An introduction and wee history of myself

Hello.

Introductions can be kind of awkward.

What you should probably know about me:

I’m a girl.

I’m a student.

I have two cats

I have recently started a course in herbal medicine.

I drink a lot of tea but never drink coffee.

I want to write young adult novels.

So why a blog?

I’ve been writing for a long time, but last November marked the beginning of my most ambitious project to date – a story that spans three novels. Knowing, of course, that finishing even one novel is one hell of a job. I’m working on the manuscript for the first book, called Het Eiland in de Mist (The Island in the Mist). And I have been struggling! At the same time I realized just how much I love this – writing, the craft, the plotting and squeezing your brain for inspiration, for the right words.

 I want to be published. I really want to walk into a bookshop one day, and see my own book on the shelves. So, I said to myself, why not try to keep a diary of your process? See where this takes you. Who knows, maybe I will actually make it to that publisher.

A brief history of my writery stuff

I can’t honestly tell when I first started to write stories. There’s one memory I have of me sitting in the back of the car with my sister. She was writing on a small note block, I was dictating the words because I couldn’t read or write yet.

But I guess my first real attempt at writing something like a book began when I was 14 years old. I had the whole story in my head; it was, in fact, some kind of bedtime story that I told myself every night before I went to sleep. I wrote it in first person, like a diary, but all that stagnated after a couple of short chapters.

One year later, I decided that I would write a book. A proper one- one to be published. I took the diary fragments and reworked them into a novel initially called The Light of the Shadow (Het licht van de schaduw in Dutch). The story follows a normal girl who one night is awakened by Steffan. Turns out she was a princess in another dimension in her past life. Once she gets her memories back, she's dragged into a rather dangerous adventure, including a magical pendant, an evil cousin and some dark family history.  I worked on this story for maybe four years and then rewrote most of it when it was finished (and I was a bit older and saner). The title then changed into In light and Shadow (In licht and schaduw).

Remeber, princes: when taking your princess on your first romantic horse-back riding stroll, DO NOT let the lady slip off into a nearby stream!  Lucia and Steffan, an early illustration.

Chandra after her first fall from grace.
Also an illustration from my earlier days.

By then I had given up on the idea that this would ever be fit for publishing, and happily moved on the my next project. I should mention that by then I had discovered the wonderful event that is NaNoWriMo. My first attempt to participate stagnated around 7 pages in word, but by the time I was ready to let go of In Light and Shadow, I had grown significantly. My second novel would be a prequel to In Light and Shadow, and it would be completely different. I finished the 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo (or Nano, for short) easily and felt really good about the whole thing. 

Moon Daughter, as it was called, takes place some thousands of years before the first book. Main character is Chandra, an orphan girl raised by priestesses in the great city of Damáris. As it turns out, the moon goddess has a nasty kind of surprise for her. And then there's Raven, with whom Chandra falls desperately in love. Unfortunately, I never finished the novel. It’s too long ago and entirely not my taste anymore, otherwise I still would. The important thing is that I learned a lot about planning a story.

An illustration for chapter 10 of
  Jia en de Kattenrijders.

So, not at all discouraged, I was ready to rock another novel by the time November came rolling about once more. This time, the story was tight-knitted, my characters were fleshed out, I knew where I wanted to head and what themes I wanted to cover. Jia, the main character, was a fresh and feisty girl whom I could relate to, but she wasn’t ME. For a long time I have considered Jia and the Cat Riders (Jia en de Kattenrijders) to be my best work. Jia can travel to and from a land called Lynesse. She joins the Cat Riders Guard, a special unit for the protection of the young and insecure reiks (sort of a prince). This leads her to get involved in the affairs of the country –a country plunged into war by a 
very dangerous opponent.

School life prevented me from joining Nano for another year, but a little while after I had edited Jia and the Cat Riders, I wanted something less fantasy. The next novel was a sort of post-apocalyptic/dystopian thing set in the near future. It was called Till Human Voices Wake Us (Tot mensenstemmen ons weer wekken) which actually sounds better in English, because it was named after the final line of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. By that time I had gained some popularity with Jia and the Cat Riders on my favorite writing site, and people were even more enthusiastic about Till human voices wake us. Suddenly I found myself struggling with every other sentence. I had raised the bar too high for myself, and the whole thing just came to a screeching halt.  This is what happens when you try too hard.

Daffodil. Our hero, much against
her wish.

Millie: a girl with a quest to
become a princess.

Needing some lighter material to work with, and never able to resist the temptations of NaNoWriMo, I wrote a novel called Plain Flowers – in English, because what the heck, it felt like an English Kind Of Novel. Plain Flowers began, and mostly finished, as a sort of parody on the classical coming-of-age fantasy book wherein a young hero(ine) tumbles into another (wannabe-medieval) world and there discovers his or her grand destiny to free the land of evil…things. My story was about the sidekick Daffodil; just a modest shepherd living in the hamlet Low-of-the-Road. She has never heard of a place called America, nor does she particularly believe in its existence – or, for that matter, in the prophecy that this strange girl Millie is supposed to become their princess and defeat the evil tyrant princess Merope. The Nano of 2009 was used to actually finish the book, focusing on fairy folklore and Daffodil’s own weird heritage – which was quite the ordeal for poor Daffodil, since she insisted on not believing in fairies at all.

In the months following, I sometimes wrote a short story and finished two novellas. And finally, then, we arrive at the November of 2010, where I felt I needed to challenge myself. I wanted to write something better, more adventurous and dramatic, more solid and darker than ever before. It is the reason for setting up this blog.

Nimue.

This is the story of Nimue, who loses everything except her younger brother Arthur when a tidal wave erases her home and village. With nothing left to lose and strange powers following them, brother and sister start a journey to find their long lost mother. And that is, as they say, only the beginning.

Dun dun dun.