Hi, I’m Lorian. Nice to meet you!
This is the page where I would like to tell you I’ve been writing since childhood, studied creative writing in college, and have a long history of expressing my innermost thoughts via lengthy free-form poetry. I’d like to, but none of that is true. I started writing in 2020, unless you count two pages of what ten-year-old me was certain would be the start of the next Lord of the Rings series. That short-lived project was named King of the Rings, so no points for originality there.
Despite having never penned anything more than reviews and the previously mentioned opus, I always believed I was a writer. You know the type. I came by this honestly, as my mother was also a writer who never wrote. Well, there was that one best-in-the-class essay in high school—a piece lost to time along with any proof that she, or I, possessed the writing gene. Nevertheless, my mother encouraged voracious reading—mostly of horror epics that kept me wide awake all night—and believed I would one day author a book.
In the winter of 2019 a regular client showed up at my semi-successful bodywork studio for his usual two-hour session. This client was atypical in that he brought his own music and audio books. While his choice of tunes made my ears bleed, he was a fan of fantasy novels and provided an introduction to the works of several wonderful authors. On this particular day the selection was Percepliquis, part of Michael J Sullivan’s Riyria Revelations. The series was aptly named; I experienced a revelation right there in the office.
This is how I write, I thought, while listening intently to the narration and performing petrissage on a particularly stubborn quadriceps muscle. Well okay, I’ve never written anything, but if I did it would sound like this. Sullivan was writing the way I had always wanted to, the way I wished others would.
After devouring all of Sullivan's works many times over, I wrote a piece of Riyria fan fiction that caught his attention. Shortly after came an invitation to join his online group, Novel House, in which he taught the craft of writing. My goal in joining Novel House was simple: I wanted to become a good writer and have people who knew what they were talking about say as much. Later, a new goal was added: finish a book. The distant thought that said book might one day be published sometimes crossed my mind, but a lot of improbable things sometimes cross my mind.
A global pandemic isn’t an ideal environment for bodyworkers, so my husband and I agreed to put my practice on hold. This freed up time to develop my writing, and in the fall of 2022 I was offered the unimaginable opportunity to coauthor a series with Sullivan. This wasn’t to be a sure thing; I had to prove I could pull it off, and no one—least of all me—knew if that would be possible. As it turned out, it was.
By the time Out of the Ashes becomes a physical reality three years will have passed—a rollercoaster ride of victories, setbacks, and most importantly, intense learning. The end result is that I finally get to find out if I have the writing gene. Mom thinks so. I hope you will, too.