Becoming a full-time author has been a lifetime in the making. While I’ve been writing since I was a child, like nearly every writer, I can genuinely say it’s books as a whole that are the truest loves of my life.

I can clearly remember the first time I read something truly fantastical: it was The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. I’ll never forget how enthralled I was by the creativity and escapism. I want to create my own worlds like that, I thought.

Finally in 2023, I began to make those dreams I’ve had since childhood a reality. But long before I got a clear enough vision to begin building the world, elements of this fantasy series has been marinating in my mind. How long? Oh, well… about seventeen years.

I got my first true taste for novel-length writing in the early aughts while in college. I began writing Jane Austen fan-fiction and loved it. Every spare moment (and sometimes when I should have been studying!) was dedicated to writing, and I realized then this was what I wanted more than anything to do for the rest of my life.

I got the first fledgling ideas for Land of Blue Smoke back in those days and wrote its earliest scenes. I brainstormed and researched until I realized that this idea was enormous, and I had no idea how to take it on intelligently. At the time, I was deep into an English degree, reading piles of classics, and at best, used to writing one and done stories. This was… not that. I was very intimidated, felt unequal to the task, and shelved it. However, each time my pen would drift to original ideas, this story was bleeding onto the page wanting to tell itself.

Fast forward in time to around 2019 after the birth of my second child. That was the point where LOBS began to niggle at me anew. Again, I sat down and wrote some scenes, dabbling with the concepts, but I was in the thick of early motherhood and no fire could remain alight in competition with those demands. So fast forward another four years and in 2023, while alone one afternoon, the whole summary for the first draft poured out of me.

I was ready now, I thought, to sit and take telling this story seriously, but it still would not write! My main character Lona and I went round and around in those early stages because I had ideas for what I wanted her to look like, and she… did not agree. It wasn’t until a long car ride alone that she came to me how she wanted to look, her voice, and who she was. At last I had her. The first draft was finished in a single summer.

The remainder of this journey has been ours together as I’ve reshaped everything I understood about writing, pleaded with Lona to keep talking to me when I had to make character decisions that she didn’t prefer, built worlds, picked them apart, and put them back together again better.