Wait, you’re an author?
Pretty freaking pretentious huh? Calling myself an author when I have, as of yet, never been published. I’m going to guess that some of you reading this will, or already have had this reaction. Which is fine. Although at this point I probably know at least half of you who will visit in one form or another, and in that case, ouch.
I kid of course. But yes, for the purposes of full disclosure, I am not yet published. Anywhere. I have however written an actual book, which you will find a commissioned cover mock up for here. I started writing Eyes in the Dark in March of this year (2020). I finished the first draft in May. At the time I am writing this I’m currently about to finish what I am affectionately calling Draft 4.5. (The period there looks dumb, sorry)
I have actually tried to write books in the past. When I was a sophomore in high school, I slyly utilized multiple writing assignments over the course of the school year to drop several chapters of one over arching story. It was a thriller about a serial killer who turned out to be the abandoned daughter of the lead detective on the case. What little memory of it I have tells me it sucked rocks.
My second attempt fared, we’ll say better. In my early twenties, I Dungeon Mastered for a group of friends and co-workers. They were a creative group that included veteran players and novices alike. I had an itch to document their adventures, and actually succeeded in writing about 5 chapters of high fantasy daring do! This was a much more focused effort that included proper grammar (by my standards at least) and as a bonus I even edited it a bit. But alas, it to fell by the wayside.
Fast forward to about a year ago. My kids were older (the middle one having just graduated high school) and we had just finished enjoying a visit from several family members from far away. Riding this wave of nostalgia, I decided to try tackling that whole writing thing again. This time, I picked a subject I had plenty of experience with. Telling the stories I had gained from 40 years of living life. This effort actually got much farther along than any of my previous attempts. Ultimately I lost interest I guess, but I saved these ones, and the Short Stories I have on this site come from that collection. (There are in fact many more to come).
So what ended up being so special about March? Well, besides a global pandemic that forced many of us to spend inordinate amounts of time at home. This time around the spark for writing came about very differently. My youngest and I stayed up late one night as she was no longer physically going to school. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, we took a very deep dive into the zany world of Bigfoot fan fiction. Point of View stories involving Bigfoot and the reader going on wacky and sometimes tacky adventures. That in and of itself was quite the journey. But somewhere along the way, our conversation lighted upon the fact that having been a Dungeon Master for over 20 years, I’ve told (came up with) hundreds of stories. It was an angle I hadn’t previously looked at writing from. If you lumped together all the adventures I had written, or in many cases just come up with out of thin air, I could fill a few volumes.
Thus the inspiration for Eyes in the Dark was born. My plan is to query this book to literary agents, so I won’t go into great detail, but suffice to say it’s a story that involves sasquatches. Actually it involves lots of cryptids for that matter. Think Men in Black, but less aliens, and more Chupacabras. That first draft was an embarrassment of grammar and punctuation errors. But buried under that AP English teachers worst nightmare, lay a story and plot that I had created, and that has only gotten more and more developed the longer I’ve kept at it.
Am I an author? I sure am, as are the hundreds of others that I have met along the way. Giving me encouragement, celebrating progress, and above all, teaching me what it means. I hope you’ll stick around to see just where it all goes.