It Started as a Game

Before it was a book, it was supposed to be a game.

The idea was simple enough: you're trying to save something important, and the story is driven by your choices. Not a puzzle with a correct solution — a series of decisions where you might make all the right ones and still not be enough. That was the part I couldn't let go of. Most games promise that if you're clever enough and careful enough, you win. I wanted something honest about the fact that sometimes you aren't, and sometimes it isn't.

So I did what you do. I built the world. The lore, the rules, the magic system, the mechanics, the twists and the turns. Every piece of scaffolding a game would need.

And then I needed someone to walk through it.

Ana came first. She was the thing worth saving — the something important at the centre of it all. But you can't tell a story from inside the thing being saved. You need someone standing next to it, making the choices, paying for them.

So I made Wren, dropped her into the world I'd built, and let her decide what to do.

That's genuinely how it worked. I'd defined the ruleset — what the magic does and doesn't do, who these people are, what they'd never say out loud — and after that their interactions almost governed themselves. I wasn't steering scene by scene so much as watching what the rules produced. Wren walked into a finished world and started making choices I hadn't scripted.

Here's what I didn't expect: how attached I'd get.

I still feel bad when things happen to them. Which is absurd, because I'm the one who guided them there. I built the world, I set the rules, I put the obstacle in the road. And I still wince.

I've decided that's probably a good sign. If it didn't cost me anything to write, I don't think it would cost anything to read.

There's a version of fantasy where the protagonist is chosen, and prophesied, and the world is at stake in the largest possible sense. I like plenty of those books. It isn't what I wanted to write.

I wanted a story where the characters aren't heroes. They're regular people trying to take care of each other.

People often say they'll never change the world. I think they can — once they define what that world actually means to them. For Wren, it isn't a kingdom or a continent. It's Ana. It's Wickerstead. It's her family, and making sure they're protected. That's the whole of it. That's the world she's trying to save, and by her own measure the stakes could not possibly be higher.

She didn't know what her world was until she found it. I think that's true of most people.

The choice I made early and had to keep making was not to promise a soft landing. That's a hard thing to commit to, but it's also just practical. There are not always happy endings. There are not always sad endings. But there are always endings — and a story that tells you up front which one you're getting has given away most of its tension before you start.

Book one ends where it ends. I won't say more than that.

As for the game: it would be nice.

Building it properly would take a team better than I am, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What I could do on my own was write the thing down. So that's what I did — five months, one world, two girls, and a road going east.

The game may happen someday, with people better suited to it than me. In the meantime the book exists, which is more than I expected when I started.