Wanderers' Tale

In December my friend and I decided to write a round-robin fan fiction. We decided not to discuss the plot and see where we would end up. Three of the four main characters are singers of famous bands and the other is an original character. As the story progressed, we tumbled into the fantasy genre and noticed that the plot was quite interesting. Eventually we decided to finish of the fan fiction and than start to reform it into an original story.

Now that the fan fiction is coming towards it's end, we started planning the original story which got the working title Wanderers' Tale. It's going to be a series since too much is going to happen to be able to tell in one book. Now we have the idea of for books in our mind, though that can still change. While a lot of people think it isn't wise for a first time writer to start with a series, we will do it anyway. I know it is going to be hard to find a publisher, especially because series from unknown authors are risky. But if we cannot find a publisher, we might as well publish it ourselves as an e-book. That part is, however, still far away since we still have to write the first book. What makes the writing process perhaps a bit harder, is the fact that we are not writing it in our native language Dutch, as the title suggest, but in English. Perhaps studying English linguistics and literature at University will come in handy to write these books.

The series will be about four people who get lost in the woods due a storm. Getting out of the woods, however, is a lot harder than they thought, especially with the mysterious events that start taking place. More I cannot say (yet).

I am going to use this blog to post updates about the story but you can also follow the progress on Facebook and Twitter.

Why do I write?

 It's simple, actually. I love writing because I enjoy doing it. I enjoy stories and I want to tell stories and I cannot think of a better way than writing them down. Humans have always told stories. It's a big part of our lives and we need stories to process what happened during the day. Cavemen told stories by painting images on walls, the bards sang stories and eventually stories were written down. First as (long, epic) poems like Beowulf and later as novels.

Now I want to tell my story. I want to entertain and perhaps inspire people. I want to bring a world alive and create great heroes and fantastic villains. While I have been writing for almost as long as I have been reading for pleasure, I have never been this serious about it. The reason for this is that I hadn't found the right story yet. But about six months ago, I did. I started to write a round-robin story with a friend for fun. It started out as a fanfiction but the plot had such potential that we decided that, after the fanfiction version is completed, we will rewrite the whole thing as an original story with potential. I am very passionate about this story. I really comprehend now what Christopher Paolini meant when he said:  "Write because a story burns within you, and you find yourself thinking and dreaming of it every free moment."


Writing has been my creative outlet, but now it has become more than that. It became one of my favourite ways to spend time.  I want to get my stories out there, in the world where people can read them. Writing has become a job. A hard, but enjoyable job. The chances that I will earn enough money to live from it are very slim; so it won't be my only job. And I actually don't care a lot about the money even though I put so much time into it. Money is just a bonus. If you write for money, you are doing something very wrong.

I'm going to end this blogpost here. I will try to write a blog at least once a week and I might update the lay-out of this blog in the coming weeks.