The Forming of an Author

    What a ride!

    I feel like this whole author thing just kinda shot off like a rocket this past Fall and I’ve only now taken the time to look and see just how far up that initial burst took me.

    It’s enough to give me a giddy sense of light-headedness!

    Now, I cannot deny that there was a fair bit of buildup to this moment. I had kicked around the desire to write back before I got married, but had not really given any serious thought to what I would do with a finished book. In college, I daydreamed about a world and story concept that intrigued me (more on that in a moment) and even wrote a book that is still lurking in the murky shadows to see if pieces of it will step out to be piecemealed into a fresh work in several years. The Game also began at that time.

    These projects and ambitions got shoved to the side as I got into the working world and began the incredible journey of marriage to my wife, Kimberly. Things were great. I honestly forgot about writing for the most part. Just embraced doing life with my church and budding family, and reading books—a steady stream of them.

    Then Summer of 2019 came and I found myself suddenly in possession of some large chunks of time as the startup company I was working with at the time had to cut back some hours for a time. My wife and I were young, ambitious, and just naive enough to say rather than go find a part time job, why not just dust off that old book idea and crank it out quick to make some money.

    Did I mention naive?

    I wrote the rest of The Game at that time (parts 2 and 3) and began the edits. At the end of Summer I lost my hefty chunk of freetime and put the book on pause for a time, promising myself (and my wife) that we’d pick it back up pretty soon and knock out the few small details that were left before figuring out this whole publishing thing.

    The next summer when I came back to it I discovered that my edited copies had disappeared from google drive.

    Thoroughly disgusted, I put the project aside and moved on with life.

    I leaned in on growing as a husband, father, friend, and church-going-layperson. And continued to take in a steady stream of books and found myself fascinated with learning about the authors that wrote these stories.

    Apparently I was just filling up the “inspiration tank”.

    As Spring of 2024 was just thinking about getting into action, I found myself startled by a sudden… well… I’m not really certain what word to use. It wasn’t an urge or a desire, per se. But more like a certainty that I was going to go start writing. It was like I just reached capacity and then my mind was firing off on ideas and my fingers were craving a keyboard.

   It was a culmination of several things, but a large part of it was being so excited over what I was seeing other authors doing, hearing their stories of how they got into the career and what their take on storytelling was. At that particular moment I was very taken by some of the works I was reading by Brandon Sanderson and, more importantly, hearing some of his vision for storytelling.

    I reached back into the past and pulled out that old world building idea from college and began hashing it out again in a frenzy. At the same time, I tackled fresh edits on The Game with a zeal. By the end of August, I handed the manuscript for The Game to my wife for a final pass and cautioned her to watch out for literary shrapnel as I barreled straight into the first clumsy chapters of my next book, tentatively titled Founder’s Legacy.

    Wait. Don’t I mean Questline? That thing I mentioned in my published editions of The Game and even included a little teaser for.

    Here’s the mad ambition of it all.

    Founder’s Legacy is the big boy book I’m gunning towards. I am working at it. But I do not expect to finish it in the near future. That said, I wanted to make an earnest effort to be putting out something on an annual basis. (I, at least, enjoy it when authors are able to maintain something like that pace). I plan to write the draft for Founder’s Legacy in the first half of 2025 and then tackle a smaller story to publish by the end of this year. That story materialized as Questline—a slightly satire take on the ideas of a quests-based society. It’s a fun story that seems to flow off the keyboard.

    This brings me to actual details on progress. As of now, Founder’s Legacy, with consistent effort over the course of four months, is sitting just under 47,000 words (think the size of The Game). Questline, because I took a month to dive fully into writing it at the start to make sure I liked it, is already at about 10,000 words. I’ve had to slow my roll a bit over the last month, but I am pretty thrilled with this progress and am feeling excited about continuing to write my way towards those books.

    In an effort to keep from running long on this post, I’ll reign myself in there and plan to tell you more about these projects in my next update. Thanks for visiting the website! Feel free to invite others over.