Here be dragons..

Did you know that ancient cartographers virtually never used that saying on maps? I know right? Never meet your heroes I guess. In any event, I just want to say Welcome! It's been a long journey to get to where I am today, but to be honest, I'm pretty sure there's still a long ways to go. So I guess this first blog post of the official website for Sera's Arrow should maybe talk about the story so far…

Though I started working on Sera's Arrow in 2017, in truth, to get to the very beginning, you'd have to go all the way back to 1996. That's when I began working on a teleplay for a weekly fantasy tv series. See, this was before Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, and I had this crazy idea about giving fantasy an actual, serious treatment. Not Conan the Barbarian, or Hercules and Zena (not that I didn't love those shows - I did) but actual grown up people with grown up problems doing grown up things, but in a world with magic and monsters. But I've always been a completionist, so before I even began writing the teleplay, I started creating the world for those characters. And that, was when Athania was born. I spent months researching world building, and created a world populated by unique peoples, with it's own gods and deities, peoples, cities, politics, and magic. Will you find plenty of fantasy tropes and heavy influences from table-top roleplaying games in Athania? You bet you will. And I don't apologize one bit for that. I love high fantasy, and this was the world I wanted to create.

I eventually did actually finish the teleplay, and attempted to shop it around, but nothing ever came of it. And then life happened. I had a son, and then a daughter, and spent the next 20 years raising a family with my wife and making games. And the world of Athania went on a virtual shelf.

By 2017 I had been wanting to start working on a novel for some time, but I wasn't actually sure even what genre I was going to write in. For as much as I love fantasy, I also love vampires, and sci-fi, and cyberpunk - pretty much all speculative fiction. So as I'm pouring over how-to's and advice articles, I chanced across one piece of advice that hit me hard. It was..

"First you need to select your genre. Hint: You already know what it is."

And I was just like.. dayum, I do know what it is. Of course it's fantasy. And I already have a world I created to write it in. So Athania came off the virtual shelf, and I began working on the first draft of Sera's Arrow.

I finished Sera's Arrow, enlisted beta readers, took feedback, made revisions, hired an editor, made more revisions, had more editing done, and made more revisions still. And in 2019 I began querying for a literary agent.

But then we all know what happened in 2020. And with the pandemic in full swing, my capacity for rejection, well for creation at all, was completely sapped.

So here we are in 2024, and Sera's Arrow and the world of Athania have yet to see the light of day. But that time is done, and I am more determined than ever to see this through! The first step was to get this webpage up, so I can start sharing with you not only my journey, but what I have created so far. And I hope you take the time to peruse the pages here, and perhaps becoming as interested in exploring the world of Athania and the story of Eradorn and Celina within it as I am in sharing it with you. And if you are, please let me know in the comments below because I need that positive energy!

Cheers, and welcome again!