An Introduction to My Latest Project

Welcome back, everyone!

It’s officially summer break, which means that I finally have the time and energy to hopefully get back to writing. Teaching is exhausting, y’all. I had a hard enough time keeping up with general housework and going to church once or twice a week. Any energy that I’ve had in the past several months, I’ve poured into working on my fantasy book. It’s been slow going, sitting down maybe two or three times a week and squeezing out 350 words at a time, but I’ve managed to get to 70k words that way. And I think the end is in sight.

Better yet, I think I’m willing to start sharing bits and pieces of it with you. But I want to have a plan–a solid goal that we can work towards. Therefore, I’m going to be using this template to share just enough information to get y’all excited.

I did not come up with this template. I believe that the Twitter (or X–I”ve heard people calling it Xitter or Twix, and I’m fine with calling it anything other than X) users who are listed at the bottom of the image actually invented this post. I found it thanks to @TKWilsonAuthor1 so credit where credit’s due. (Also, I did ask her permission but she hasn’t gotten back to me yet, so if this post disappears, you’ll know why.) That said, let’s jump right in with an introduction.

If you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you know me pretty well. My name is MJ. No one in real life calls me MJ, but I like a bit of privacy, so unless you know me offline, you can stick to MJ. I’ve been writing since I was ten and have three self-published novels on Amazon. (I do recommend you check them out–https://a.co/d/2TI2B32 is the first book in the series. It recently got its thirty-first review and has a grand total of 4.7 out of 5 stars, so when I tell you that it’s a good book, I’m not lying.) I just finished my second year of teaching, and I live with my cat in a duplex in a very small town. I spend my spare time going to church and making stuff out of yarn.

Now to introduce my fantasy novel.

I’ve talked a little bit about it on my blog, but it’s undergone a few major updates since then. The main character is a fourteen-year-old human boy named Maywin who works for his father’s cobblery along with his big brother Gregor. Disaster strikes when Gregor’s life-force is eaten by the fae–evil spiritual entities that can shapeshift into incorporeal clones of their victims. Desperate to save his brother, Maywin teams up with his best friend Cory the dwarf, an elvish college student named Vataris, and embarks on a quest to find a group of human/tree nymph hybrids known as the Elysians. The Elysians are the only race who practice the Active Magic necessary to vanquish the fae and get Gregor’s life-force back.

I intend for this novel to be an allegory. The different races represent different systems of belief. The elves are the easiest to explain: they are atheists, and more specifically materialists who do not believe in the existence of the supernatural or an afterlife. The Elysians are at the other end of the scale. They represent the charismatic church that is operating in the gifts of the Spirit and has a close, intimate relationship with God. The humans and dwarves fall somewhere in the middle. Humans are legalists, believing that they have to earn God’s favor and that hardships are punishment from Him. The dwarves are essentially decent Christians who don’t know how the Holy Spirit works, although they are a bit on the superstitious side (which is more for cultural flavoring than anything else). The fae represent not only demons, but also the pain and sin that Satan uses to turn us away from God and others.

It’s still very much a work in progress, but it’s shaping up nicely, and I’m definitely looking forward to sharing it with you. After reading the prompts, are there any other questions you’d like me to answer in a blog post? Let me know in the comments below! God bless you, dear readers, and have a wonderful summer!