I'm going to be honest. I'm the worst person you should talk to about writing a book. I never intended to write a book, but now I have four. (I cheated a little, but we'll get to that.) I will do my best to give you the abridged version of how the first book came about:
As my writing partner and I came to finishing up some RPG basics (world building, character creation, basic abilities, and upgrades), I wanted to create a few characters to test how the builds felt; if anyone was overpowered, if I could come up with interesting back stories/motivations, etc. I built three characters: a Tender named Linden, a Temari named Kharis, and a Cygnan named Shaw. Or Hemlocke. But his nickname was Locke. I'd figure it out later.
I had fun noodling background stories and personalities for a little while and settled in on two of the three characters as possible PCs. Without writing an entire post on Parallax splices and variants, I will quickly explain what a Tender and a Cygnan is. Tender: non-sentient customer service robot that uses holograms to appear as their customers prefer. Cygnan: glowy space druid. Now that you're up to speed, I'll continue. I enjoyed the idea of these characters so much that I wrote a scene starring Hemlocke and Linden that ended up at 20,000 words.
I showed the short story to my writing partner because he was the only one who would understand what was going on. I was a little afraid: this guy is a professional writer. He's sold TV shows to major networks. What would he think of my silly fan fiction? He read it, told me he loved it, and asked: do you want to keep writing this? And I didn't know how to answer.
What a strange question. Keep writing it... what did that mean? I had an idea and I wrote it. That's as far as it went, right? Apparently not. I was unaware that you could outline an idea, work an existing short story into a larger one, and turn it into a novel. But that's what happened folks. 98,000 words later, I had a complete sci-fi manuscript.
I had a lot of help. My amazing writing partner sat down with me, asked me questions, allowed me to write new lore for the universe, and helped me take something I loved and turn it into something I was obsessed with. I hadn't written anything since college, so he had to go full English professor on me. I wanted every note. I lived for notes and comments. Someone liked a thing I wrote? Enough to help me make it better? Was it possible to make something I liked entertaining enough that other people could like it, too?
And so it began. My novel spurred my writing partner to write his original idea for this universe into novel form as well. We read, edited, brainstormed, and plotted. It was the beginning of a global pandemic, what else could we do? The outside world made us sad, so we enveloped ourselves with a dystopian future. We wrote. And wrote and wrote and wrote. His book was massive, too large for a debut, but we wanted to intertwine the two stories anyway. We chopped up our books, shuffled them together like a deck of cards, and edited the whole thing again. Wrote new chapters, cut out dozens of others. It was a labor of love that took just about a year. We ended up with a trilogy. We refer to 'our' books sometimes, but honestly, it would be tough to pick out who wrote what at this point.
That's it. I made up some characters I instantly fell in love with, wrote a short, silly thing about them, and showed it to someone who liked it enough to help me expand on it in ways I could not have predicted. Now I can't wait to write every story about them and all the nonsense they can get themselves into.
It's certainly a similar theme I have read from other authors: write about something that you love, write for you and no one else, and you'll succeed. Do you want to publish your book? That's another story. But I'll talk about that journey later.
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