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Hello dear readers!
Before I begin my story, I would like to share some personal thoughts about why and how I began writing. This way, I can also see again where I started from, where I am going, and most importantly, maybe I can give a little courage to others who would like to begin writing... and maybe I can create a somewhat closer relationship with you.
Thank you for reading this short introduction, but feel free to skip all this gibberish. There is a story waiting for you after all.
For those who choose to stay a while, let's see...
I started writing for real a few years ago. In my childhood and my teenage years, I tried to write short stories and poems. I also drew a lot. Although I was never really good at it, I still wanted to see with my own eyes and show to others all that I imagined, stories, characters, landscapes, and so on. Of course, looking back, digging out the pictures from the old paper folders and rereading the faded stories written on crumpled pages, I smile at my old self, but the enthusiasm and the idea itself originate from that time. Over the years, I have collected a lot of inspiration from many different sources: from fairy tales, books, movies, animes (I love them, I have seen a lot of them, both wonderful and horrible), mangas, music, I have collected the witty evergreen jokes and one-liners of friends, and I have even jotted down fragments of my own dreams, dreams of stories, landscapes, both interesting, strange, abstract, and downright hellish ones. Nightmares give the best inspiration. For this reason, I often kept a small notebook and a pencil next to my bed. Over the years, a lot of thoughts piled up, scattered, unorganized, sometimes incomprehensible, on countless sticky notes, writing sheets and notebooks, while the idea of the world I wanted to create and put on paper slowly began to take form.
However, I didn't start writing for a very long time, I didn't dare. Ever since I was a child, I dreamed that one day I would write something beautiful and exciting about a fabulous world, full of emotions, into which I would put my deepest inner self with all my enthusiasm... but I was afraid. I thought that if as an adult, after reading so many books, both good and bad, I wouldn't be able to write, then a dream will be lost forever. I didn't want to lose my dream.
Looking back, I wonder how I began writing, despite the terrifying vision of myself lying in ruins among the pieces of broken dreams...
The answer is: one step at a time. At first, I just started reading through my many handwritten notes, saying that I surely wasn't passing judgment on my own fate just by reading them. One can think of it as an almost mundane office job. Paper sorting. After that, I started to organize them. After all, if I've already taken the time to read all that gibberish, then it would be worth doing something with it. Simple categorization. Important, "later", letterweight, "what?", and so on. This is a good story basis for shorter chapters, those are broken pieces of characters, these are about the world itself, and those are punchy one-liners. I digitized the lines, paragraphs, sorted them by topic, stacking them here and there, copying and pasting them, until I found, with some imagination, some sort of order in the chaos. Then came the real challenge. To piece together a coherent idea from the many jumbled, yet at least comprehensible fragments, scraps of inspiration and thoughts. I don't know how long this exciting work have lasted, but it must have been a month or two, possibly even more. It was worth it.
The fact that from the many small shards collected over the years, under my hands, in front of my eyes, a far from perfect, but visible dream-image formed, gave me the confidence and enthusiasm I needed to take the first real step. To write the first letters of the story, after I climbed through the piles of notes sweatily, panting, yet cheerfully.
I can safely say that, despite my great fears, I have spent well over a thousand hours writing, but I'm probably not lying if I say it has already been several thousand. There were weekends when I sat down to write at ten in the morning and got up at midnight. There are times when I can write two beautiful pages in an hour (that's a lot in my world), but there are times when I can't get a single line together in two hours. I often sit down without really knowing how to continue the story, at which end to grab it, but somehow, in the end, I always manage to at least improve something that's already written. On the contrary, there are some events that I have already envisioned long ago, with every little detail, and I can't wait for them to happen, to finally reach that point in the story. These scenes, among others, are often inspired by music. However, a significant part of these countless hours is actually not spent on continuing the story, but on rewriting what has already been written, over and over again, for the thousandth time.
There are certainly people who are bothered by the fact that a work never feels perfect, but for me, it has a certain charm and beauty. I never know where the story will go, it always offers new mysteries. Maybe I think I will never change anything in a certain part, but half a year later I'll go back and reshape it. I may only change a few adjectives, reverse the structure of a sentence, but there have also been cases where I raised a supporting character, who I only intended to be a source of humor for one or two paragraphs, to the company of the main characters. In addition, I spend a lot of time making sure that the language is polished, and that I don't write something that doesn't fit the imagined age. (Of course, until now, that applied to my native language, but I promise I will do my best to write neatly in English as well.) Because of this, I read the thesaurus to rags and learned a lot of interesting and exciting things that I would never have read about otherwise. For example, how time was measured and divided into units during the medieval times (there were terribly silly and complicated ways of doing it), how long a "moment" really is, when the first doorknob and lock were made, what was used for reading before glasses were invented, what people baked and cooked in, or where the fireplace was in the house.
I really like to sprinkle the story with small signs and hints, some of which may even seem like logical errors at first... however, if you read carefully and don't skim over the small details, you may raise your eyebrows more than once and say "oh, so that's why!" a hundred pages later. And if something remains hidden, it will surely emerge during the second reading. As a hint, I will tell you that already during the second and third chapter more than ten such small details are hidden.
A little more about what kind of book I'm writing...
My story falls into many genres, as probably most books do. Fantasy, adventure novel, drama, romance, in many places thoroughly sprinkled with humor... all of this poured into a fundamentally very dark, sometimes horroristic, sinister atmosphere. I aimed to create a unique world in which I not only lead one story line, or its many branching paths, but which also gives me the opportunity to take the readers to completely different dreamlands. A world where everyone has their own truth, virtue and sin, where there is no black or white, only shades of deep dark and star-white.
Of course, as it should be in a decent novel, my story also has a beginning and an end, with stormy waves and calmer times in between, but in no way do I rush the plot with incessant twists and turns and wildly galloping fight scenes, for in such whirlwinds the excitements crash into each other, in the end extinguishing each other's flame, burying all the fine details under their avalanche. I put a lot of emphasis on the detailed, polished painting of the locations, landscapes, atmosphere and mood, and I leave much more time and space for the characters to develop, and to allow the readers to get to know them. I myself met them for the first time while writing and I want to get to know their past, understand all their feelings, their relationship with each other, the weight of their actions, and to see their every little change. I want to write so that you can feel that you are sitting with them in the inn or at the campfire, walking by their side while accompanying them on their journey, as their companions in their struggles, happiness and sorrow, so much so that you can almost smell the air, and sometimes you almost feel that you might be able to touch them...
Thank you for following me into this mysterious dreamworld.
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