- 07 Nov, 2025 *
I’m writing fiction for the first time in 11 years and it feels… I don’t know if there’s a word to properly convey how I feel. Fantastic? Elated? Riveted? Fvoinuigfiuhafeac? I’m going with that.
I didn’t realize I wanted to write until I was in college. I wrote some stories in high school out of boredom, but I never considered it something I could do for a living. When I realized I had a passion for it, I took writing classes in college that earned me a diploma for Creative Arts, and a Certificate in Professional Writing. I was never able to sell anything though. I started writing for websites, games and sports journalism, to make a living in the field. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it beat working at a grocery store, let me tell you. As the years went on, I wrote…
- 07 Nov, 2025 *
I’m writing fiction for the first time in 11 years and it feels… I don’t know if there’s a word to properly convey how I feel. Fantastic? Elated? Riveted? Fvoinuigfiuhafeac? I’m going with that.
I didn’t realize I wanted to write until I was in college. I wrote some stories in high school out of boredom, but I never considered it something I could do for a living. When I realized I had a passion for it, I took writing classes in college that earned me a diploma for Creative Arts, and a Certificate in Professional Writing. I was never able to sell anything though. I started writing for websites, games and sports journalism, to make a living in the field. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it beat working at a grocery store, let me tell you. As the years went on, I wrote less and less fiction as I focused on my journalism, criticism, and eventually video production work.
The only fiction I wrote by the time I was freelancing full-time were mods for Fallout: New Vegas. The last thing I wrote was Discworld fan fiction called Other Wurldly in 2014. It was about a gargoyle traveling to space, and the moon. That came to an unceremonious end early when a comment informed me that Pratchett already touched on space travel in the short story The Last Hero.
I just didn’t have time to write fiction anymore, or so I told myself. Nor did I have the desire. I felt like a failure, having not been able to sell a single piece of fiction in five years of trying. At what point do you accept you’re just not good at something and give up? Well, apparently I had my answer.
During the hell of 2020 lockdowns, I thought of an idea for a book. It was a murder mystery set at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. The idea of confined spaces and a bleak world was present in my mind, for some reason. I worked on it for all of four days before I realized I had no idea what I was doing. While I enjoy murder mysteries, I didn’t know the first thing about how detectives actually work, and even less about how McMurdo Station works. Who would even investigate a murder there in the first place? The FBI? Maybe. What do they even do down there? Look at ice and determine if its cold or really cold? I felt like I couldn’t write this story without having a decent knowledge of those two things. So I shelved it, and once again felt like a failure.
It wasn’t until late May 2025 that I took fiction writing seriously again. I was in my usual Birthday Funk, realizing I was a year older and still no closer to reaching my dreams. My YouTube channel was cratering and I hadn’t gotten a freelance writing gig in over a year. Or was it two by then? Three? I realized I had spent more time making YouTube videos than I ever did writing, and for that all I had to show was 5,000 subscribers on one channel I no longer had access to, and 8,000 on a channel that was somehow getting fewer views than ever. I didn’t want to do it anymore, I had to stop, but I had done it for so long I didn’t know what else to do with myself anymore.
I mentally drifted for a month before I stumbled on a YouTube channel about – and I promise you I am not making up any of this – Thomas the Tank Engine. I binged the channel for a week when I got an idea for my own Thomas story, about him getting a new driver who was a burn out and didn’t really care about his job, before having a crash and coming to love Thomas and driving in trying to fix what he broke. I liked it because it felt both like a true-to-form Thomas story but so unlike anything in the series, putting the focus on a human character instead of one of the trains. So I wrote it. It was a big revelation to me at the time, that I could simply… write something. Yeah, it was a rough time for me.
That led to me writing another short story, more fan fiction, about a group of adventurers I had created in the (criminally underrated) game Our Adventurers Guild. It followed them after beating the bad guy at the end of the game and coming to terms with the fact that the world was peaceful now, and then a new threat emerging just as they were getting used to that whole “peace” thing.
From there I was off to the races. I wrote nine more short stories in June and July alone. It was like eleven years of pent-up stories were bursting out of me all at once. That’s when I stumbled on an idea that couldn’t fit in short form, and I started working on my first novel. That is still a very long way off, I want to build up my portfolio by selling some short stories first before I focus on that, but for the first time in my life I feel like this is something I can do.
Can I actually make a career as an author? Statistically speaking, probably not. But the important thing is that I feel like it’s possible. I’m energized, I’m happy to be writing again, and for the first time in I don’t know how long, I have hope for the future.
