For the first time since I was fifteen years old, I had written something!!! It had been thirteen long years, and it felt good to be back.

Reading authoritative books from cover-to-cover on stuff like writing and technique was really just a way of convincing myself I was serious about learning to write a novel. Yet, as I moved on, those very books were becoming more and more obsolete. They found themselves being pushed farther and farther away until they were clearly out of arm’s reach. In their place? Lots of novels.

After all was said and done, I felt they had served their purpose well:

1. They made published writers seem far more ‘human’ to me; their world more accessible.

2. Information on finding agents and publishers: very interesting! It would have taken me ages to learn all that stuff on my own. For example, I would have still not heard of the Writer’s Market.

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As you may recall, I knew that I wanted to write a high fantasy story about an anti-hero, a thief named Cirellio. And that’s about it.

So … where did I get ‘Cirellio’ in the first place?

Cirellio’s humble beginnings:
2:00 AM. In a cold basement. With friends of the more … geeky persuasion. All of us were wired on Mountain Dew, and we were crowded around coffee tables, seated in old folding chairs, only a little worried we would get too noisy and wake up J.J.’s mom. I needed to name the thief I had just rolled, and I was always picky about decisions like that. With everyone else impatiently waiting to get started, I had grown desperate enough to start rummaging through a pile of nearby Magic: The Gathering cards as a possible source for inspiration. An artist’s name caught my eye: CIRUELO. Derived from that name, the word ‘cirellio’ just … sounded like my rogue (pronounced – Sir-el-ee-oh).

So yeah … Cirellio was a thief I created for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I would love to tell you I created Cirellio out of thin air instead of on a character creation sheet, but, this, my friends, is truth. Poor Cirellio died that same night to a nasty spell called Melf’s Acid Arrow. But no matter what his humble beginnings were, I fell in love with his name and the persona I developed for him, which incubated over the following years in my mind (even though I wasn’t playing AD&D any more). He was my all-time favorite character, so I reclaimed him from the grave for this book.

Armed with only a name and profession, it seemed the only way for me to progress was to just swallow my pride and start writing. After all, I had nothing to lose, and if I didn’t ever write my stories, who would?

Getting ready to knock on my muse’s door for the first time in years was hard. My heart felt like it going to leap right out of my chest. Would my muse turn me away? I took a deep breath and created a text file simply called ‘book.txt’. A double-click later and I was staring at a blank white landscape which, with persistence, would soon be filled with my imagination.

Hmm … a blank, white landscape?

With that thought, I closed my eyes and visualized. I didn’t worry about deleting. I just let it flow, letting the keyboard mine the depths of my imagination. When the trance-like flow finally ended, I found I had written a total of 3,253 words! I had chills.

Later, I would find out this wonderful technique was something already well known in the writing world … called ‘freewriting’.

The opening paragraph of my freewrite looked like this:

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I am currently in the middle of writing a book. Or ‘middling’ – as it is sometimes called in the writing world. This is the point of the book writing process where you see a nightmarish landscape of jagged, foreboding mountains laid out before you during a swirling storm, and you must traverse all of it if you ever wish to see, somewhere on the horizon, the fabled, glimmering, heavenly, yet taunting, End of the Book. This is the point where you realise you will indeed pay with your sweat, blood, and tears – just like all of those authors whose advice you read forewarned – before finally making it to the end of the story, only to be greeted by an unforgiving ‘final editing process ogre’ holding his stopwatch and tapping his massive foot, demanding even more of your time and patience.

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