I have been writing since grade school, and it was the typical menagerie: the plot to a spy novel, the first couple chapters of an Arthurian fantasy, an historical fantasy about the Hundred Years War, and many morose little poems. It was a great creative outlet, but all my grandiose plans were inevitably foiled by the gulf between my own lack of skill and the heights of my ambition. I’m sure hormones also had something to do with it.
Still, the foundation of Purovus was laid in those turbulent years as I toiled to create a world in which my friends and I could play Dungeons & Dragons. My brother had gotten me hooked after only a game or two, and now I was determined to DM my own adventure. We were too cheap to pay for the handbooks and too distracted to follow many rules, so I began creating a home-brew RPG. It began as an amalgamation of D&D and Skyrim, so that we could have a fantasy realm with which we were familiar. My players were rowdy and incorrigible, always pushing past the facade of what I had prepared and into the gritty world of ad lib creation.
I determined that there was only one way to outsmart my players: I would have to create a world that was real. It had to be populated with people who lived and died, with history, legends, and myth. There had to be war and prejudice, hope and redemption. Then I could enter through the wardrobe into a place alive. I would no longer have to rely on quick thinking and I could respond to unexpected turns by simply revealing what was already there.
High school ended and college began. I continued to tinker and eventually found a new group willing to delve into my burgeoning world. Eventually, all my borrowings were stripped away until I was left with something purely of my own creation. I still only perceived it as a somewhat ostentatious platform for a game, until sheer boredom drove me to write.
I was living in Salmon, Idaho, the most remote town in the lower forty-eight. My fiancé was across innumerable mountains and I was spending most of my days in a tent, often separated from even my small oasis of civilization. There was nothing to do but daydream and write. The disparate threads of story finally began to weave together and in a year I had finished my first book.