I love to write stories. I didn't realize how much I loved it until I was well into my thirties and I started writing stories with my tabletop RPG friends. We'd write from the pov of our characters in-between games and I'd get so into it, I'd stay up all night just writing elaborate life stories as backgrounds for the characters in my game all so I could understand them well enough to write the next line of dialogue in the conversation. I'd get so into it I wouldn't be able to sleep at night because I'd be thinking of new ideas for my stories.
But I really didn't have an audience. Gamers have lives and even though they had fun with the campfire conversations, none of them were putting as much into it as me.
Except Mike.
Our book started out as an RPG Mike designed to be played by writing within rules. Mike, my husband and I each created a character for the world. It didn't really go anywhere as a game because for most people, writing stories isn't a game, it's work. We had two people who wanted to write a story and one person who wanted to play a game. Eventually we dropped the game and Mike and I started trying to turn the whole thing into a book...and eventually, a trilogy of them.
Very little remains of the game. The names of the characters are the same as they were originally, and the premise of the world is, at its core, the same. Our characters' powers grew from the seeds of the powers they had in the game.
And so here we are, years later, and we've been building this world, building these characters, tweaking dialogue, and putting these poor characters through so much, and the first installment of the story we want to tell is out there.
Right now there are a handful of people in the world who are in on this universe we've been immersed in. The idea that I could have conversations with other people about these characters, that I can actually talk about this...
Well to give you some idea, the moment at which this all became real to me was when we got our first Amazon review. That was the moment when I felt all the emotions of being published. I skipped through the house to where my coauthor and my husband were playing Left4Dead2 and held it out on my phone for all to squeeeeee over. I'd been pretty stoic until then. Someone read the book and loved it. I was over the moon.
Which brings me to the title of this blog entry. Those of you who know me are going to faint dead away of shock because I am posting something other than cat pictures on Facebook. See, here's the deal -- I have it on good authority that if I want to write books for a living, I can't just sit in my office all day writing books.
Well crap.
So here I am, writing about how I feel on the internet. Scratch that, on a frakkin web page with my frakkin name in the url. How did it come to this? ::shudder::
It came to this because for all my love of writing stories, it is empty if no one reads them.
Update on the print version. The print manuscript will be submitted within the next 48 hours, at which point we'll be waiting on our proofs. Once the proofs pass inspection, we'll immediately post the print version for sale on Amazon.