HOW IT ALL BEGAN
Let me tell you the story of how I was encouraged to begin the writing adventure that has become the Tellurae Aquaous Series:
I have been a lover of books my whole life. It started when I was just a baby and my mom read the entire "Little House on the Prairie" series to me. It continued with such titles as "The Chronicles of Narnia," "A Wrinkle in Time," "The Hobbit," "The Lord of the Rings," "The Cooper Family Adventures," "Hank the Cowdog," "The Wind in the Willows," "Lad: A Dog," and many more as my father made it a habit to read out loud to my siblings and me each night before bed. It continued as I astounded some of my high school teachers with the speed at which I devoured books they gave me. In high school I turned from the Young Adult section and found the Star Wars books, the Wheel of Time books, The Deathgate Cycle, and more. It continued to develop into a love for writing as I took every creative writing class they offered in high school and college, and it came to fruition when my dad proposed a challenge to me one summer:
"If you want to be a writer, you should be writing," he told me.I know it doesn't seem like a novel idea (pun intended) but it seemed that way at the time."I want an adventure tale to read to Grant and Evan and Brittany." (those are my younger brothers and sister)I wanted to tell him that there were dozens of good adventure tales at the library; even though I knew what he meant... it was just that the idea of writing a whole book was so daunting, but I decided to let him finish."I want ten pages a day."TEN PAGES A DAY!?!?!?!?!?"I'll pay you a dollar per page, and an extra thousand dollars if you finish it by the end of the summer."Ten pages a day... if I write five days a week for 9 weeks that's roughly 450 pages... can I do it? really?
And thus, my new career as a serious author began. I wandered up to the computer room and pulled out all my old creative writing pieces until I found a journal entry that caught my attention.
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This morning before school I walked out on my porch as the sun rose, it was... amazing. The fog was stretching up to the sky, the sun shone through the fog casting an iridescent, almost unreal, fantasy type setting. The whole sky seemed to glow in a hazy orange hue, especially in the eastern part of the horizon.
There was a lot of fog rising up from the pond, so much so that I could not see the actual pond; just a vague outline of what could have been a wide, deep chasm. With the sun shining reddish-orange through the thick fog as it lifted, fairylike, off the pond, I could almost imagine that I was seeing the entrance to a dragon's lair. The fog, of course, was not fog at all; it was the steamy breath of the slumbering monster that lay within the unknown depths of the hazily outlined cavern.
The fog, if fog it was, was tinged with a fiery color and made the possibility of a dragon seem that much more real. I felt, as if by stepping out of my house this morning, that I had passed through another door entirely, and ended up somewhere completely different from my intended destination.
A shadow seemed to fall across the cavern and I could picture the dragon, rising up, fierce and powerful like the sun, out of the morning fog, and flying overhead: a blazing beast of light over the whole land. Then the fog cleared, the terrifying cavern became once again the idyllic, serene pond that I know so well. The sky turned its normal, clear blue, and the dragon, if dragon it was, became the fiery morning sun, content to travel through the sky, waiting for the time when he might rise again to meet the morning.
Thus "The Dragon's Eye" was born.