I did not decide to write a middle-grade fantasy book because it was easy, but because I thought it would be…

Everything started 12 years ago. Yes, you read that right. It took me 12 years to write the first book of Johnny’s saga, The Corestone of Bismillah. Okay, to be fair, it took me all this time not only to write this particular book but also to lay the foundation, hooks, and plots to be developed in the next six subsequent books—yeah, I have a lot to write.

I always wanted to write a book, although I did not know what kind of book to write. The only thing I knew for sure was that it should have action and adventure—a lot of it.

One day, while navigating the internet, I came across a comment (I can’t remember if it was on Reddit or another social media platform) saying something like, “It’s a pity no one ever tried to put a school of magic in a fantasy world like LOTR. It would be so cool!”

That’s how powerful a comment on the internet can be! And the person who posted it was certainly right about the last part of the sentence. It’s cool indeed. However, it’s also extremely complex to build a fantasy world with kingdoms, mythical creatures, prophecies to unfold, and dozens of characters who can’t simply come from nowhere—they need a past, and a past that shapes each of their personalities and actions, and all of that revolving around an Academy of Magic with its own agenda.

Once I “finished” the book after about two years of intensive writing, I thought it was ready to print. However, once I started reading it as a reader rather than a writer, I realized it looked like crap, and the more I read, the more sure I felt about it.

It was time to start the revision process. And what was supposed to be a revision became a true battle. I deleted entire sections, full chapters, rewrote everything, changed the order of some chapters, and deleted paragraphs, pages, etc. It was brutal.

That was how I spent the last 10 years. Okay, 10 years is a lot of time. During this long period (a decade 😐), I started a couple of businesses that took up a lot of my time but ultimately didn’t take off. However, I can say I spent most of these years on the craft—revising, deleting, and rewriting my book.

Then, long story short, the day finally came when I thought my book was ready to print, and with that realization came another: I needed to master a new set of skills—editing, design, and formatting. Then I learned about industry standards, book dimensions, font types, line spacing, orphan words, orphan lines, etc. It was a shock!

Aware that I had a lot to do, I started working on my book full-time from 6 AM to 11 PM for almost three months non-stop, from Sunday to Sunday. By the end of the process, I felt like not only could Johnny do magic, but so could I. I reduced the book length by about 50 pages, which means I deleted around 15k words. It’s amazing how many pages you can save by simply deleting adverbs lol (yeah, I used to love them—now I hat… don’t like them that much).

Now my book is published on Amazon, and I’m really proud of the final product I achieved after all those years of blood, sweat, and tears.

In the next articles, I’ll share with you what I learned during this process in depth. It will be good to revisit some old memories (and some not-so-old ones) and tell you everything I learned along the way. See you!