Alra Forest is a story that has been floating about in my head for over a decade. I wrote the first draft of the story back in 1997 from start to finish, then in 1999 I made it more complex as I travelled the world. When I got back from the year long adventure I wrote more notes down, played with the story line and even made parts of it into a dungeon and dragons adventure that was played over the course of about a year.

Although the D&D adventure was actually book two, not the first book.

Then life played its part by making me busy with work, babies began popping out then everything got turned upside down with a divorce…. I strongly recommend not going through that process if at all possible. But the divorce played a role in the story making because my ex wife destroyed the paper copies of the first book.

This meant that all I had of the story was in my head.

For a writer, this is a disaster because it takes many hours to transfer the mind version of the story into a written version. When the written story was gone, I pretty much gave it up for a few years.

Then I decided to rewrite the story at the request of a friend and my new wife.

Obviously I decided to do it, but rather than go through rewriting the entire book to present to publishers, I thought it would be better put the story online as a series. That way I can publish the story as it is written.

Obviously this presents many challenges, but I get around most of them by being about twenty chapters ahead of what is published, but that is a topic for another post.

The online version went through a few variations until I decided and settled on using a blog to publish it.

I also want to earn money from my work so I am learning how to earn from the blog as well; this is a topic for later posts as well.

So all in all, Alra Forest now has a home online, is being read by people and is beginning to earn me a little bit of money, but best of all, it is being read.

Sooner or later, and this is going to be the most exciting factor of doing this on a blog, people will comment on chapters, criticise the story and, I hope, this will become a conversation between writer and reader.

I can’t think of anywhere else a writer and reader are able to talk about stories as they are being written.

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