Flashback Fridays #10

For this Flashback Friday, I’m going back to February 3, 2021—to the very first time I wrote publicly about the story that would eventually become Dawn of the Lightbearer.

Of course, it wasn’t called Dawn of the Lightbearer yet. Lucardia didn’t have a name. There was no Absolution of the Morning Star, no sprawling history, no interconnected novels. I thought I had simply found a way around a bout of writer’s block.

When I first started writing, I had a single image in my mind of an ancient tree hidden deep inside a cave, caught in a shaft of light from above (much like above). That image became one of the first visual foundations of the story—and, in many ways, of Lucardia itself.

At the time, I was working on sequels to two of my earlier books, and I fully expected to return to them once this strange burst of medieval dark fantasy had run its course while I was on the winter holiday break.

I never did.

Those two drafts remain exactly where I left them at the beginning of 2021.

Reading this post now, I realize it captures one of the most profound moments of my life as a writer. What I described then as going “off-roading” became an entirely new road. One story became a world, and that world became a creative quest that continues to this day: bringing Lucardia to life.

This is where it began.

Cheers!

New Adventure in Dark Fantasy!