In the many years of play-testing what is to become the 'Codex Druidum' I had come to develop many ideas for stories, many, and after a chance encounter with who became my film script agent for Hollywood in 1998 the process began. He asked me to write a script, so I did in three weeks. It was a sudden inspiration but one that I have found to be ingenious in the following years. I called it 'The Girl with the Rainbow Eyes' and it involves a girl named Ana who will find herself caught up in an ancient war in Faery between the Faeries of Light and Darkness.
I won't give the story away here of course, but I will say that it is a work of art in places. One I am proud of and wanted to see in movie or book form someday. The script sits gathering dust (Hollywood takes FOREVER) but I decided to write it as novel, my first novel ever written. In the past I tried to write but could never get passed the first few pages before burning out. The art of writing seemed impossible to me at the time. I had hundreds of original stories in my head but wanted to capture that magic, the same we find in our games.
So I swore a vow to myself while in undergrad school that I would write something in the novel once everyday, no matter if it was just a paragraph at a time. I was going to write them taken from the script no matter what! Slowly after six months I wrote it all and by 1999 I finished it. Then I held onto it until 2008, almost ten years later before I felt like sending it to publishers and literary agencies. But after continual rejections (about 10+) and overcoming my own ego about it, I was humbled to realize that it wasn't my story, but it was HOW I wrote it. It needed to be formatted properly like a true novel or it wasn't going to work at all - ever.
The first draft was amateurish and sloppy, a shame to admit that I composed it.
After writing several novellas in the same fall of 2008 ('The Witch of Round Mountain') I knew that I needed to sit down and correctly write a novel, not just assume that I could do so. So by December of 2008 I jumped into the re-write of the novel, almost ten years later from the original first draft. As I was writing it I was feeling the writer in me transform and take shape for the first time. My new re-write was full of energy, life and color, and it was engaging to read. In the next three months I was eagerly writing on it every day after coming home from teaching my courses at the college. Progress was being made but I was feeling the pangs of burn-out and had to stop for a break.
A big mistake.
In the interim I decided to go with the writing flow now that I found it, and put my Steampunk Horror novel 'De Civitate Sanguino' into book form (but that is another story of its own). Meanwhile my Celtic adventure novel sat again to gather dust as it had since I first composed it in the late 90's. I should have finished it then while writing it but I didn't.
Now, years later from the spring of 2009 I am finishing it again. Finally. My pet story is going to see the light of day very soon. I have a chapter and a half to go and it is a BIG conclusion more improved from the first draft and the script version. In the re-write I have changed radically many elements from the old version and have it greatly improved.
My adventure modules echo this story intentionally, and the Codex Druidum will provide gamers with everything from the setting in game form. Now with the novel about to be officially completed after twelve long years I plan to give it to a literary agency and see it become a major published novel with one of the Big Six companies. Yep, the Big Six as authors call them. A scary step in my evolution as a writer.
'The Girl with the Rainbow Eyes', and its two sequels (and possibly a third) is about to be official and hopefully a serious deal. My other novels and series are with a slightly small press and without advance pay or an agent to help, it helped me start as a writer now, but this is about to go large if I can make it.
Once the novel is finished, I will thoroughly read it through, make its corrections and prepare it for an agency. It is the next logical step as a writer to me.
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