Author Chat:  How Did I Become An Author?

Author Chat: How Did I Become An Author?

Welcome to my blog! I hope you’ve enjoyed the social media posts so far. While I love Facebook and Instagram, I felt my blog was a better platform for these Author Chats!

Today I wanted to answer a question recently posed to me: How did I become an author? Simple, I played video games.

My journey to become an author is a rather non-traditional one. Throughout my adventure in academia, I found myself excelling at writing papers and stories. The first story I remember rewriting was based on Beowulf for an English IV assignment. I had great fun re-writing the story with a female protagonist. I even created full color maps and copied them on our shiny new full color printer for an appendix. I later used that same piece as part of my college entrance portfolio. Perhaps this moment was the seed that would later bloom into my authordom. Or maybe it was the video games?

Flash forward about eight years to my time as an avid RPG gamer in a guild on Guild Wars. The guild had an assignment to give your character a back story to be shared on the guild board page. I already had my characters, but did they have a back story? Enter the Guild Wars manual with all the story lore. I ripped apart the game’s history and used those parts to make epic backgrounds for my favorite characters. I received a standing ovation from my guild mates…even though the writing was rougher than a rawhide chew!

I called my first finished book The Secret of Genetic Corp X . I wrote it for fun based on these crazy ideas I had about clones. My first beta reader raved about the story. So, I started looking for ways to publish my story. Full disclosure? I like doing things to the beat of my own drum.

Self-publishing back in 2005 was wild and a very different animal than it is today. I wasn’t looking for a traditional publisher to tell me what to do or a vanity press to charge me thousands of dollars for a warehouse full of books. There were no eBooks and there were hardly any places offering publishing services…the internet was still a rather fledgling place for business. Yet, I was determined to see my works in a tangible format. I met my goal when I came across a place called Lulu and published both my poetry and prose books.

And that, dear reader, is how I became an author. OK, so, maybe it wasn’t just the video games! Looking back now, I realize it was a culmination of a lot of things. My love of mythology coloring sheets in the 7th grade, She-Ra, Red Sonja, Wonder Woman, Xena, Buffy, and MMORPGs. Of course, it is also equal parts disdain for not being able to find enough entertainment featuring strong female leads. I mean hey, they say create the entertainment you’d want to consume, right? What better way to achieve it than to write it yourself?

Don’t forget to pick up Dragons Within: Guarding Her Own to read about my #ScorpionsOfJustice. #DragonsWithin #GuardingHerOwn

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