When I finished the first “official” version of The Royal Wizard in 2008, before I thought I had any hope in the world of getting it published, I “pseudo-published” it just for myself. I sent off a copy for an official Copyright, and then I formatted the word document to look just like a real book (without really grasping the concept of the page break yet, so imagine a lot of line breaks being counted off) and created a cover from images I found online and loved. I printed one copy, had it bound at FedEx Kinkos, and placed the 8.5″ x 11″ booklet on my bookshelf among a small handful of first editions, which will probably never see the light of day. This first edition was roughly 68,000 words long and on the first page I had written the following epigraph:

Dreams open the windows through which in our waking hours we seek to see. They are the worlds we create when reality fails to live up to our expectations, and the secret lives we wish we could live. They are the stories we write for ourselves, with no thought of critics or audiences, knowing that, whatever they might be, they will always be well received.

On the very next page, I had written another:

A dream which needed to be told.

That, more than anything is the reason why I am sitting here today, writing this nostalgic post. Because I still believe those words. They guide everything I do in this life, and every word I write, published or not. Those closest to me know how important dreams are to me. I have hundreds and hundreds of pages worth of dream journals and those I trust most know that they’re not just random images and scenes, but stories and movies playing out my head while I sleep.

Now I get to rack up my courage, square my resolve and share one of those dreams with you. The Royal Wizard is, in a way, a dream twenty years or so in the making, and it has come a long way over the years, grown with me to roughly 100,500 words and an awful lot more complications and intricacies. You can imagine how nerve racking it is for me to put it out there LOL. Nevertheless, I love the story. I adore the characters. As my younger self had said, this dream needed to be told, and so I can do no less than tell it. I owe that to my inner child.

With great pride (and more than a little trepidation at having the inner workings of my mind revealed to the world) I present to you The Royal Wizard. Now available at Smashwords and AllRomanceEbooks,  and soon to be distributed everywhere else.