Very, very excited to announce the release of chapter one of my first serial novella! I have high hopes for this story, that even if it doesn't gain as much attention as I would hope for then it at least leads to more serial novels and physical novels later down the road.

I almost like to think of it as training wheels.

This is very much a milestone for me, even if only my friends and family see it at the moment, as it marks a long-awaited turning point in my writing career.

At this time last year, I was working on stories for myself, tinkering on smaller things and messing around with world building (it's safe to say that the fantastical world I had created back then was a hot mess), really just experimenting with characters and themes and seeing what I liked. The story I had created branched off in so many directions, ranging from cowboys to knights all in the same timeline, steam engines and dragons, and yes, the concept was cool, but it was all poorly stitched together, fraying on the ends and in some places, not even stitched at all, just left to hang.

Something clicked that spring, I came to an understanding, I guess somewhere in my soul, heart, and mind there was a harmony, and I realized writing was what I truly wanted to do with my life. It was the path I wanted to take.

Earlier on I hadn't been sure, I thought maybe it would be ranch work, maybe veterinary studies, maybe I would work on ships, maybe I would work on trains, maybe I would be a teacher. None of it is a true calling. Enticing, yes. Minor interests, yes. But what I realized I wanted to do, needed to do, could not live without for the rest of my life, was writing.

With that, I realized it was time to get serious about it.

So I did. I scrapped that world and began to work on actual short stories, the little things, tinkering again, but this time with more of an idea of where I wanted to go, what I wanted to write about. The unknown, the great mystery of our world, anomalies and the unexplained, the supernatural. The wild that calls. All things I was interested in, and I came to realize it quickly. The entire summer I wrote, wrote, wrote, and I ended up with the draft of a novella.

This is that novella. It's not much, but it's the start of something, the beginning of something that I think one day could be grand. Maybe because of this novella I'll one day have a whole book series. Maybe I'll have written fifty individual books and five series’ and I'll be able to look back and see where it all started.

Without further ado, I present chapter one of L'appel du Vide.