So...why does an author without a book have a website?

As you can probably tell from my homepage, I don't have a single book available for purchase. You might be wondering, “Why even bother having a website when you don't have anything to sell yet? What's the point?”

Honestly, that's a valid question.

I've always wanted to write books. When I was younger, I would start manuscript after manuscript, convinced that this one would finally be the story I could finish. Unfortunately, I could never seem to come up with a plot that worked or figure out how to make all the pieces fit together. I cannot tell you how many unfinished manuscripts eventually ended up in the trash.

For a long time, I felt defeated. I started to believe that maybe I simply wasn't creative enough to actually write a book.

Then, more than ten years later, I met a woman who would become a very dear friend of mine. She had been writing for years and already had more than thirty published books under her belt. She's also an internationally bestselling author, so needless to say, she knew a thing or two about the publishing world.

She encouraged me to start writing again, so, I sat down and decided to give it another shot.

But she didn't just encourage me to write. She also gave me an invaluable list of things I needed to know as an aspiring author. And that's when I realized just how much goes into becoming an author.

It's about a lot more than simply writing a story and sending it off to be published.

This time, I had the tools I needed. I started by creating characters. Not just the main characters, but the people who would appear throughout the story, no matter how important or insignificant their roles might be. I gave them histories, personalities, relationships, and reasons for being part of the world.

Then came the world-building.

I started with a map of my kingdom. From there came cities, towns, farms, rivers, lakes, islands, and everything in between. Then came the taverns, inns, shops, and other places my characters would eventually visit.

For the first time, I wasn't just writing a story. I was building a world, and then came the biggest hurdle of all: The plot.

Over the past ten years, something else had changed. I had discovered Dungeons & Dragons. I still play every Sunday to this day. (Our current campaign is actually Star Wars-themed, but that's a story for another blog post.), and to this day, I am still completely in love with the very first character I ever created when I started playing D&D.

Her name is Raven. I just didn't realize it at the time, but I had created my protagonist. Once I had Raven, the stories began to flow.

Out of respect for the other members of my D&D group, I never wanted to write stories based on our campaigns. Those adventures belong to all of us. They are stories we created and experienced together, but Raven was mine.

She was a character I had created from scratch, and that gave me the freedom to take her somewhere completely new. I could give her a history, create her world, put her through impossible situations, and decide where her journey would take her. I could make her the heroine of her own story, or, perhaps, the villain. And that's how the Raven series began.

I may not have a book available for purchase just yet, but I'm getting there. This website is part of that journey, and I hope you'll come along for it.

When you eventually read my stories, I hope you don't simply read about Raven's world. I hope you feel like you've stepped into it. I hope you can feel the passion, imagination, and countless hours that go into creating every character, every location, and every story.

Because this time, I'm not throwing the manuscript away. I'm finally finishing the story.