I have been writing stories since primary school. My earliest memory of this was circa age 8: I was running around the playground, "teasing" bits of my epic (5-page) story to other kids. A teacher actually let me read it out at an assembly.
That story may have been terrible, but it was a start. It certainly proved that I've always had a thing for vivid images in my writing. I wrote a couple of poems, and it was around here that I started world-building. I called this 'verse The Seven Realms, and, true to my Inspiration, I had maps upon maps, I had lore, I had extensive multi-millenia-long historical timelines... That original book, and several others, is sitting on a shelf by my computer right now.
Now, that particular version of The Seven Realms doesn't even remotely exist anymore. But it was around age 11/12 that I started writing the novel that I'm in the process (finally) of tidying up for publication. (See below.)
This is a wee series I started writing on a whim while taking a week off work. I wanted to write a random piece of fluffy egg-fic (which I did), but then I realised that I liked these characters enough that they needed more adventures.
Prince Rogerius, exiled from the palace, needs to rescue his sister. When a fairy looking for vengeance offers him a disguise, he has no choice but to take it—but what will it cost him?
Exiled Prince is a 6700-word short story, featuring gender-bending, bloody revenge, and a f/f romance.
I started writing something called Guardians of the Citadel at high school, roughly age 12. I still have the 4 exercise books containing the original (pencil) draft. This first draft is basically unrecognisable now: most of the main characters have the same names & occupations, that's really it.
Draft 2 hewed fairly closely to the original, while Draft 3 (started my first year of University) changed it noticeably. But it still wasn't the story that I'm finalising at the moment. It required two major background changes:
I had another entirely unrelated universe, conceived of at high school, which involved (crucially) hopping between multiple worlds. A particular civilisation had built a giant city made of mile-wide stone tiles that moved through the universe, and it left tiles here on there on different worlds as it passed. I realised that I could make the setting of my novel one of those worlds. This changed the focus, the nature of certain entities, and the villain specifically.
While I was working on Draft 3 (which I never actually finished, tbh), I figured that it would be #goodrepresentation to have more female characters in my story. In the unfortune tradition of a lot of 20th-century spec fic, I'd defaulted all of my characters to male. Out of my 3 protagonists (at the time), I wanted to keep the two wizards male (because I had already decided to wangle in a one-sided gay crush), and so I picked the teenager from Earth.
Once I switched that character over to Abigail, I found that she came to life when I wrote her. She felt more lively, and she had more character, if you know what I mean. (Also, it might count as foreshadowing of my transition a year or so later lol.)
With those changes in place, a workable narrative came together, nominally Draft 4. When I found myself unemployed in 2021, I spent a solid 6 months editing it into something coherent (and changing the title), and then promptly put it down & started working on a sequel of sorts (based on a fragment written in my last year of high school). That's still a bit of a mess, really, but throwing Abigail into the mix is helping provide a focus to it.
Last year, my wonderful wife Jordon (who is a professional proof-reader and editor) had the time to sit and read through my latest draft in its entirety, and provide a lot of excellent commentary. A bunch of little tweaks to make, and a few character-arc adjustments that I still need to work on. But once that's done, watch this space!
