I believe I was ten years old, or thereabouts, when I decided to write my first book. I do not recall why I made such a choice, but I can guess. I had always been -- and still am, though not quite as much -- a voracious reader who consumed media well above my grade level. I was raised on Tolkien and Lewis, as well as a small library of illustrated classics such as Ivanhoe, Call of the Wild, and Oliver Twist. I explored the local library independently more often than not, and my favorite stop in any shopping mall was the book store. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would want to attempt a book myself.
Now while I cannot directly recall the why, I can plainly recall my initial inspiration. My father owned a copy of Myst, essentially a point-and-click puzzle game for those unaware, and it fascinated and terrified me in equal amounts. So I externalized those thoughts, forced them into an awkward marriage with various and not at all subtle references to The Lord of the Rings, and hand drafted a handful of pages in school notebook. I titled the project Yith.
I have no idea what became of that notebook. I imagine it's somewhere in my mother's garage; she kept nearly all my old school things.
Over the next few years I circled that project like a hungry scavenger, constantly revising and refining the idea. My siblings became involved, drafting characters that I would shoehorn in, and slowly the project evolved. The only evidence of its origin was the magical book which transported the main character, an unfortunate soul I seem to recall naming Phillip, into the magical world of Yith. Much of the influence of The Lord of the Rings had also been left by the wayside, at least outwardly, and the likes of Eragon had taken their place. I tried my hand at crafting an original species to serve as my enemies, began to wrap my mind around the basic elements of a character arch, and made it well into that draft, dedicating enough time to it that my mother actually invested in a curriculum designed to help me along in the process. I remember getting to what I had considered the halfway point of the book, though I could not guess how many pages or words that amounted to, when the computer I was writing on crashed, corrupted the document beyond recovery.
While none of that draft survived, somehow the idea has never fully left my mind. In college I played with yet another draft, though the only thing this project had in common with that first work was the name of the setting, "Yith," and in recent months I have revived the work yet again, adding yet more distance from its current form and its beginnings. Yet still Yith persists. Maybe, one day, I'll even finish it.
