I’ve often wondered what it would be like to write a book; what topic I would choose, what format the writing would be, and how many words it should have. But I have never found a decent topic to write about. My expertise has always been web development and design, yet I would never think myself familiar enough with that field to write a whole book on it. Sure–I know a thing or two about running an online magazine; putting a site together, and I guess I could have written a book on the fundamentals of designing for anyone new to it, however, my confidence isn’t at that level. Who am I to tell someone else how to do anything?

A book is one thing, an article or blog post is another. I won’t write a book about coding, but I’ve written numerous articles on well known design website Creative Bloq about it. I wouldn’t write a book about anything in the video game industry, but I’ve certainly written a few things on Medium which have been picked up by an online publications, and I would never even dream of writing a book on anything about Christianity however, I’ve put together several small posts on my old church’s website. A blog post requires much fewer words than a book, a maximum of 3000 in my opinion, meaning there is less time investment on the side of the reader. I feel ‘less bad’ if someone reads a post they don’t agree with because it’s only 5 or 10 minutes of their time they’ve lost, as opposed to the 8 or 12 hours they would have lost reading a book. Almost everybody and their grandmother has a blog, so the requirement to be an expert wasn’t an issue. Yes–there is a possibility I’ve published posts with spelling or grammatical errors, but the beauty of it being online is it can be edited as and when I see fit. In conclusion, I enjoyed writing blog posts for various outlets getting paid too–if I’m lucky. So what drove me to write a book, what field did I deem myself expert enough to dedicate hours of my free time and thousand of words to?

I read a lot of fiction books grown up as a teenager, Goosebumps, the Famous Five, and the Secret Seven series. One book we were not allowed to read at home was Harry Potter. Growing up in a Christian household, reading a book about witches, wizards and magic was a no-no, (although come to think of it, we happily watched merlin on BBC one every Saturday afternoon when that was on). What made matters worse for me was that everyone read it at school. Everyone talked about it, saw it on the news, and had watched the films, but I couldn’t engage in any of those activities. So I grew up never knowing anything about Hogwarts even though it was mentioned in passing between my friends, I went to work not knowing what a 'muggle’ was whenever people made jokes with the word around me. And I had no clue what the sculpture below the number nine and three-quarters at Kings Cross Station meant, these things were all alien to me, until recently. After becoming an Audible account holder and getting a taste for fiction books after Stephen King’s 'The Stand’, I yearned for another long interesting book to be read to me, and what better books to go through than the series I was never allowed to read as a child. Seven books long; with raving reviews, and read by none other than Stephen Fry, I couldn’t resist.

Powering through all the books at 2.5 times speed I managed to get through the everything in under a month and came to an interesting discovery. The in the Harry Potter series is so good and engaging, the characters are interesting, but the world is what grabbed my attention. J. K. Rowling is a genius in my eyes because of it, she essentially created a whole world out of nothing, a universe. A book or film can be made from any small piece of the story that wasn’t elaborated on in the main books. Voldemort’s story in more detail; how Hogwarts came to be and its first students, the Quidditch World Cup in a school on the other side of the world. I was impressed with the possibilities, the different stories that can be derived from this world. Also having a story on a modern magic school is something that was new to me since most of my non-fiction reading was around sci-fi and fantasy set in the middle ages. With this new found passion for universe creation, I thought to myself, how difficult would it be to create my own universe? I play a diverse range of computer games all with varying degrees of story quality. I’ve watched a plethora of films and television series some of which are incredibly engaging, and I came up with a handful of stories which I didn’t put into writing in my youth. How difficult would it be to create my own universe? I’d have no issue with not being an expert because everything I write will be made up and I can make the book as long or as short as I want. With that, I began to write a book called, Crimson Hail and the Secrets of Valour. Currently, 2 chapters and nearly 6000 words in I have fleshed out the backbone of the story which I got from a dream I had last year and I’ve built upon ever since. It’s heavily inspired by Harry Potter of course but more futuristic and SciFi which is a genre I enjoy more.

So far I’m enjoying the process, and I hope to get to a stage where I can share some of the text online, maybe. Currently, I’m not in talks with any publishing houses and I’m not sure if I want to, purely because I’d rather not have any deadlines to work towards, however, I am really enjoying the process of making certain parts up, and diving into research to make the text more detailed. I’m using the time during my commute home to write the book on my smartphone, which is how I usually wrote my blog posts so there’s not much of a departure there, nevertheless, I would love to be able to take a few days off work to focus on getting it done.

I have no doubt the frequency of my blog posts will reduce because of this, but I will most likely write another post to let you know how it’s going.