Hello, my name is Emily, and I am a storyteller…

     When I was little, my dad used to take my brother and me for walks out to the Point, a little spot in Northern California where a tributary stream runs into Trinity Lake. The moment we grabbed our walking sticks and stepped off the porch we became the prince and princess traveling with our great wizard protector in search of the Isle of Greenland. We journeyed through the rocky lakebed, fighting prickly-armed weed people with our staves, and eluding the Evil Empress Dingledork. Our adventures ended at a small island surrounded by a shallow sliver of lake where we healed our wounds at a great gnarled stump before setting off for home.

     As a child, the world was never an ordinary place. The woods behind our house were filled with elves and wolves; the shrubs and burrows housed tiny people or talking animals. My brother and I made up an elaborate world with our stuffed animals. We developed a political hierarchy, a money system, a religion, several languages, an origin story, and a method of conception. Our bedroom doors were plastered with homemade newspapers, travel guides, and political propaganda. It was intense.

     My strange, fantastical imagination followed me into adolescence and adulthood (I’ll admit I still imagine a colony of miniature people inhabiting the jungle-like fauna outside my apartment). The collection of notes for Shards is preceded by a single journal entry expressing my annoyance at the dullness of life. To escape my discontent, I jotted down some very melodramatic notes about a land at war. Then the writing started to flow. Twelve pages later, I had the rough skeleton of what shaped into the second chapter of The Shards of Morning. I had no idea where the story was going or if I would ever finish it.

     Shortly after I began Shards, my parents decided to buy property and build a house. I, of course, willingly assented to this. It would be an adventure right? [FATES cackle with sinister glee]. We moved from a comfortable place in town into the middle of the woods. My brother and I lived in a twenty-foot trailer, half-sunken in the mud and teeming with little critters that crawled in through the cracks in the floor.

     When school rolled around again, I rose in the darkness of five a.m. (I spent my senior year attending a community college fifty miles from home) to catch the bus. The early morning silence was often shattered with harrowing cougar screams, so while I made my breakfast in our open cook shack, someone else stood watch with a shotgun.

     Despite the best of intentions, we did not finish our house before winter struck. The water froze. We had to go to the local gym and pay five dollars each for a shower. We couldn’t do our dishes, and every time I went to the outhouse (yes, the outhouse), I nearly froze to death. I slept fully clothed with my hood pulled up over my head, but still I awoke with icicles (figuratively) hanging off my feet. I gave up wearing normal clothes and lived in parkas and thermal sweatpants.

     Through exhaustion and a brutal winter, Helena’s story became my lifeline. I worked in an empty corner of my trailer. Tiny brown beetles with curly feelers and crosses on their backs liked to crawl across my screen (I named them all Fred), and once I discovered a little green and orange frog sitting on my shoulder watching me write.

     At last the winter came to an end. I graduated from high school having made the decision to put college on hold to try writing full-time. I also decided that I would end my novel on a cliffhanger and split it into several books (I had no idea where the story would go next). I gave copies to my parents, a writer friend, and one of my teachers (also a writer) to read and critique.

     While I tried to get moving on the second book, the story was not flowing the way it had been before. Finally, I sat down and wrote a scene that was sort of a what-if. I didn’t think it would amount to anything, but when I was finished, I had an epiphany. The novel was not complete where it was. For the first time, I saw the conclusion. So, I began working on part four and rewriting huge sections of the first three parts.

     The first finished draft of The Shards of Morning ran at 188,000 words. It was a colossal monster in need of a great deal of pruning. I slashed and edited, put it away for months, then edited again. I gave it to trusted friends to read and critique. I edited again. Writing the novel is only the beginning of the work!

     So what now? After graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, I am hard at work wrapping up Counsel of the Blind, the sequel to Shards, as well as completing new episodes of Sherwood (check out the Sherwood page for some awesome reading!) Keep up on http://ekmartens.blogspot.com for more news from Kaladh (a third installment? You better believe it!), and some exciting new projects I've been cooking up!