My six-year-old loves DanTDM, and after the birth of baby #4 I’ve been keeping the older three pacified with hours and hours of his videos while I’ve been postpartum. It dawned on me that he’s popular. Mind you, I knew that when we first found his channel over a year ago, but now he’s, like, popular.
I’ve started wondering what it would be like to have that many fans.
Of course, the thought of going on tours and talking to lots of strangers is a very off-putting idea for me. Invisible introvert here. That’s why I write. NTY for that one.
But what if someone drew fan art of my characters? What if someone read every novel I ever write? What if someone related to my story?
Just one person who isn’t somehow personally connected to me enjoying one of my novels would be really cool.
If I were to write Fade to White today, it would be a very different story. For starters, it was written before I started listening to bands like Within Temptation and Kamelot.
I’m not posting the novella because I think it’s good — it’s a snapshot of how I used to be. When I look at the story, I can see the battle between who I was and who I thought I should be during a pivotal moment in my life. Fade to White was written by the girl who went to college, because everyone told her she should.
I am now the woman who said “Fuck you, it’s my life,” and made my own choices against enormous amounts of criticism. Who knew that random strangers would be so invested in whether or not I had a college degree? And that was only the beginning.
Quite a few plot events happened because I thought they were the sorts of things that should have happened. Characters are rigidly righteous because I thought that was how protagonists should be. The romance is slow paced, because I was told that was how all relationships had to happen.
Nowadays my definition of ‘good’ is more fluid. Would a contemporary Tryne become upset at Jerek for being Nosaj’s heir? Probably not. She would likely conspire to use him as the perfect inside man.
The characters would be far more interested in flat-out revenge.
Insidious, convoluted, and dark.
The ending would be completely different, but we haven’t posted that far yet.
Which is kind of funny, because I have always loved books. I wrote and illustrated my first when I was just in kindergarten, and kept the practice up for my entire life.
We started out normal enough when my oldest was a baby. We got a few children’s stories, and I read them enough that I could recite them from beginning to end without any prompts; my daughter’s absolute favorite book was simply titled Water Animals and consisted of pictures and names of things like dolphins, fish, and a polar bear for good measure.
That all changed when baby #2 came along.
My oldest started tearing apart books. Water Animals was shredded to pieces, so I taped it together as best I could then tucked it away somewhere safe (it will probably be years before we find it again). After giving her some time to adjust to having a younger sibling, we bought more books and to my dismay those were also torn up. Several months later, I mentioned to a neighbor that we didn’t have any children’s books, and she gave us a few that also met the same fate.
I was tired of cleaning up the mess, so I gave up. No more.
These days the children and I snuggle up with our Nintendo 3DS and read video game dialogue together.
As I’ve been reading the Fade to White chapters that I’ve been posting, I can’t help but find it jarringly jumpy — like most of what was in my head when I wrote it never actually made it into words. I want to go back and smack my 19-year-old self then tell her to stop reading so much manga.
Maybe at some point in the future I’ll rewrite it, because the story itself is cute. Or maybe I’ll be too engrossed in other projects to care.
It has dawned on me that thus far, I’ve been painting myself as a ‘generic author.’ Part of that is my compulsive need to stay secretive, especially since I have a book in progress and I don’t want to reveal much about it until its ready. But that doesn’t mean I have to be generic!
My favorite genres are:
Gothic romance
Dark fantasy
Horror
My stories are usually combinations of all three.
I am an eclectic pagan; I read oracle cards, burn incense, and talk to trees. I include a number of elements of spirituality in what I write.
When I was a kid, I used to pin my bright yellow blanket around my shoulders (the perfect universal costume, in my humble opinion) and play act having conversations with the characters from my favorite novels. I loved those hours I spent in my room, exploring worlds and “interacting” with Martin the Warrior and Prince Caspian.
One day when I turned ten, I got hold of some lined paper, picked up my favorite maroon marker, and started writing those conversations down. Truthfully I didn’t understand paragraphs back then, or quotation marks for that matter, but that solid block of text was the beginning of my dream.
As I grew, I joined Elfwood and Fictionpress, swapped stories with other teenagers online, took creative writing classes all through high school, and majored in creative writing in college. For me, there were no other career options — I was a writer.
Then life happened.
Somehow, the agonizing moments seamlessly blended into becoming a wife and mother of three, and before I knew it the better part of a decade had passed.
But you know what? Writing is the only thing that gives my life a deeper sense of meaning outside of the ordinary. What would be the point of all the pain and joy if those emotions stayed secretly locked up inside my own head? Sometimes it seems like it’s the only way I can peacefully live with the past.
I have my days of dark depression, when demons loom over me and whisper bleak things in my ear, leaving me too paralyzed to think. Then the sun shines again, I find a quiet moment nestled between games and chores, and I write.
By Autumn Rain 