On February 28, 2017, I posted, “This morning…I’m a novelist“. I expected for my first work to take about a year. Seems I underestimated by about a factor of two. ‘The Book of Ruein’ first draft was completed by Feb. 2019. It’s been through five drafts as of this posting and is with my inspiring editor, Danita.

Those first weeks of writing were heady, energizing times. Every morning, I’d burst into my office at 6AM to make manifest the story that had been bubbling throughout daily commutes, lunch breaks, showering, etc.

You might be wondering where Ruein came from?

Believe it, she was an original character role-played in our fantasy RPG group. The more I crafter her, the more I realized how versatile she’d be. A full-fledged anti-hero unlike most I’ve ever seen. Yet some of our players had a beef or two. There’s no way someone like this could ‘not be evil’. She’d never be able to function within a party of the goodly sort. That only made me want to flesh her out even more.

The more I delved, the more Ruein’s potential unlocked.

A gripe I have about popular heroines (mainly in the comic industry) is how many of them are knock-offs of their male originals; Superman/Supergirl, Wolverine/X23, Batman/Batwoman, Spider-man/Spider-Gwen, Captain Marvel/Captain Marvel. You take one successful character that harnesses the zeitgeist and just clone with an extra chromosome. That’s not to say they’re not capable of being entertaining. Yet, the core pathos that drove people to love the original becomes immaterial.

I’d rather bring into being a woman with her own pathos. She becomes who she is not as a reflection of what the other gender has done, but because her story―her character speaks whole-cloth for herself.

I hope you’ll enjoy the adventure that my wonderfully supportive readers have already discovered.

We are just getting started.