From Roleplayer to Novelist

Life can change dramatically in five years. Little did I know when I started a new job in 2011 that by 2016, I would have five book titles listed on Amazon. I had been writing since my teens, but it was a hobby, right? Nothing serious? It was just something to kill time?

Then I stared a job which involved spending a lot of nights in hotels away from home. Talk about lonely! One evening, I was flicking through the ‘Other’ messages on Facebook, the ones not from ‘Friends’ and there was a message from a character in a book series which I enjoyed reading: Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark Hunters. Online conversations and a face to face meeting, and I started to write online fan fiction, playing the part of one of the series characters.

Unfortunately, ‘good’ things come to an end. Jealousy, rivalry between other groups, and that original group started to fracture. I was invited to join what was known as an ‘Own Character’ (OC) group run by the same person, but found that the story she envisaged was not to my liking, not least because it used thinly veiled ideas from other book series. Instead, I set up my own OC group, using the ideas I had from my own writing all those years ago. I was delighted when two of the other writers joined me, not least because the pleasure of writing had been restored. I was even more delighted when several followers of the original Facebook group followed my own group. What would become the Negescu Cwn Annwn and the Anghelescu Hellhounds had begun.

As was common with such roleplay groups, each writer would write the parts of a character in the stories. A ‘face claim’ would be used, either an actor or a model whose looks embodied or inspired the character. My own group was no different: the ‘look’ of the Negrescu Cwn Annwn Alpha was inspired by the Hungarian model, Andrei Andrei. A photograph of the Spanish-Israeli model, Angel Macho, inspired a short story about rescuing a young Jewish girl from the Nazis during WW2.

It was about this time that I found out about Smashwords.com and self-publishing. I discovered the fun of finding covers and ensuring that the finished product looked professional. Amongst all that, my friends and I continued to write. We survived attempts to wreck our novels. And yes, we even sold some of the finished product to people who were not family.

It wasn’t easy. Sometimes I wondered if I had made the right decision.  I think I did. For what I have learned and the friends I made along the way, yes, it was the right decision.

And further on the plus side, I found a role-play group being run by someone I knew where I might reprise my first role-play character. Like the picture said, there were those who wanted me to fail in my dream. Well, tough!