Sub-Question:

Were there any specific stories that inspired you?

I love this story. To my younger self, it's a manifestation of stubbornness and serendipity that fits my books, in a way, but it also has two distinct chapters. I wouldn't exactly say I started writing twice. But at the same time, that's as close to what happened as any other description.

I've always been a worldbuilder. The different years of my childhood memories are marked not by milestones or school teachers, but by the little worlds I came up with to keep myself entertained in the pockets of dead space I found throughout the day. Little worlds upon little worlds. When I was nine, one of these prompted me to start making little animal figurines out of bits of wire, a hobby that quickly grew to take over my childhood playtime.

Now, during this time, I was also a voracious reader. I would finish a book a day given half a chance, and gravitated towards series because they'd keep me occupied for longer. Yet even as I aged out of middlegrade fiction, I never made the leap to teen fic... I never related to it, and was far too fascinated by the strange and wonderful worlds of my favorite middlegrade Fantasy authors.

The Redwall series by Brian Jacques

The Keepers trilogy by Lian Tanner

The Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer

The Tunnels series by Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams

The Inkheart trilogy by Cornelia Funke

Dragon Rider, also by Cornelia Funke

The Septimus Heap series by Angie Sage

The Silverwing series by Kenneth Oppel

The Airborn series by Kenneth Oppel

Tomorrow's Magic by Pamela F. Service

The Underneath by Kathi Appelt

Something about these always drew me far more than classics—even classics for my age—like Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Narnia, or Lord of the Rings. Kenneth Oppel in particular had a way of ensnaring my imagination. And though I never finished the Tunnels series as its storytelling went off the rails, it made a massive impression on me. The books and scenes I remembered and the books and scenes I loved weren't cute or empowering or relatable. They were dark, and they were weird. I loved the weird. I loved things that gave me chills. I loved ghost ships and gruesome, made-up creatures; underground cities that raised rats for food; glowworm lanterns and space-bending staircases and dragons trapped in stone. I loved half-spells that worked, but could backfire at any moment. Mutated deer turned to unicorns in the aftermath of a nuclear winter. The intersection of magic and science and grey morality.

Those were the seeds of what I write now, but that's the second chapter in this story.

The first was driven more by the likes of Redwall and Silverwing, though it already showed signs of what my writing would become. My world of wire creatures flourished for many years before spawning another. This one "clicked" far faster and spiraled rapidly in scope and scale. By the end of a year, I decided I wanted to record everything: about the older world, to preserve it, and about the newer one, to document all its wonderful complexity. And then, I told myself, if I ever finished that... maybe. Just maybe, I would start to take notes on the snippets of story I'd come up with while the characters of that world interacted.

Well, two months later, I was done recording the world. So in September 2012—I still kick myself for not marking down the date—I sat down with a pencil and a sheet of lined paper, and started writing. I'd never loved storytelling in school. But this was different. By the end of a page, I could already tell this was outside any of the story snippets I'd imagined before: the story had taken on a life of its own. In twenty-four hours, I had a new favorite hobby.

This book-world's name was Shelha.

I proceeded to write it in near-total isolation for the next four and a half years.

Only my youngest sister knew what went on in my books. I read them out loud to her, and got my first taste of a reader waiting eagerly for the next chapter to be written so it could be shared. I wrote by hand, filling three binders before it became clear that the roots of the story were no longer strong enough to support the branches. Editing had also become too hard. Four books into the series, I turned around and went back to the beginning, rewriting those early books from scratch, this time on the computer.

The new version was better. Way better. And finally, after years of friends and family members alike asking me what was in that story that took up so much of my life, I was ready to share. I sent out PDFs, shared Google Docs, compiled email lists. That worked for half a year, but it was cumbersome. Then that fall, I was on a co-op work term when a fellow student learned I wrote on my spare time. She asked me if I'd ever heard of a site called Wattpad. I made an account that evening. The date was October 3rd, 2017.

For me, who'd scarcely shared my work with anyone, let alone strangers, the traction my first book got on 2017 Wattpad was nothing short of magical. Then I found the forums. For the first time in five years—and already five books deep in my writing career—I met other writers. Writers I could learn from, and writers I admired. A number of these were part of a forums community called The Chuck Taylors (I'm told the reason behind the name was that it implied all members were all-stars), which intimidated the hell out of me. Still, I was determined. I was also starting to outgrow the same old discussion topics on the rest of the forums. Two years after I joined Wattpad, in December 2019, I finally worked up the courage to hop into the thread and join them.

Most people ignored me, lol. But did I mention I was determined?

Anyway, this is where the second chapter of my writing journey began.

The Chuck Taylors (or Chucks) was focused around daily discussion topics on writing craft and everything else to do with writing. It also had an extended community network. In January 2020, one community member started a writing-craft book club, with the book of choice being Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. This was the first time I had ever properly learned about story structure. I started playing around with a new story idea, which would go on to become I See Fire. I cleaned up my planning documents for the sixth and final book of my rewritten series, which I was writing at the time. I wrote, deleted, rewrote, deleted, and rewrote an experimental opening for Listen to the Water. But none of those caught fire. Not yet.

That same January, the head of Chucks started gauging interest for a cross-promotion campaign for Wattpad's 2020 Open Novella Contest. I had never paid much attention to the ONC, let alone participated in it. I had never written a novella. I had never written anything with human characters, and to be honest, the thought kind of terrified me. So when people asked if I would be joining that year's ONC, I said no. For a few weeks, anyway. Then the prompts dropped, and I made the mistake of reading them.

Two prompts grabbed me by the hair and combined with a third to give me the idea for Dreamcatcher. By 4:00 AM that morning, I had a cover, a blurb, a rough plot idea, and several pages of worldbuilding. I started writing three days later. And within the next two and a half months, I learned a few things. The first was that tropical Steampunk was fun. The second was that I really loved researching for it, and then applying that research to a plotted story. The third was that writing humans wasn't so bad after all. But surely I was kidding myself on the writing quality, right?

Dreamcatcher thought otherwise. It made it through the first round, then the second. It Longlisted. Then it Shortlisted. And then, to my utter stupefaction, it took home an Honorable Mention and exploded in growth and reader engagement.

My imposter syndrome took a kick in the teeth that day that it has never quite recovered from.

In hindsight, I know what happened. By the time I started that novella, I was several hundred thousand words past the million-word milestone already. My writing had drastically improved since starting my old series, but I hadn't noticed because I was still tied to that series, and all the plot and worldbuilding and character decisions that came with it. My writing craft had also improved. That gave me both the writing practice I needed and the tools to apply it, which meant Dreamcatcher wasn't actually an anomaly: it was my first indicator of where I was actually at.

Dreamcatcher wasn't the only book I started in the early months of 2020. I See Fire and Listen to the Water both got rolling, and I set aside book-queue ideas that would go on to become Belltower and White Crystal Butterflies. With knowledge of plotting under my belt, my writing speed had doubled. The rest, I can say, is history.

The nine-year anniversary of my first book whispered past in September 2021. So did its series' completion, bringing a close to both the oldest project in my repertoire, and what might yet prove to be the most influential nine years of my life. I can't think of any change that would trigger as seismic a shift in my writing perspective and productivity as that first breakaway from my old series did, but I'm sure this story will continue to evolve forever. This was just where it began, and then began again... here's to a future third chapter!

I'm just going to keep asking questions in all of these  😆

What is one book you read as a child that left an impression on you that you still remember?

If you're a writer, did you start on your own, or did someone guide you to it?

What inspired the first book you ever wrote?