I always thought I’d write an epic fantasy series. I was going to be the next J.R.R. Tolkien. Or something.
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In junior high, I created a world. A friend who was also interested in fantasy helped with the map because he wanted to write some stories in a different region of the world. It was one part awesome and three parts ridiculous. (Seriously. There was a country named Paulania, because the king’s name was Paul.)
I wrote stories where kids from our world traveled to this one (Narnia? What’s that?). Some of these got typed on the manual typewriter I mentioned in the last post. Most were hand-written in spiral notebooks.
When I got older, I thought the world and much of its creation still held promise, but the stories needed major changes. First of all… these kids from our earth didn’t add ANYTHING to the story. Why did I even have them there? (Oh, yea. Narnia.) I ditched the kids and went back to writing just the world’s residents.
This novel was started, abandoned, started over, abandoned, completely re-written, lost, started over, and abandoned… maybe not in that particular order. Eventually, I used the setting and basic plot as part of a RPG campaign that went pretty well. I even considered re-writing it again with elements and characters from that campaign.
Because this was what I was supposed to do, right? Epic fantasy! It’s what I had been working on my whole life. But… it just wasn’t working. Ever. No matter how many times I tried, it was still too derivative, too cliche.
When I finally published a book (self-published in 2015), it wasn’t even fiction! I wrote an Advent study guide, primarily for my family and church friends. That was NEVER on my radar of what I would write, until it actually happened.  (link)
However, the exercise of completing that small project gave me the motivation and encouragement I needed to get back to writing in general. I toyed with a number of ideas over the next year, but nothing seemed to click. I began to lose motivation again.
Then… mid-October last year, I got a bizarre image in my head. I began to wonder about it, and before long, an entire world and storyline exploded out of it. I wrote down a lot of ideas and thoughts and even wrote a few pages.
I was browsing online and saw National Novel Writing Month for November. I had seen it before, but never really considered it. Now I did. It was a challenge. I had an idea that might work. I needed motivation. This was it.
I wrote a novel. Full-length. 76,000 words. (50K during Nov., to reach the goal, and the rest added in early December.)
But it wasn’t epic fantasy. It was YA fantasy, told in first person point of view. This was totally different from anything I had written or had planned to write. It wasn’t even traditional fantasy – the story contains modern-day elements and even some sci-fi pieces.
Yet it works. I’m actually quite proud of it. After lots of editing, revisions, and feedback from beta readers, I’m now in the process of searching for an agent.  But that’s another story.