The Author's Desk: Musings I

It was time. It was finally time.   I've wanted to turn the Mortal Lands into a professional project for a good while now. The Dark Monks has been in development for at least seven years, and many of my stories long before that. But between years of international travel and a particular Pandemic making a mess of things, it never seemed like the right time. Heck, I hadn't even realized how little I knew about the Catholic Church until the last couple of years, when I began teaching CCD at my local church.   But slowly, with each writing challenge I took and each draft of the novel taking a different direction, my novel slowly came to form. Even now, only a few finishing touches remain.   There's only... everything else that goes into publishing.  

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Did you know how hard it is to build a following from nothing? Getting the nerve to look into publishing was hard enough, but finding out I needed a fanbase before I'd even published my first novel? It looked like a chicken-and-egg scenario with no clear entrance or exit. Consider, for example;  

• Social Media Followings
• Target Audience
• Genre
• Consistent updates on work
• Availability to the fanbase
• Appeal
And that's only the tip of the publishing iceberg! How was I even supposed to begin the publishing process of creating a one-sheet, proposal, and finding a literary agent when so much work to even become a known name in Christian literature sat before me? How does one even do that?

   

Maybe I should just go back to writing cringy fan-fiction...

Still, I'm going to persist. I feel the call. I just have to take this one step at a time. Perhaps by writing shorter stories, focused on parts of the Mortal Lands, I can begin to build a foundation.   It's here that one of God's many blessings makes itself known in my life. While I had felt the gentle push to be a chaperone for the annual Youth Retreat, I hadn't really understood why until I looked upon a gymnasium full of, what God kindly pointed out, was my target audience. While finding time to interview students was hard between sessions and keeping track of my own herd of cats, I managed to approach a few groups and ask them two simple questions;         The results were quite telling. Quite telling me I need to get an Instragram account, that is. Apparently snapchat no longer exists or something. What was more interesting to me, though, were the results of the second question; stories about the Saints and Lives of Virtue were the most requested amongst the students. I'm going to cover all ten categories I put forth, of course; but to best appeal to the target demographic, I need to write about saint-like characters. I've a few ideas in mind featuring characters that appear in the Dark Monks; Credo, but there are numerous Saints and Blesseds who dot both the Mortal Lands and our own world. And this is where I stand; between the idle fantasies of personal art and the cruel, grueling world of publication. But I will not waver. As a particular explorer character of mine (Very often) Says;