Celebrating 10 years of being a writer

September 19th, 2024, marks the 5-year anniversary of publishing my first book, Seelie Princess. If that doesn’t make me feel old, the fact that I started this journey 10 years ago certainly does! Well, technically, I’ve been writing for close to 20 years. The oldest Word file containing a story that I could find on my laptop dates back to September 2005. Honestly, I’m astonished I held on to those for so long, but I’m glad I did. I’m certain I wrote stories even before then, though sadly that was before I got my first computer and those stories are lost to time.

2005-2014: A walk down memory lane

Back in 2005, shortly before I turned 13, I wrote about 11 short stories that were fan fiction of Hamtaro. Yes, that little hamster guy from the cartoon of the same name. Those stories were incredibly short, less than 500 words each, in my native language (German) and riddled with mistakes. After that, I moved on to writing Harry Potter fan fiction that hit nearly 30k words. My biggest project comprised six books heavily inspired by a very popular German children’s book series, which would probably qualify as plagiarism if I ever published them. I also started to dream about my own original stories and wrote my first fantasy novel about a boy who could turn into a dragon (clearly, that was during my Eragon phase). I managed a whopping 60k words.

Then I fell into a bit of a slump. Because I was stupid and listened to my classmates who made fun of me, I stopped writing in 2009 for about three years. I tried to write another story sometime around 2012 (contemporary YA romance) but ultimately abandoned that, too.

After a year abroad in the States, I returned home determined to reconnect with my writer self. By then, English had become more than a language I had to learn for school. I found I could express myself much better in English, and I began writing Mortal Instruments fan fiction. And then in 2014, I had an idea which would eventually become Seelie Princess.

2014 – 2019: The idea that started it all

I still remember my initial idea being far from the final product, so I looked through some old notes. And oh boy, am I glad I didn’t stick with my initial idea! This is the very first story hook I wrote back then:

18-year-old Kayla, who is descended from Native Americans, lives a normal life in her beautiful suburban house with her mother, her father and two younger brothers. As her home gets attacked and blown up in an explosion she gets almost killed. She is being rescued and taken to an unknown place where they inject her some mixture of vampire blood and the secret serum before she dies.

I guess vampires were still popular back then?! And don’t ask me why Kayla is Native American or what the secret serum is. I never went far with this story and it turned into a failed attempt of barely 7k words in total. My second idea wasn’t much better, and though I finally added faeries to the mix (and Fay!), Kayla was still a vampire. I didn’t do any actual writing for that one, just brainstorming.

I’m glad I didn’t pursue that idea further and instead started on Idea #3, which was slowly beginning to resemble the final story. Kayla is now a faerie, who lives in the mortal world with mortal parents. One day, she runs into Fay, Nooa, and Maeve (originally named Hailey) and learns she’s a faerie like them. By then, I’ve settled on a few core things: Kayla starts out not knowing who she is, the main antagonist is Titania and her Unseelie faeries, Kayla goes back and forth between both realms, and, of course, Kayla and Fay fall in love.

And that was the start of five years of writing, revising, failing, procrastinating, working on other projects, editing, revising again, (possibly also annoying my writers’ group) and persevering. (I wrote in more detail about my process of writing my first book in a different blog post a long time ago, which you can still read here.)

During those five years while I was working on Seelie Princess, I also wrote plenty of short stories that went nowhere and busied myself with plotting other novels whenever I got stuck on my manuscript. In the end, I always came back to Kayla’s story.

2019 – now: The result of my perseverance

On September 19th, 2019, I was finally ready to share Seelie Princess with the rest of the world. Unseelie Queen followed in July 2021 and Goddess of Light in April 2023. The past year, I’ve been working on both Book 1 and 2 of my spin-off series.

Sometimes I wish I had more to show for after 10 years of serious writing, and I get envious of those writers who can pump out several novels a year. I have so many more stories to tell. If I keep going at this pace, will I even be able to finish all of them in my lifetime? And also, as my own publisher, I need to up my pace if I ever wish to make enough money to break even.

On some days, I still get caught up on all the stories I haven’t written yet, but then I look at the three books I’ve already published standing on my bookshelf and I feel proud of what I’ve accomplished. Every day, I work on adding another book to that shelf. My stories are always on my mind, always part of who I am. And if there’s something I hope for in the next 10 years of this journey, then it’s that my love for books and passion for storytelling will still be a part of my life.