I have any number of places in my life I could count as the beginning of my journey as a writer.
Childhood
The earliest recollection I have of writing goes back to when I was in second grade. It must have been some time in October, and my teacher, Mrs. Mary Jean Smith, asked all of us to pull out a sheet of paper. Then she came around and placed a Halloween themed sticker in the center of our pages and asked us to write a story. The sticker on my page was that of a happy little witch riding a broom. As I recall, I wrote a story about a little witch who just wanted to make friends with the other witches, who were always being mean to her. This echoed my desire for friends despite constantly being picked on by my classmates.
While I received good grades for my writing throughout my academic career, I never set out to become a writer. For a long while, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, until I had a realization in eighth grade. I had been babysitting for a couple of years at that point, and that year I helped tutor third graders. The kids I worked with seemed to really like me, so I decided to become a teacher.
Early Career
After earning my bachelor’s in elementary education, I took the job as an eighth-grade science teacher at a middle school in Chicago. I won’t go into all the messy details, but I was let go of that position just before the Christmas holiday that year. There was a lot of internal politics going on that my autistic brain did not pick up on, and my position was undermined before I even knew what was happening. The craziest part of all that is everyone at the school knew I was planning to move to Colorado at the end of that school year, so I was leaving anyway.
Once in Colorado, I had hoped to continue my teaching career, but getting a foot in the door here was more difficult than I had expected. Being from out-of-state, and settling in a university town that produced many new teachers every year, did not work in my favor. It only took one more year before I realized I needed to change careers, unless I wanted to keep working in retail indefinitely.
This was the next steppingstone in my writing career. During that year, I taught myself HTML and built my first web page. After a nascent attempt at writing a blog, I realized I enjoyed writing. So, I took a paid tech writing internship. At the end of that internship, my experimentation with websites had blossomed, and I landed a job as a web designer and developer at a local tech company.
Fast forward eleven years, I had more experience under my belt, in creating both web sites and writing process documents and procedure manuals (which made that earlier internship pay off). During that time, I also earned a Master of Science in technical communication with a specialization in web usability and graphic design. Unfortunately, I was hit by corporate layoffs, but I landed on my feet after launching a web analytics consulting agency. Part of the services I offered was training in web analytics to my clients, which included writing custom training manuals.
Fictional Inspiration
Until 2015, most of the writing I did was either corporate, technical, or academic, while also continuing to blog on my own websites. A pivotal moment in my writing happened when I discovered an older video game that was being offered for free (because of an upcoming release of a sequel title). That game was Dragon Age: Origins.
I’ve been an avid PC gamer for many years, but there was something about how Dragon Age: Origins wove its story and gave the player choices with real consequences in the game that stirred my imagination. After I completed the game the first time, I had so many story ideas I wanted to write. Initially, they were all based in the world of Dragon Age and were the first fan fiction stories I ever wrote.
Over time, my fan fiction stories became more original, until the point where the only thing they had in common with the fandom I was writing for was the names of the characters. This is when I began working on my first original stories. By 2018, I had written three novels, and I self-published the third one. The first two were part of my sci-fi series and were a passion project of mine, so I needed to polish them more before I was ready to share them with the world. Instead, I wrote and published a handful of queer erotic romance stories, which were the types of fan fiction stories I was known for.
The Next Chapter
After I published my first novel, I was ready to give writing full time a chance, plus after running my consulting agency for a decade, I was burnt out. In November 2018, I formally dissolved my company and have focused all my time on writing ever since.
Never think it’s too late for you to start your writing career or publish your first book. I was 46 when I published Coffee-to-Go in 2018, Mark Twain published his first work, The Innocents Abroad, at the age of 41, J. R. R. Tolkien was 45 when The Hobbit was first published, and Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65 when she first published The Little House on the Prairie. So, whether it’s been a lifelong dream to become a writer, or you stumble into it when you least expect it, if it’s something you truly enjoy doing, then keep going!
While it took eight years, over a dozen edits, and a full rewrite, I eventually completed the first novel in The Cycles of Revelation series, Artifact of the Dawn, which I published in September 2023. I am currently completing the rewrite of the second novel in that series, The Medellan Conspiracy, which is planned for publication in the summer of 2024 (and is currently available to read on Kindle Vella, with new chapters posting twice each week).
It has been quite a journey, with more yet to come. So, stay tuned!
Grayson Bell 