I have wanted to turn some of my stories into books for a long time. I have a couple of professional writer friends that have given me the advice that if I want to be a good writer, I need to write books. Not just one. If I practice writing the same story over and over until I get it right, then I have gotten good at writing that one book. If I want to be able to write a variety of books, I need to practice by writing many books that are significantly different from each other.

So, I have a lot of stories I have made up and told my kids over the last twenty-plus years, and there is one that they wanted me to write more than any other. I decided to try it, and I made an important discovery. I didn’t know how to write books. I tried and it and tried it again and again and at some point, I remembered that bit of wisdom about writing multiple books. I decided to try a something other that that one.

But what to write? Now a side story. A few years ago, one of my daughters asked me a question about writing one of my other stories, but as someone starting to age a bit and having listened to way too much loud music as a young person, my hearing often gets creative. So what she said isn’t what I heard.

What I heard was “When are you going to write Dawn of the Second Darkness?” I was floored. What an awesome title! I repeated what I heard back to her and she was like, “No. That’s not what I said at all.” I was like, “But that is an incredible title!” and she said, “Well, yeah, but that isn’t what I said.”

So, I made a point to remember that awesome title, but never had any ideas for an actual story, and I didn’t really put to much thought into it. Back to the main point. I decided that I needed to write something I really didn’t care about too much, and I started going through my other stories to try and figure out what would be a good story to write. Nothing felt just right.

That same daughter asked, “Why don’t you write that one book you had that awesome title for?” It was brilliant! Only, I had no idea what it was about. So, sitting at the table with a bunch of my daughters one evening, I asked what they thought a story with the title ‘Dawn of the Second Darkness’ would be about. We brainstormed for a bit and came up with some basic plot points, but still needed a lot of details filled in. My youngest asked if she could come up with some characters and I figured , “Why not?”

I expected she would either give up or give a really short list without much details. What she actually did was provided with a large list of characters with backstories and roles and personality traits. I didn’t end up using all of them, and none of the characters stayed as she originally suggested, but key elements of their backstories survived, along with several of their names.

There are many other characters that made it into the book that she didn’t come up with, but that a preteen girl could come up with that was impressive to me. I spent the last part of October of 2024 making notes and thinking about what I wanted the story to be, and then in November, I started writing as part of my first attempt at NaNoWriMo. I completed 50,000 words on November 14th, successfully completing my first NaNoWriMo.

Then I got hit with writers block. The next 50,000 words took me until the end of December. I finished the book and was so proud of myself. Then I read it. Uuggggg!

The story was ok, but the writing was awful. I became a proficient writer as a graduate student writing academic level writing that could potentially be used in publications. It’s dry and boring and convoluted and filled with incomprehensible words and far to much passive voice. It didn’t flow at all.

Ok, so, maybe it wasn’t that awful, but certainly not what I wanted it to be. There were some major issues with it, however. There were huge holes all over in the timeline and in character development. There was a bunch of inconsistencies that just didn’t work. I ignored my friend’s advice and started a rewrite. It wasn’t that I wanted it perfect, just good enough to be enjoyable. It was a lot more work that the original writing, and life kept getting in the way. I finished the rewrite in May.

Still had big issues, the most glaring were that the prologue and the beginning chapters were almost painful to read. The first major character, who was supposed to be likable, was so awfully done that I hated him. I gave it a couple of weeks to just stew on it, and then moved a lot of the beginning chapters around and completely started over on the one character. I made a short outline that covered the chapters and what was important to know, and I was done with the book on the 21st of July.

I had found in doing edits that I kept getting carried away in the story and would forget to do the editing. I figured that was a good thing. Then, I decided it was time to publish it. That shouldn’t be too hard, right? Well, I just uploaded a fixed manuscript to KDP to fix the one I originally published that still had lots of issues, even after reviewing it several times. I have sold a couple copies and so far the few who have purchased it have told me they like it. Oh, and the story got split into 2 books after passing 200,000 words.

I hope to have Book 2 out in a couple of months, hopefully without any of the issues that Book 1 had when I went live at the end of September.