Twelve Years Old:
I was twelve years old when my first real story idea came to me one afternoon and a lone game of basketball in front of my house. I’ve told this story many times, but I’ll share it again.
Sitting in the grass, with the basketball on my lap, I was catching my breath, enjoying the weather, and playing with the blades of grass with my right hand. My fingertips brushed something cold and hard close to the earth. Excited, hoping to find a coin or a key, I searched the blades only to discover a rusted screw with a crooked tip. The strangest thing happened while I held that screw, though. I thought about what it would mean if that screw was really a key to an unknown world, and who would be there if I found that door? A girl was there, who had extraordinary powers. I ran into my house, grabbed writing utensils, and resumed my spot outside to write the opening of that story. The rest is, well, herstory.
I had kept that screw for many years, but when my family moved out of my childhood home because of foreclosure, I got rid of it. I could’ve kept it. It was tiny, after all. Alas, I did not. I wish I had that screw still. I honestly don’t remember if I put it in the trash or stuck it back into the ground where I’d found it. Part of me thinks I did the latter…to honor it, so I choose to believe I did.
Fourteen Years Old:
I finished writing my first novel. I had called it The Unknown World. It was a fantasy adventure and took up four hand-written notebooks. The computer document was complete at 87,018 words/426 pages.
Sixteen Years Old:
Writing became my passion. I couldn’t not write. I wrote on the school bus and in class. I wrote at home. I carried my current notebook wherever I went. I slept with it beside me in bed.
At the age of sixteen, I completed Book Two, The Face Beyond, which took up eleven hand-written notebooks. I was unable to open this document, so I don’t know the word/page count.
Seventeen Years Old:
Book Three took up seven hand-written notebooks. I apparently never typed this one up, which is surprising to me. I swear I did. I used to have so much fun typing up these stories, listening to music from my headphones, and adding to the story as I went. Alas, I can’t find that ancient document.
Book Three was the story that changed the course of my series, my characters, and my writing forever, and it was all because of a new character who came into the story. His name was (and is) Rainer. I loved him. Plain and simple. I liked him more than the love interest I had at the time for my FMC (female main character), and I struggled to justify keeping her and Rainer apart, as only best friends rather than boyfriend and girlfriend as they truly wanted to be.
Seventeen Years Old (Again):
I was working on Book Four, and I was seven notebooks in (nowhere near done), when writer’s block hit. A big part of it was because of my Rainer dilemma. The other part of it, I later discovered, was because I’d matured while writing my stories and felt a disconnect from them because of where I was taking them. The first two, especially, weren’t anything like the story I was working on, which was much more adult.
That’s when I decided to rewrite them from page one. Age my characters. Give them interesting jobs. Change their world to be less fantastical. Dump the old love interest and bring Rainer in from the start.
May 2008:
I completed the rewrite of Book One. Then I sent out my first snail mail query letters. Way before I ever should’ve submitted, so, yeah, I got rejections.
May 2010:
I completed Book Two.
December 2011:
I completed Book Three.
May 2013:
I completed Book Four, finishing the series.
Side Note: Interesting that three books in this series were completed in May, and the third book was not. That’s especially interesting considering I have done revisions on those three, but I have not done the new revisions/rewrites that are required for Book Three, even after all these years. I know what I need to do, and I write a little here and there, but it’s been slow going.
2008 – 2015:
I continued to work on and rewrite Book One. The beginning I especially struggled with. I can’t even tell you how many different Chapter Ones I wrote. At one point, I’d even had a prologue.
2015:
I asked my blogging community if anyone would be interested in reading the first 3 chapters of Book One. I got several takers. They praised my writing and descriptions and said they were intrigued. One beta reader suggested that I wasn’t starting the story in the right place, and they were right. I still had not figured out that beginning.
Another beta reader offered other suggestions. I liked her feedback and ended up giving her a few chapters at a time for her to read when she had the time. We kept this up from September 2015 to January 2016. Her thoughts helped me to realize a certain scene had no place in my story, and she helped me to figure out a few things about the world and the characters, like how the “gods” weren’t gods but Guardians. Not all of the changes stayed, but the most important ones did.
Still 2015:
Now, Ghost of Death features the FMC from Avrianna Heavenborn. I thought that if I published a story with her as the heroine, showing a bit of her world, that would help me to get readers interested and my foot in the door with an agent. A few readers who read Ghost of Death and reviewed it did say they were intrigued by Avrianna and wanted to know more about her, which had been my goal, but nothing else came about from that. Certainly no agent.
2013 – 2019:
During those years, I queried Book One, and I continued to read all four books over and over again and make revisions, add descriptions and dialogue, and look for typos.
