Writing a book was never a life goal of mine. It wasn’t something I stayed awake at night wishing I could/would do. It happened accidentally.
I was off work at the time, a way for my mental health reasons, and I found myself in need of a new project, so I started writing a new mystery game for our little home business. It was just supposed to be something fun. An alien-based game that took our players to a new world and had them work through a series of puzzles.
I started typing out the storyline with the intent of building puzzles along the way, but before I knew it, I was 10,000 words deep into a complex-looking game. It was at that point that I had to take a step back and question if this was more than a game. It was certainly too long to be a game, and it wasn’t even close to being finished.
I remember Kyle walking into my little craft room and asking what I was working on. I looked at him and said, “I think I’m writing a book.”
He barely even batted an eye before responding, “Cool!” That was all the encouragement I needed to keep going. He didn’t tell me that was crazy, or it was going to be really hard, or that I shouldn’t take on something so large. He supported me right from the get-go.
So I abandoned the idea of a mystery game, which meant I had to go back through the book and change the point of view from ‘I’ to ‘she’ and rework some of the details to make it less of a puzzle to more of a story. But that only took me an hour. From there, it was off to the races.
In summary, the novel didn’t start out as a novel. It started out as a game. Who knows, maybe one day it will be transposed into a mystery game, but for now, it’s the story of Alexia Harmon and her fight for survival in an alien galaxy.
