Where Do My Stories Come From?
5-29-25
First off, I’d just like to say that my life has been pretty hectic lately, and I have not been able to update my blog here, nor have I been able to work on much beyond a little titter or two on the keyboard here and there. I hope you have had a great spring, and that your summer is just as beautiful and relaxing as an afternoon spent in the sun, smelling the freshly bloomed flowers and some freshly cut grass.
Inception
It isn’t often that I reflect on my past, especially about how and when I began writing full-length stories. However, I thought it might be something fun and beneficial to document here and to explore in depth for the first time in my life.
In 2025 I have been writing consistently longform prose since January of 2020. This was an endeavor brought about (oddly enough) by the ramping down of my music career. It was around that time in 2020 when I found myself with more time than I had in years, and with nowhere to channel my creativity into. I’ve always loved to write lyrics, crafting the stories or messages behind the songs I performed, and knew I would be absolutely devastated if I found myself with nothing to pivot to, with every aspect of my music world suddenly gone away. There had been times before this period where I had written short form stories and comics, and even times when I had written a little on my phone, but never had I taken those seriously, and those had mostly been from my days in elementary to high school.
Quickly I found the nights in 2020 where I would tinker around on the ipad my mom had gifted me with an attached keyboard trying to piece together my first story growing longer and longer. Already I had felt my enjoyment grow after graduating from writing on my phone to using a full keyboard, so an hour or two a week quickly turned to three or four a day, and then before long it was basically all I did. Those nights of writing then turned to early days and late nights, as my enjoyment and obsession truly took root inside of me, and I filled doc after doc with notes, segments of stories, and even a completed book or two.
When My First Story Ideas Materialized
It was the winter of 2019 when my first serious ideas for stories came to me, and they didn’t come from any dreams I’d had, nor from some experience I’d drawn from in my own life…they came from a deep depression being self-medicated with marijuana. Now, I bet you’re rolling your eyes at this point, or thinking to yourself how stupid or horrible these stories must’ve been, and that no one would’ve enjoyed reading them. So, you’ll be relieved to know that those initial stories were undoubtably unreadable, and only served as stepping stones to weed out and hone the grammarless, non-storytelling side of myself. I hadn’t graduated from any college after taking writing courses, I hadn’t studied authors or storytelling whatsoever, so when the love of the craft came to me I felt I needed to act fast in order to bridge my gap in learning and talent. But that wasn’t the only reason, I began to plunge into my ipad crafting these little stories as a means to escape my life, as a way to find and have control over something, where everything else felt entirely out of my hands.
Some of those first stories were, however, integral to creating the seeds of what one day would become THE LIGHTLESS and VINE VEIN. You may have seen it mentioned here before, if you are an avid reader of this blog, but my original manuscripts of those books were written during this time, and THE LIGHTLESS was JACE & THE LIGHTLESS, and VINE VEIN was called Bloodbound and was a 4 or 5 hundred page mess that like JACE & THE LIGHTLESS had to be entirely rewritten years later when I had grown confident enough in my skills to truly take another swing at them.
So, during this time of my life, where nothing was certain, where my world had crumbled around me, where I had sunken lower than I ever thought myself capable of sinking, these stories brought me tremendous comfort. And as I was eventually able to kick my marijuana habit, and my writing had become a consistent part of my life, my garbled, misspelled, ungrammatical, disjointed, unreadable stories slowly evolved draft after draft, idea after idea. I honed in on what genre I wanted to write, honed in on the types of stories I wanted to tell, and truly took some giant leaps at becoming an actual writer.
I left behind my grandiose sci-fi epic, my small town, “our world” Stephen King style horror stories, and another handful of incomplete stories that in retrospect both made little sense narratively, and were just so lacking in originality, style, and grammar that they are still hard for me to go back to to this day. Although, I do still have all of these stories, as well as most of if not all of my initial first drafts of THE LIGHTLESS and VINE VEIN. Those two are the only ones to survive being in my first batch of stories, and both have received new drafts as recently as 2023 and 2024—though neither I’ve gotten to where I’d like them to be.
*However, the first story I ever completed was called Wretchton, and it was a very vague, broken grammar story about strange happenings around a small family. That story I used as reference a few years ago to write my first novella called Flower Flesh. While zero of the original story made it to the new version, it was cool to be able to kind of inspire myself to write the novella by looking back at that very first story of mine.
THE LIGHTLESS started as a Stephen King style horror story in a small town, and honestly the very initial idea of the creatures and people I cannot recall how I came land on. The same can be said for VINE VEIN, as it began as a very cliche, unoriginal, and disjointed fantasy epic, but its specific plots and characters I cannot seem to nail down the exact moment they came to me either. I chalk it up to my cloudy mindset at the time, and they could’ve easily been tossed aside and forgotten, but for some reason they always stayed in my head, they always begged me to make them better, to write them. So, that’s what I did.
Where My Stories Come From Now
Over the past few years my stories have come to me in various different ways. One recent story began as just a simple idea that came to me as a feeling I had about the loved ones in my life, one began as a desire to tell a story from a very unique POV, and another came from my desire to show a side of one of my worlds I’d never shown before. These all stand out to me in my head because while they for intents and purposes did come out of the void like my first stories, they had things to tie on to, they had established worlds where their stories could be told in, making their writing much easier than when I had to initially think up those worlds in the first place.
With two series taking place in parallel universes my worldbuilding really never stops, and every year their lores thicken, their intricacies lengthen, and the stories of the people within each of them grows dearer and dearer to my heart.
What Taking Myself Seriously Has Done For My Writing
These five years of writing seriously have been nothing if not a hurricane. I’ve written draft after draft, scoured the internet for writing resources, editors, agents, publishers, conventions, workshops, and anything else I could get my eyes on that could in any way help nudge me in the right direction. I have gone back a time or two to briefly scan those first drafts of THE LIGHTLESS and VINE VEIN, and it makes me so proud to see just how far they’ve come, how far I have. There have been few days in these past five years where I haven’t done something to further my writing career, to make better my stories, to further craft my worlds, and I wouldn’t take a single day of it back.
As my writing gets better, I get better, and this is only the beginning.
My parting message is the same as always, thank you so much for taking the time to read my words, and I cannot wait to share my stories with you,
JMB.