No agent. No closer to publishing Book One.
2019:
I received query letter help from an author in my blogging community. The query letter for Book One was never something I was confident in because it was always difficult figuring out what to highlight. The author helped me to level it up, focusing a bit more on the romance, but that query letter has since been upgrade to a better version thanks to my awesome critique partner. The bones of the query letter I wrote back then with her advice are still there, though.
2020:
I submitted Book One to a well-known publisher. A few weeks later, I got a rejection with actual feedback on how I could make it better, and they said I could resubmit.
That was when I went to a dear friend (who is also a writer) and asked if she’d be interested in critiquing Book One, keeping an eye out for the things the publisher had said. She said “yes”! After she read the complete manuscript, we had countless email exchanges, hours-long video chats, and Discord discussions. Her thoughts were invaluable.
Now, here’s the honest truth, while I was making the extensive changes, I did think, while sobbing my eyes out, “This doesn’t even feel like my story anymore.”
I’ve seen other writers say the same thing while doing revisions after a critique and give up, saying, “Nope, I’m ignoring what my critique partner said. It’s my story!” And it is. Totally. But sometimes you have to ruin something to build it better, stronger, more beautiful. Trust the process. I did. After all the work was done, I looked at my story and said, “Okay…so this was how my book was supposed to be all along.” I had to find the true version of my story beneath the one I was holding onto so tightly. That version had been a Darling, and we’d supposed to kill our darlings.
2021:
April 26, 2021: I resubmitted Book One to the publisher previously mentioned.
June 27, 2021: The publisher requested additional time to review my submission. I granted it.
December 8, 2021: The rejection came with no reason as to why. And that hit me hard.
2022:
I did not submit Book One even once all year. Instead, I was taking care of my mom.
My critique partner gave me valuable synopsis help, though.
2023:
I attempted something new and published two complete novelettes (Universal Killer & Cocky Killer) on Patreon. These are stories featuring Avrianna and take place before Book One. The goal was to publish nine novelettes that would lead up to Book One. The other goal was to generate interest in my character and my series. It did not go that way. I had two subscribers after a handful of months and two completed stories. I was publishing Cosmic Killer, when life changes forced me to put my Patreon on pause. In 2024 (I think), I ended up deleting it.
Still 2023:
My critique partner and I brainstormed over how to make my query letter for Book One better.
She also reread the entire manuscript, offered new feedback, and even read over the third act for a third time after I made revisions based on her notes. I am happy to say the changes worked for both of us. 😄
I only submitted Book One twice at the end of the year, after completing revisions.
2024:
I took a serious look at Book Oneafter an agent specifically said she thought the word count was too large for the genre (paranormal-romance). I ended up cutting about 8,500 words.
2025:
I started to self-publish. BEST. DECISION. EVER! And it was in 2025 when I decided to self-publish Book One and the entire series. For years, this was not what I had wanted to do. I mean…look back at the history here. I had always considered self-publishing when getting an agent didn’t work, but because I didn’t have the financial means then and I was holding on tightly to a long-time dream, I dismissed the thought. In fact, I feared it. I didn’t want to self-publish this story. I wanted something more, and I thought the trad world would give it to me. Then I had a not-very-good experience with an editor with my old small publisher while publishing my last trad-pub book. In 2025, I also saw the crap trad publishers were doing and getting away with. And it was those two things that made me change my tune, especially after getting a little more indie publishing experience. So, I set the goal to publish Book One July 7th 2026 (my FMC’s birthday).
2026:
Those prequel stories I had started sharing on Patreon in 2023…I kept wondering what to do with them. I could publish them before Book One, after Book One, or after the series completed. I decided I didn’t want to wait, so I published Cocky Killer (March 3rd), Universal Killer (April 3rd), and Cosmic Killer (May 4th) leading up to the release of Book One. On June 3rd, I published a collection (Everywhere a Killer) that consists of these stories on June 3rd.
July 7th: I published Heaven Born, Book One of the Heaven Born series!!!!
My goal is to publish one book a year for this four-book series.
So, that, ladies and gentleman, is the journey this book has taken me on, and it’s definitely NOT over. As I said, it’s a four-book series. There will be a collection off entertwined stories that’ll follow it, as well as a secret project, plus a series of novelettes, and several spin-off stories with other characters, and a book I never thought I’d write, which then created it’s own spin-off stories, AND I’m going to rewrite the original series AGAIN by keeping the plot and changing the characters, because what I wrote back when I was a kid has good bones.
This is a BOOK UNIVERSE that is ever expanding, and I love it so much.
Chrys Fey 