This is a long story, so I’m going to break it up into two posts. I’ll post the second part on Wednesday, September 21^st.

I suspect anyone reading this is someone who already knows me, so you probably already know a bit about my writing journey. But since I’m writing this blog in hopes of reaching new people too, I think I should tell you about myself, and how I got to where I am with my writing.

Like many people, in my school days I wrote a lot of stories. Not just school assignments, but for fun in my spare time. I told myself I was going to be an author someday. In high school I got my first idea for a fantasy novel. I spent hours making maps and writing backgrounds for the different races of the world. Somewhere (I don’t know where) I’d picked up the notion that to write a novel, you had to write an outline of it first. I failed miserably at this. I had a general idea of the overarching plot, but how we were going to get from point A to point B was a complete mystery. After multiple attempts, I came to the conclusion that maybe this novel idea just wasn’t very good, and I abandoned it.

I did keep writing at that point, though as someone who struggled with self-esteem, that first failure sowed a lot of doubt in me. As I got older, the triple threat of university, working part-time and an addiction to online RPGs sucked away my time and my drive to be creative, and I wrote very little. It was during this time though, when I was about 20, that I got my next idea for a novel.

It came to me while I was on the bus, heading to class. Half-asleep, headphones on, I was listening to “Resurrection” by Moist on my Discman. As the song reached its electric guitar climax, I suddenly saw a dark-haired woman dressed in white robes. One of her eyes glowed blue while the other glowed white, and above her in the night sky hung two full moons, the same colours as her eyes. All around her was the chaos of battle, but it stilled at her appearance.

I had no idea who this woman was, what was going on with the moons or her eyes, or who was fighting all around her. Those things came to me over the next few weeks, as I got more and more glimpses of her story and world. I made notes of all the scenes that came to me, and it became clear that I had a novel here. Unlike the one I’d come up with in high school, this time I was sure it was a good idea.

I tried to just start writing it, but quickly became overwhelmed by the scope of it. I thought again of doing an outline. I wrote down the scenes I knew in the order I thought they had to come in, and then again could just not find the connective tissue to link them. This time, it wasn’t the idea I doubted, but myself. I just wasn’t good enough to write this story. To my self-doubting mind, if I wasn’t good enough for this story, I probably just wasn’t really a writer at all. After all, this was two novels now that I had failed to even begin.

I put it aside, let myself get lost in video games, and tried to forget I was a woman full of stories to tell.

Will our hero get over her self-doubt? Will she ever tell the story of the woman with glowing eyes? If you know me, you already know the answers to these questions, but tune in Wednesday anyway for part 2.