one else’s, with plastic binder covers. I went to college. I got a job. I fell back into being unable to finish what I’d start writing with the exception of my lyrics.

It was in 2019 that I realized I needed to take a look at myself. My current job had brought me there, really, and not because I was unhappy, not because I didn’t feel like I fit in. It was looking at the people I worked with, an amazing team discussing how they got where they were and how they had done it by following their passion. Sales, marketing, and a full team who did creative things like editing and writing scripts and I realized I hadn’t been true to myself as these people were. But where to start? I’d written my first book over a decade ago…

So a half a lifetime later I was there, staring at the first page of a first book and realizing that I was twelve when I wrote it. When I was twelve it was perfect, it was a book, it was something I was right to be proud of. When I was twenty five, it was rough, it was unorganized, and it needed overhauled to be published. The thought was daunting but I gritted my teeth. Everyone was doing what they loved so why not me too?

I quickly found my editing turning into deleting more than just words but sentences, and then paragraphs, then I was highlighting and removing pages as I plunged in. I was caught, again, in the magic of writing, meeting my characters again in a way I never could have the first time I wrote the books because, this time, I knew where it was going. I knew the last page to the last book in the series.

Between October and January I edited and rewrote over four hundred pages. But that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t put it on a shelf again, despite how terrifying the idea of putting my heart and soul out for the world to see and judge was. I pushed forward. It was my family who helped me edit, my boyfriend who helped me find my perfect cover, and my twelve year old self who created a world I could fall in love with all over again.

The first book of the William of Alamore series was published by March 1st 2020, almost exactly thirteen years from when I had started writing that same book the first time.

It’s not easy, realizing your work needs work. It was sleepless nights and early mornings, writing as much as I could before rushing to my job that paid the bills. Nothing ever seems to be easy if it’s worth having, right? And let me tell you this; it’s only worth having because you have to work so hard to achieve it.