The Creation of the Objects of Inwit
Immortality Awaits began in August of 2007.
I had just turned 18. I was fresh out of high school and preparing myself to move off to college, and one day I was struck by an idea.
I was an amateur, a novice, and had tried and failed many times to write a captivating story I deemed worth telling.
I didn't know how to describe settings.
I didn't know how to develop characters.
I just had an idea I had to start writing.
I learned how to read when I was about three or four, and my sister was learning in her kindergarten and/or first-grade class. She would come home and practice reading to me, and I'd read her lips to learn the words, eventually learning all on my own.
In second grade, I learned what a paragraph was. My second-grade teacher said I was the youngest seven-year-old she had ever taught who grasped the idea of a paragraph the first try.
I tried to write enough good paragraphs to make a book ever since.
At the time when Immortality was in its very earliest of stages, I had a thing for fan-fiction, especially being a beginning writer, because it helped me focus solely on plot.
Character and setting development were way out of my league at this point, but I believed if I could understand the general formation of a plot, I could always go back and enhance the characters and settings later.
With that in mind, this novel began as a fan-fiction for Harry Potter. I spent about a month writing it out, but when I got 30,000 words in and realized I had only covered one of the four elements I wanted to, I thought maybe, at this point, I should start developing my own story.
Upon browsing through other fan-fictions, I came across one that was 296,000 words and the author had been working on it for four years.
Four years?!
296,000 words!
A little voice encouraged, “If you’re going to spend that much time writing something, why don’t you just write your own book?”
The browser was closed.
The fanfiction was deleted.
I had a story that, for once, I liked.
I decided it was going to be mine.
And BAM!
It took me about a year and a half to write the first draft. Then I rewrote it a couple of times, sent it off to an editor, and knew without a question this was what I wanted to do.
I also knew, though, that it lacked something -- which, in hindsight, proved to be experience.
When people say you need to write what you know and all of that, they’re certainly not lying! If you’re writing a fantasy book then no, you can’t “know” what it’s like to live in a different world, but you can sure as hell fictionalize your real life experiences and turn them into fantasy.
So, I had to fall in love to make my character’s relationships more believable.
I had to fight a couple of battles on my own to understand the battles my characters had to go through.
I had to go through life to realize my characters needed development, drive, purpose.
They needed to be relatable.
They needed to be real.
I was so scared that everyone was going to think I was crazy for talking to my characters. Well, they do. But who cares! Because when my friends who think I’m whack read what I write, they say it all makes sense. (It’s so nice to have friends to lie, right?)
And now, here I am. The First Edition of the book is out, though if you read this post you can learn more as to why I published it when I did, as well as why I'm choosing to re-release it. Apart from that, in essence, that's where it all began.
