A Story of the Heart

Anyone who writes (or creates) stories often has a story with a very particular, special place to them. It could be for many different reasons, whether it be because of the characters, some solace derived from the crafting of the story, or just a sense of wonder tied up with it. Even when you’re writing other things, that particular story of the heart (or stories, maybe) lingers at the periphery, hoping for their chance to see daylight.

Stories of the heart aren’t necessarily the most marketable ones. They’re those more “pet projects”, the tales you’re passionate about. Sometimes weird and quirky, it’s that thread that you keep coming back to on occasion. A sense of nagging, a feeling that there’s something you still need to write…you come back to that story over the years, even if just fleetingly.

That’s something I’ve had for a long while. I kept coming back, and here we are.

It was my final year of college, 2011 and 2012. I’d been reading a lot of books and playing a lot of video games in my free time, and this was also around the time when we had the big “young adult” fantasy literature boom.

I’ve always written stories, but they were more passion projects for myself. Little bits and bobs here and there as a way to express myself and share thoughts. I wasn’t a fan fiction writer, nor was I particularly publicly facing, and the stories were just for myself.

This time, though, it was different…I was, for the first time, writing with the ultimate agenda of potentially sharing this story with the world. I would brainstorm story ideas and make notes during down time, and I would feverishly write during my downtime. It came along, and it came along well…

…but the story was not good. At least, not as it was. And I think there were two main issues.

I’ve always erred towards concision and precision in my writing, which is something that’s always been a bit of a haunting specter. Any time I wrote a story, it was a very tightly-wound affair where the story was, at best, a novella at the end.

This story attempt was definitely longer, but it wasn’t enough. It came in around 45k words…which was longer than what I had done before, but it was very short, and this was also before the self-publishing boom. Even with my target as more of a young adult-style of work (think The Hunger Games), it was cutting it very tight without having the same tightness that Suzanne Collins had. It just…didn’t work.

The other main issue is that I’m awful at outlining. The core of the story was a synthesis of three very particular elements: Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean (a 2003 GameCube RPG set in a skybound archipelago), The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (2011 Wii action adventure game set predominantly in asky archipelago), and the then-storyline of Magic: The Gathering, around the time of Scars of Mirrodin (plane gets corrupted by a noxious oil that ruins everything, and a “resistance” quickly finds themselves outmatched).

I was juggling a lot, but it was definitely hurt by not being able to thread all of the different skeins together in a way that really did them justice. It was about as “thin” as you might expect a video game plot to be, where someone alights on a quest to save things from getting worse and often without heavy justification. I was inspired by classic RPGs, what can I say.

One thread that has stuck around is that I did keep a name from Magic: The Gathering as the name of the main protagonist, Venser. I had always liked the name and loved the character (and he’s still one of my favorite Magic: The Gathering cards). But the “corrupting oil” plot point did not stick around…it might be interesting to revisit, though.

One thing about my older writing style is that I had a tendency to obsessively and endlessly tinker with them. Minor adjustments here and there, nothing too substantial. But I knew it wasn’t right as it was, that I could make things better than they were. Structurally, though, the story needed a lot, so I made the call in 2013 or so to do a full rewrite of the story. Same shell, but taking the lessons I’ve learned about writing and my own quirks into something better.

I also was keener on making it deliberately gay, which has generally been something I’ve wanted to do with my writing. The first draft was a bit more coy about things, but my second stab brought in a proper love interest for Venser (in the form of Basch, whose name I took from Final Fantasy XII) and explored that relationship as the plot unfolded.

Still, this felt lacking. I had gotten the length better (55k words), but…I wasn’t entirely happy with things. It was around 2014 that I shelved the story almost completely, a combination of personal things and my old laptop giving out. That killed a lot of motivation I had with writing that story.

I feel like 2020 was a year that was good (or, at least, less bad) for writers, and as the pandemic dragged on, I got to thinking about my old story again. Revisiting that setting, those characters, and seeing if I could do them the justice I hadn’t felt I was able to do almost 10 years ago. So, over the course of three months, I took the skeleton of that old story and turned it into something bigger and grander. It was actually decently long now (90k words), and I liked where it was, so I polished it up and started querying it through agents.

That…didn’t work. The story was a bit weirdly positioned, a sort of cozy-adjacent adventure with gay romance and plenty of shenanigans, and I was an unknown author trying to break in without much of a market. That said, a little side hustle I’d started exploded around then, and so I put the novel to the side. The plan was to not let it disappear into the abyss this time, but I definitely was being stretched in terms of my side thing.

While the shell of the old manuscript survived, I’d started to worry that it was structurally lacking. I had compressed a lot of the story’s back half, and the inciting incident had always felt flimsy and thinly explained and justified. I started to plan another restructure that would get the story to someplace I liked more, where I wouldn’t look at it six months later and think there was a gaping hole that I couldn’t resolve.

So, the last rewrite started in June 2022. I swapped out a character I hadn’t ever felt fit well (Alistair, the guard was removed in favor of Leondra, the woman who Venser was arranged to be married off to), used an arranged marriage as the inciting incident and motivating factor for the action, and tried to slow the action down enough to create something more deliberate in pacing. Venser and Basch were still the story’s heart, and that didn’t change, but everything else got a facelift and a tightening to feel better.

This time, the story wound up at about…155k words after the drafting wrapped up, over five months. That posed a slight problem, because I knew that selling anything over 100k words as an unknown author was a daunting task. But the point was, at this stage, to just get it written and figure out the course of action.

I split the novel in half, roughly, and planned to query the first half of the work as I continued revisions and restructuring. The querying did not go well (again), and compounded with a couple other projects that I was doing, I realized that I really was not too enthused about trying to scream into the void with it.

It was around the middle of 2024 that I had started to toy with the idea of self-publishing. I looked into it, and while I knew I had (and have) major weaknesses in terms of marketing acuity and graphic design, this was a story I believed in enough to put out into the world. My continued polishing and tweaking had gotten the first half of the story to about 95k words, which was what I had been focusing on as the query package.

With no traction in the traditional sphere, I decided to take the plunge and put the story I believed in out there. I did a couple final editing passes, put a cover together, and published the first half of it as my first novel in August 2024. The second half of the story came out as a novel in March 2025, after I gave that story a full rewrite and editing pass.

One day, I might put out a proper omnibus that brings both halves of it together. I’ve always seen it as one story, and that would be a way to bring it all together and put a neat bow on it.

I’ll be wholly honest: the novels have not been a runaway success. That said, they’re books I’m very proud of and pleased with all the same, a story that explores escaping a troubled and traumatic past, finding a home with people you share appreciation with, and exploring different cultures and locations. That was always the seed that had been there from the beginning, but it just took a while to get there, and I needed to grow as a writer and as a person to do the story justice.

If you have a story you’re trying to get out there, it’s perfectly fine if it takes a while. You may not yet be the writer you need to be to tell the story, the tools not fully there and not fully realized. And, importantly, sometimes the only way you know you’re not there is to do it.

Give it a try, and write the story you’ve always wanted to. You might well surprise yourself. And even if you’re not completely there yet, you can be some day.

If you want to read the novels I’ve talked about, Beyond Good & Evil: The Horizon’s Edge and Beyond Good & Evil: The Future Past are both available on Amazon, through regular purchase options or through Kindle Unlimited.