The Dukarian Legacy all started with daydreaming. As a child, I had a very vivid imagination. I was always fantasizing about magical animals and good overcoming evil. My first fantasy story was about a pet winged unicorn who would always come to my rescue when I needed him. As I grew older, my fantasies no longer included myself. It wasn’t me who needed rescuing, it was others. And those others didn’t have to solely rely on magical animals to help them. They learned to defend themselves. Yet they still needed friends, and occasionally magic, to help them.
The story of the Dukarian Legacy probably began to form in my head during my late teens – although I did not call it the Dukarian Legacy at the time. But the main character, Tomis, was the same. When I was working the night shift as a 911 operator, I finally decided it was time to write this story down. First of all, I didn’t want to make a career out of being a 911 operator. I wanted to pursue my dreams of being an artist. Secondly, the night shift was really slow after 2am and I had little to do between the hours of 2 and 6am. I was bored out of my mind.
Writing Down the Basic and Key Events
And so the writing of a fantasy novel began. The Dukarian Legacy started with me writing a down a few pertinent events. It was just the basics of those events, not filled with descriptions of the characters or setting.
Outline the Story
But then I had to tie all the events together. So my next step was to create an outline of my fantasy novel with a beginning, middle, and end. That meant that some of my events had to be left out and new ones had to be inserted. Otherwise my fantasy novel would be long, boring, and difficult to follow.
Adding More Detail to the Outline
Once I finished the basic outline, I began writing the fantasy novel with short chapters – again without much character description or setting. After all, I already had this information in my head. I just really wanted to get the story organized and insert the details later. I had to decide what I wanted my main character to accomplish, what message did I want to send with the story, and what can I do to keep the story interesting.
Research
I knew very little about castles, horses, weapons, battle tactics, and other things which were an important part of the story. I also had to work on my grammar and punctuation. So a lot of the work put into writing a fantasy novel was put into research. I bought and read books on castles, medieval times, Victorian times, weapons and armor, horses, mythology, castles, medieval clothing, writer’s handbook, writer’s guides to characters and plots, thesaurus, dictionary, and much much more.
Writing the Story
The next step was in actually writing the fantasy novel. Writing the fantasy novel was not as easy as it sounds. Trying to describe what I saw in my mind was difficult. I had to write not only what I saw, but what I felt. And I had to put it together in such a way that made the story flow.
Editing the Story
Once the story was all written down, I needed to edit it. I have edited my book at least four times. There was always something new I wanted to add, characters I wanted to refine, or punctuation and wording that I wanted to fix.
That is how I wrote the first book of the Dukarian Legacy. It took over a year to finish and years more to perfect. Getting it published is the next step and probably follows almost all of the same steps – understading the basic steps, outlining the steps in more detail, research, then implementation.