A Winters Tale: A History

A year ago, I published my first book...Bad Moon Rising: A Winters Tale.

The journey to get there was a long one, more than ten years in the making. So, let's take a look back to how I got here.

In 2012 I was working at my local TV station as a Production Manager where I shot and edited commercials and directed our programming. One day, for our talk show, one of our guests was a local author (Rhonda Dennis, Blue Bayou Series) who was putting on a writing seminar.

I signed up that day.

I was trying to write my first book at the time. I had the basic idea, characters and the start of the prologue. Before, most of what I wrote was fanfiction and journal RPs.

Saturday rolled around and I attended the seminar. We started with basic exercises. Rhonda gave us a the start of a story and we'd have to come up with a few sentences to finish it.

After an hour break, she taught the fundamentals: how to avoid common mistakes, how to prepare a first and second draft, how to make a cover and how to get peoples eyes on it.

Our final writing exercise was to pick a photo and write something about it. She brought four or five pictures and we had about 15 minutes to write something. There was this picture of an altar with satanic symbols and I chose that one.

I've been a life long fan of the supernatural. I enjoyed watching Halloween specials on TLC and History Channel, at the time FOX had a couple shows with allegedly true hauntings and UFO sightings. Then came Buffy...Angel...Supernatural. I became such a fan of horror shows and movies.

That became the inspiration of my writing. So, I began writing my story. It came slow at first. Then, as I started writing, I hit my flow. A young detective on the search for a young girl that was taken by a cult. This story became the center of my first Alex Winters book. When she called time, I was still writing. I tried to pay attention to their stories as I was (and the messy handwriting in my notebook was proof) quickly finish.

I read my story and she turned to me and said, "Yeah, you need to keep writing." It was a great boost to my confidence. I'd gotten feedback on my fanfiction, but this was something that was me, something original.

The book I was writing hit a brick wall. Writers block...it is a bitch.

In 2014, I started building up my "Alex Winters" story. At the time, it was just a team of paranormal investigators taking on different cases. My life took some big changes, moving to a new town and starting new jobs. It took five years to really get the story going.

It was in my downtime at work I started working on an ACTUAL outline for my first book. I finished it a year later, but put it to the side for a while. I started writing every weekend for a couple hours in January 2022. As I was nearing the end, I had to do more six day work weeks. I didn't make the time I should have, but I finished it in December that year.

Early 2023 was all about finishing it up. I had my best friend and book nerd Torie edit the first draft. She caught some glaring errors and a few sentences and parts that didn't make much sense. After she finished, I did another pass with it. Top to bottom, I made sure everything was ready.

I found an artist on Fiverr to do my cover (I'm better at video editing than photo editing) and it was exactly as I pictured. I went to work getting it up on Amazon. I had a lot of mis-steps on that because of formatting.

Bad Moon Rising: A Winters Tale finally went out in May. It was mostly purchased by family and friends, but I had accomplished it.

I finally self-published my first book.