My journey as a writer has been a long, slow, and steady march. There’s a notion, variously ascribed to several authors, that a writer’s first million words are garbage, but you have to write them in order to reach a plateau of competency. When I look back on my writing life, I think I’m pretty close to those milestones— both the words and the competency.

I’ve been writing short stories since I was a wee lad. In tenth grade, I wrote my first (piece of a) fantasy novel. Our class had an entirely open-ended writing assignment that we had a couple of months to work on, so I decided to write as much of a fantasy story as I could. My two protagonists—a burly fighter and a scrawny wizard—found themselves in one seemingly un-survivable scrape after another. I typed the whole thing on an ACTUAL WORD PROCESSOR, which in 1985 was a great big deal, and painstakingly printed the final copy out from my Apple IIe via a dot-matrix printer. I was intensely proud of it, and was hoping for all sorts of flabbergasted praise from my English teacher. Alas, Mrs. H was notoriously lazy, and the sum total of her marks upon my hundred pages of lovingly-crafted prose was “99/100. Good job” on the cover page. I’m fairly certain she didn’t read it; I think she figured I was a decent writer for a 10th grader, and dear god that was a lot of pages of schlocky fantasy, so 99/100 sounded about right.

In my senior year of high school I wrote an excessive number of short stories, hoping to win my high school’s writing prize using a scattershot strategy. (Surely if I submitted enough pieces, one would win just by chance!) The longest of these was a first-person present tense non-fiction account of what it had been like acting in my first play. I had never written anything like it before, but I was inspired by a piece my father had written that had been published in a local newspaper. Like most things I wrote before I turned 30, I imagined it a work of startling genius while I was writing it, but on review it stands the test of time in much the same way Bernie Sanders would stand up to Mike Tyson.

In college I majored in creative writing, and my senior thesis was an (again unfinished) fantasy novel about a college student who accidentally acquires unwanted magical powers. It was blatantly autobiographic, cringingly self-indulgent, and marginally better-written than my high school story had been.

A few years ago I was invited to write an interactive novella for the excellent choose-your-own-adventure publisher Choice of Games. Over about 15 months I wrote Choice of the Star Captain, a humorous science fiction romp, of which I was (and still am) quite proud. It was a combined writing and light coding exercise, but despite that my career had been in game design, I think I naturally emphasized the “writing” part over the “game” part.

A year after that I wrote a 40k word non-fiction humor book centered around a few years of Facebook posts about my kids. I called it Status Update Parent, and maybe someday I’ll polish it up and publish it, but for now it’ll have to wait in line behind my fantasy novels.

Finally—and this is where the most sizable chunk of my million words comes from—I wrote a fictionalized account of a long-running D&D campaign which I ran for about fifteen years. Those campaign journals would wind up as the foundation for The Heroes of Spira, of which The Ventifact Colossus is the first of five volumes.

When I go back and look at everything from Star Captain onward, I can see the quality of my writing finally shedding most of the skin of mediocrity that had covered it lo those twenty-odd years. I can watch myself discover my voice at last, and learn how to narrate, describe and entertain all at the same time. Of course, even a million words isn’t sufficient to perfect one’s art; no single lifetime is that long. But for me, at least, the key to moving from “hack” to “at least half-way decent” was perseverance.

I get asked about my target audience quite a bit, and my go-to answer is: I’m going for the inverse Harry Potter. The Harry Potter books are written for kids, but with the expectation that adults will enjoy them. My books are written for adults, but with the expectation that kids will enjoy them. There’s little that a 13-year-old with a good vocabulary couldn’t handle. 

In terms of tone, my books are optimistic and generally light-hearted. Not that bad things don’t ever happen to the characters, but if you find yourself looking for a break from grimdark antiheroes,  my books could be just the antidote you want.