Cover Art by Jason Pedersen
Welcome to my attempt to improve my Tuesday posts. I’m going to look back at each of my books and end with a Questions 3 finale. Best place to start is with Legends of Windemere: Beginning of a Hero. This was Volume 1 of my first series and is currently on Amazon as a FREE eBook.
Where to even start with this one? I created the foundation for Windemere and the rest of my series with this book. Luke Callindor was introduced as the ambitious, reckless hero who was in over his head. Fizzle showed up and might be considered the mascot of Windemere entirely. So much happened in this book to get the ball rolling and set up a 15 Volume series. There was a lot of juggling, but it didn’t feel like much of a challenge at first. Worked on this book for a little more than a decade before self-publishing on Amazon in 2013. I can’t even remember most of the sessions since I’d gone through so much during that span.
As much as I love this book, I don’t think I can ever read it again and it definitely shows my newbie status. A big reason for that is because I was so new to writing that I thought everyone knew better than me. So, I would take every suggestion to ‘improve’ Beginning of a Hero and it was turned into a mishmash of styles. I think the only tip I ignored was to change Luke’s first name to something else since Luke Skywalker existed. Nothing fit him, so I stuck with it. That should have taught me to trust my instincts, but I kept mucking around with my writing style. When I decided to try my luck with Amazon, I looked at this book and was horrified by what it turned into. It took me 3 months of daily work to get it back to what I felt was closer to my style, but I still see some shaky areas where I might have been listening to others on some level. Am I still proud of it? Yes, but I will always remember the brutality that I put this manuscript through due to my own lack of confidence.
I wouldn’t try to rewrite it either. That crossed my mind a lot, but I was worried I would lose the parts that came out really well. Going back to the drawing board because I listened to too many people seemed wrong. This is why I did editing run and editing run until I was happy with the final product. I think having a book like this out there helps me see how far I’ve come too. When I’m having imposter syndrome moments, I can look at Beginning of a Hero and see how I’ve improved. I know many authors who junk their earliest works and pretend they never existed. That doesn’t suit my personality where I like looking back to see how far I’ve come. Our past is what makes us, so why bury it?
All that being said, this book taught me how to transfer game events into a book. Dice rolls tend to cause unexpected twists, but you can’t have that occur in a book without it throwing off the flow. So, I needed to list the big events that were going to occur and see how I can make them fit. I did this a lot by making sure characters had the proper flaws to explain their successes and failures. One of the reasons Luke Callindor is so reckless is because I needed to show how he could make terrible mistakes and unexpected victories, which happened due to the dice. He became a character who depended on luck just as much as skills. That was born from needing to transfer events from one medium to another and this book is where I learned how to do this.
Overall, this book will always have a special place in my portfolio. I mean, it was the first one I really got to publish and promote. The first one to get on a Top 100 Amazon list and the first one to earn me a royalty check. Needless to say, Beginning of a Hero had a lot of milestones, which is to be expected.
Questions 3:
- Do you ever think back to the first book you wrote?
- What do you think about authors taking all advice given to them?
- Do you enjoy Coming of Age stories? Why or why not?
