How I came to write this book

Hello and welcome to the first in a series of posts examining the chapters of A Wizard and Her Daughter! The goal of these posts is to share more about what I was thinking when writing each chapter, what the goals were, inspirations, and occasionally some tidbits that didn’t quite make it into the chapter but might be explored in future books following our family.

As this is the first post, however, I wanted to start by talking about what brought me to writing this book at all.

I’ve always wanted to be an author, for as long as I can remember wanting to do anything when I grew up. My family were all readers, and books seemed like one of the most amazing and magical things in the world. It certainly didn’t hurt that one of my favourite books (D.E. Stevenson’s Five Windows) featured a little boy that was quite a lot like me growing up and becoming a moderately famous and fairly wealthy author. I enjoyed writing (once I got to keyboards, I was infamously terrible at handwriting and have alas only gotten worse), when I could write about something that interested me, and I had (and have) pretty wide-ranging interests.

But fantasy kept calling my name. I never wrote anything terribly long, but I would shoehorn my way into writing about it in school assignments, write up backstories for RPG characters I was playing, the usual. Nothing terribly serious, and my few attempts at writing a book (interestingly, always the same book: The History of Manners, which was to be a multi-generational study of the evolution of manners in a historically-inspired setting, with one generation coming up with a social convention, the next using it in ways the first never imagined, and the third abusing it and perverting its original kind intentions in a way that requires the cycle to be started anew) never advanced far, as I was determined not to make the kinds of mistakes that always vexed me in poorly-planned out fantasy novels, but daunted at the idea of planning them out to the degree needed. I blame Tolkien for setting the bar so high, really.

And then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked my friend Kyle introduced me to Battlemaster. We had just finished up our crucial final exams in high school, and for reasons to do with the sometimes-tense negotiations between the International Baccalaureate program we studied in and the main school administration, this left us with a couple of weeks before school officially ended with a sudden wealth of time on our hands. He had found this interesting text-based online medieval RPG, and thought I should come join and help his realm out. I readily agreed, but for reasons didn’t actually get the name of the realm he was in, so I made a character, picked the first realm in the list, and figured I could make a new one after he told me the realm.

Well. He never did get around to that (he dropped the game for a different diversion after a couple of weeks), but I was hooked. I was finally able to be a pseudo-medieval Knight in Shining Armour, and I quickly dove into making Damian and Darkwind (yes, I know), half-brothers sworn in service to Abington, one the golden boy and heir to his house, and the other a bastard son only allowed to train as a knight because of Damian’s deep love for his younger brother (yes, I know), both struggling in a titanic war of what they perceived as Good vs. Evil despite Damian’s boundless optimism and Darkwind’s (theoretically) endearing cynicism and broody standoffishness (yes, believe me, I know).

What I quickly learned is that in Battlemaster at the time (and indeed, to this day, as the game is still around, though with far fewer players), your writing was everything. Writing was how you convinced the Realm Council, the Dukes, and other powers-that-be that you deserved a title. Writing was how you gathered support in the conclaves for your bold strategy to defeat the enemy. Writing was how you built friends, made nemeses, and created stories that spanned continents.

And, as I was to soon learn in some of the endless discussions on IRC (for those who don’t know what it is, think of it as a forebear of Discord), writing was also how you won lovers.

Because it was in those fast-moving discussions among the most-dedicated, hardcore players that I met Kelley. And over the course of months and years, IRC, more than a couple sets of characters, two in-game weddings (one of which lasted for a week and involved themed events each day and foreign dignitaries, as we were powerful indeed in the ancient lands of the Far East), and quite literally countless hours of writing together, we fell in love, and got married ourselves. That’s a whole story of its own, but what is pertinent today is that I spent many, many, many hours writing. I once estimated that I spent ~35 hours a week on college and associated work, and ~45 hours on Battlemaster, of which probably 85% was writing. I played with that level of intensity for a good five years, and the math on that gets me to well over my 10,000 hours to become a theoretical expert.

In this environment, you needed to be fast (to get your thoughts in before the conversation moved), precise (because typos were often relentlessly mocked and used by others against you in the war of ideas), but most of all, engaging. If you wanted to win, whatever your definition of “winning” might be, you had to engage others. They had to want to play with you, in essence.

The rules were clear: Write well, and get the accolades, fame, support, friends, allies, and darn near everything else an adolescent might want. And I have always been very, very, very good at learning how to excel at the rules.

And then, I got a job, with a punishing commute, and then the usual rat race of advancing to a point where I could live the kind of life I wanted with my wife and stepdaughter. I had to quit Battlemaster, and it was hard. I stopped writing darn near anything more fantastical than “Please see attached document and confirm receipt”, and knuckled down on my career.

But, as these things do sometimes if you are lucky and can find the right niche (and do very, very, very well at playing by the new rules), I Made It to a good job and house and comfortable life. And as gaming picked up, and I had time and energy to focus on the old writing itch, Kelley kept poking me to write a book, not just elaborate backstories for a level 1 character.

I gave another abortive stab at The History of Manners (which made it a whole page, the second-longest bit of writing I managed there), and then at my lovely wife’s suggestion once again, I started thinking about writing in terms of bringing the mountain to Mohammed, since this particular Mohammed was very much not making it to the mountain.

And we talked about how in Battlemaster I had done great episodic work, almost always writing in one sitting. We had been watching All Creatures Great and Small, and talked about how there was such rich character development and story, and comforting low-stakes. And how we always knew that it would be all right in the end. And we talked, and noodled around on ideas, and then quite suddenly the opening scene from what is now the book popped into my head. Hannah and Leyla setting off to name the trees, waving goodbye to Ciaran. And I went and wrote the first chapter, and realized I could write many more chapters of this local village wizard and her daughter setting off each day, solving problems that were unusual and strange (rather like a certain Excel Wizard around an office...), and then always coming home to a warm, safe, loving home at the end of it.

Something I could write. Episodic, so I could sit and write a chapter all at once. Building up characters and their world through how they handled the situation in front of them. A pseudo-medieval fantasy setting (though that changed quite a bit as I wrote further). All things I knew how to do. All things I had honed.

There were more twists and turns in writing and publishing, but that’s the tale in how we ended up with A Wizard and Her Daughter. Next time, examining the first chapter!