Origin Story

Last fall (2015) I heard about NaNoWriMo. It may have been for the first time, or not. I don't know, and it doesn't matter.

This time I did it.

I had been dabbling with a book idea in September or October. Before that, I had been making some maps. Before that, or somewhat simultaneous to the map making, I had been playing a long-running D&D game with a group of fellow nerdmigos.

While I'm telling this story in reverse, let me say, I didn't find my first group of D&D-playing friends until I was thirty. Part of me says that was too long to wait. Part of me says it was just long enough. You really don't know anything until you're thirty anyway¹.

So the D&D campaign took place in a setting one of my friends made up and another extended, and both of them described the terrain that our party was traversing, and I couldn't picture it in my head without making a map, and of course I did that Architecture thing once upon a time so I was already busy drawing one before they asked me if I'd mind including a bit more around the edges and before you know it, I'd helped make up a world².

And when I was drawing that world, it just came to life in my mind in a way that nothing previous had. I knew the history of the people, and saw all the incredible conflicts that divided them (or in some cases, united them). And I wanted to write about it.

Now, in general, writing books based on D&D campaigns is a terrible idea. The storytelling of D&D is wonderful, but is, by nature, organic and improvisational and not well-suited for the rigorous structure of a commercially viable novel (nor palatable short fiction). Go find an online writers group and look for the fantasy works in progress and I promise you'll be able to tell the ones that are a novelized D&D campaign.

So I didn't try to keep the campaign, but I kept the world.

This wasn't the first world I'd made up, but it was the best. And I needed to write about it. So I did.

I lumbered my way through eight chapters or so sometime that fall, and then I heard that NaNoWriMo was coming up, and I thought to myself, to hell with it. I'm going to write two thousand words a day for a month just to prove that I can.

The problem with that is that 2,000 * 30 = 60,000 (more than the NaNo Goal), but 60,000 words does not a non-romance novel make.

So I pushed on into December, and sometime a bit after Christmas (I think it was the first week of January, 2016), I wrote "The End."³

Ninety-six-thousand-words. For reference, that's about the length of The Hobbit, and is therefore A Real Novel™.

At that point, I was hooked.

Since then, I've been learning to write for real. Of course the first draft of that book wasn't great and the second draft was only a little better, but compared to the stuff I was writing in 2015 it was miraculous manna from heaven.

I think I'm getting better.