Most writers (at least, writers who publish their work so that strangers might read it) are usually asked the same question: When did you start writing?
Unfortunately (or fortunately?) for me, a lot of the writing I did in my youth is gone. See, I grew up during a time when the internet (and even computers 🤯) weren’t around, or at least they weren’t as mainstream and affordable as they are today. I am an 80s baby. This meant that any of my writing that I did before my late 20s (when I was able to afford my first laptop) is gone. Some of the notebooks I wrote in, I’m sure, are stored somewhere in a box I have yet to unpack. But I would say 98% of my work is gone.
When I was little, my imagination ran wild. It also reflected a lot of what I was watching on television. Back then, my favorite show, because it made me feel a lot older than I was at the time, was 90210. And I also watched Days of Our Lives and Another World, two fairly popular soap operas. I wasn’t even a teenager yet but these shows shaped my desire to write screenplays, if you can believe it! The fact that I even knew what such a thing was at the age of 10 is still astounding to me. But as a teenager my best friend and I put our heads together and created our own primetime television show we called Safe Haven (or New Haven? I don’t quite remember which title we landed on…) and we wrote 12 episodes!
By this time I still didn’t have any sort of computer but I remember my mom had one at work. One computer shared between her and like three other employees. But whenever I got to visit her at work I would spend all day on it. I discovered Yahoo chat rooms (ah, I miss those days) but most of all, Microsoft Word. This afforded me the ability to take our handwritten episodes and convert them to printed paper. Thank you Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for teaching me how to type!
My college years were spent writing poetry. Emo music was my flavor of choice. It helped me express my angst while I was away at school dealing with friendships and relationships and all that fuzzy crap. Let’s just say I wrote a lot of poems. Some good. Some really bad. All of them I still have access to. By this time I didn’t own my own computer yet, but I had access to the campus computer room where I spent a lot of time taking my handwritten poetry and typing them up then saving them. I at least made sure, over the years, as computers advanced, to have hard drives and now I use the cloud to save my work.
Fast forward to the last decade of my life when I left screenplays and poetry behind and decided to “just write fiction stories.” Not just fiction, but fantasy! I wanted to write an EPIC! A Harry Potter meets Game of Thrones sort of story. It was gonna be HUGE!
By this time I’ve been out of college for a while. I have a steady job. I can afford to buy my first laptop, my first desktop, my first iPad. I had money to burn! I also discovered Twitch streaming and a teeny tiny community of fiction writers on there. I felt emboldened to start my fantasy story! I met one pretty amazing self-published author who already had nearly a dozen under his belt and some other writers who wanted to be more but never quite made it. I looked at the self-published author and said, to myself, “I’m going to do that.” And so, I set out to not only do what he was doing but to do it better and faster!
Inside three months I had my first vomit draft of a series I came up with. Meant to be a 6-book series with 5 novellas in between each book. Heck, if I was going to write a story that I compared to HP and GOT then it had to be long right?
Well, the series became an entire universe and that universe had me creating multiple trilogies and sagas and standalone books along side it. I had my very first “bible” that contained all of my ideas and outlines and everything that would go under the heading: STONEHAVEN.
I then got started writing my second book in this 6-book series. With that one written and under my belt, I now had to think about self-publishing. Lucky for me, this self-published author I discovered on Twitch showed all his work to us. He showed us designing his covers and formatting the interior. All of it. And I paid close attention. I even found books that were similar to what I wanted mine to look and feel like and looked up their information as well. Fonts, cover artists, dimensions of the book, etc.
Using Amazon was a no-brainer (then or now) and buying my own ISBNs so that I would never feel stuck to Amazon was also a no-brainer. Inside that year when I started I had my first two books with an editor and I had pre-orders on Amazon. The wheels were in motion.
While all that was going on I set about writing the first novella and the third book in the series. I wanted to release them in the order I felt they ought to be read. Which meant a novella between each book. So, even though the first and second were ready to go, the second would have to wait a bit. But little did I know burn out was on the horizon for me.
I pushed myself and I didn’t realize just how hard until I had my second breakdown. The first one was bad. But the second one had me in bed for days. Up until that point I was working 9-5 and then I’d get home and from 6pm - midnight I was streaming on Twitch, writing the entire time. 10k - 20k words nearly each writing session. And on the weekends I spent 12hrs each day just writing. I should’ve known that was unsustainable. But I was young and I had ambitions. I was going to write all 6-books and 5-novellas in a year and edit them all and publish them all at the same time! HA!
Suffice it to say, I got halfway through book three before the lights went out on that dream. I couldn’t do it anymore. The streaming, the writing, the planning, the editing. All of it just stopped and it stopped for years!
Why am I sharing all of this? I hadn’t thought about Stonehaven in almost a decade! Why now? Well, I have Substack to thank for that. Up until this point I never felt I had the time or energy to look back. I always had to look forward to new projects. Keep it fresh for my subscribers who, at the time, were getting monthly email updates from me. How would it have looked, I felt, if all I had to share with them were things I had written long, long, time ago? The concept was completely foreign to me.
NOTE: I want to mention that while I did, in fact, publish these books I’m about to share on Amazon, they were taken down some 5 years ago now so you won’t be able to find them. At least, I don’t think you’ll be able to find them…
Nowadays, I not only have time to write fresh new fiction stories that I share daily with my subscribers, but I’ve got time enough to start new projects, and most importantly, revisit old ones. Am I ready to go back to Stonehaven and finish what I started so long ago?
NOTE: I want to also mention that in the last decade since I walked away from the first 6-book series, I did return to try and start a different series in the universe. One I felt equally as passionate about. I will share more on this series another time. I just wanted to point out I didn’t completely abandon Stonehaven for this long.
To answer that question, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t try. And I can see no better time and space than here on Substack, with all of you, to do the trying.
I’m going to start by sharing the books that are already done. They are each 40+ chapters so sharing them weekly will take a long time, and a long time is exactly what I need.
TO PAYWALL OR NOT TO PAYWALL?
I haven’t decided yet, to be honest. Part of me made a personal decision with myself that I would put more of my fiction behind a paywall for my paying subscribers. But another part of me feels this story has been hidden away long enough. Perhaps it’s time to let it see the light of day!
It’s not perfect and my writing style has changed considerably since I wrote it. I’m sure I’d love to take a red pen to it today and make it bleed. But that isn’t the purpose of this. The purpose is just to reflect on my past and maybe, just maybe, if it’s well-received enough, consider picking up where I left off.
There is much “Behind-the-Story” to share about Stonehaven, this first series, and more that I’d love to also share and perhaps, if I make the chapters free, I’ll share this to my paid subscribers.
So, where do we go from here?
Starting in August (date TBD) I’m going to release a chapter a week of the first book. Between now and then I’m going to reveal stuff about the series and the first book. I intentionally left it out for now.
There is a new Section, aptly named, STONEHAVEN. If you want to receive these chapters and whatever else I decide to share about it, make sure you OPT-IN. There are 44 chapters and just over 91,000 words for the first book. I’m excited to share it with you.
Lastly, Stonehaven is not the only universe I’ve created or book I’ve written. I have other stuff that are just waiting for my inevitable return. And who knows, someday I just might do that.