Debut Novel
Yup. I’m on my way toward the completion of my first book; The Exceptional Trunk. This one is the first in a 5 book series entitled The Legacy of Leithu. Currently I’m at around 50k words of the anticipated 75-78k for this first novel. It has been a story about 17+ years in the making and for the first time, the creative waters are flowing faster than ever.
The first 8-10k words appeared around 2007-2008 as a short story. It slowly grew from a quick idea to something worth a little extra effort. Over the next few years or so I developed it into 12-15k words. Then as quickly as it appeared, it slowly lost attention from me and my ever expanding reality of life as a father and a husband.
Somewhere along my path an adventure in education occurred. I attended school for an MFA, and though I never fully completed the education (I earned 85 of 90 credits; one thesis away), I had a very valuable nugget hidden within that school work. I had written an 80 page game design document for one of my classes. This document created a world, the quests, and the antagonists that the original story from years ago was missing.
However, this too sat in a folder on my computer for a dozen years. And then, the inspiration finally hit: What if I placed the characters from ‘trunk’ into the world of ‘D’?
The inspiration bolt struck down in late February of 2025. After thinking about the concept, and how to accomplish the blend, I felt I was ready to dive in. In late March I had the initial 17k words of a fledgling story I had already restarted 3-4 times with no path forward. I could never really break free from the circles of self doubt and revision edits.
I finally sat down in April with a goal of blending and rewriting. I worked elements together as best as I could and fleshed out an outline of the full story. I approached the new writing process in from a different angle. I started dictating into a speech to text program on my phone on my daily commute. I would then come home in the evening and edit/refine those 4-7k word chunks. The hose was open and within the first week I had grown to 30k words.
The process has continued very successfully and though story is not “written” the outline, ideas and core arcs are there for a potential completion of the full draft by May 1 2025.