I wasn’t always sure what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I knew that I loved writing. I love books and good stories. It’s something I am naturally drawn to. We had big pieces of computer paper at my house, and I used crayons to write out a little story and draw pictures. Then I stapled the edges and called them books. Writing was always my favorite thing to do in school, especially if the assignment allowed me to unleash a lot of my creativity.
I love reading, but I could never seem to find a genre that I loved wholeheartedly. I jumped around to different kinds of books and series but couldn’t settle on anything. When I was in 7th grade, a teacher showed us a few minutes of “The Fellowship of the Ring.” I saw from when Frodo and Sam are going through Farmer Maggot’s corn field to when the Nazgûl show up in Bree. I had seen commercials for the movies, but they never caught my interest before then. I had never read or watched fantasy that much, but I fell in love head over heels immediately. It was like I discovered a piece of myself that I didn’t know had been missing. I watched The Lord of the Rings movies multiple times and zipped through the books. About a year later, I got an idea. All my life, I have created stories in my head. If my mind is not focused on something else, then I’m deep in my imagination. But I never wrote anything down besides my early “books.” This time, I did.
The tale was about talking horses in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. The idea came from seeing and reading about talking horses in The Chronicles of Narnia. It was a fanfiction even though I didn’t know what fanfiction was at the time. However, it was the first time that I was able to flex my creative muscles without the hindrance of a prompt or the rules of a writing assignment. I worked on the story for about two years before abandoning it. Even though I lost interest in that tale, I had caught the writing bug. I wanted to come up with a story that was more original and publish it.
Soon after, I had an idea for an original book. There ended up being two versions of it with some of the same characters. Aria was my heroine in both. One iteration involved her entering a fantasy world from the real world, and in the other, she was already there. I think the portal fantasy one was my first idea, and then it was abandoned in favor of the other story. Both were the classic battle of good versus evil against a dark lord. This is when I came up with Jayce, Garne, Landa, Landaro, Haven, a few other characters who I can’t name because they would be spoilers, seer wolves, and wierllings, although wierllings were originally a bit different. I really thought I had something, and I worked on each story all throughout high school. I was going to write and publish my own fantasy series.
At that time, I had no idea how the publishing world worked, but I still wrote my heart out. The only incident was when my flash drive crashed, and I lost a chunk of the second book in the trilogy. Always press the safely remove hardware option before pulling a flash drive out. My desire for working on the series lost some steam. After I graduated high school, life happened.
College began and I had almost zero time. My life began to fall apart. I was extremely depressed, and it took months to climb out of that dark pit. Writing that didn’t fall into the orbit of essays, research papers, or discussion posts was completely abandoned. I still wanted to write a fantasy series, but I had no new ideas. When I looked back at them, I realized that my other ones weren’t as original as I thought they were, and I wanted to come up with something fresh. But I had lost my creative spark.
I have been an avid reader of fanfiction across multiple fandoms for many years. In 2014, I started writing a fanfiction that I planned to post online. I was very nervous. The only people I had shown my writing to before was just my friends. In this situation, I was going to be writing a story and putting it on the internet for strangers to read. It ended up going better than I expected. My writing skills at the time still needed improvement, but I received so many nice comments. My passion for writing reawakened, and my confidence in being able to create entertaining stories grew. I frequently stayed up late working on fanfics until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I remember having the feeling one day that if I could write for a living, I would be so happy.
I wrote until the darkness of mental illness returned and once again extinguished my passion. Oddly enough, it would take over a year of suffering and two nightmares to win it back stronger than ever before…