💖🐲 The Story That Started It All
Dragons are having their time in the light. Have you heard of this one? Its origin is a defining one.
As an author of ten books, and dozens more on the way, thinking back on writing my first book feels like a fever dream. Was it really so long ago? Now it feels normal to write and publish, like something I’ve always done, but with the completion of my first series, I’m reminded of all it took to get here.
It was late 2016, I just had my son, and an idea popped in my head. What if someone had a birthmark they were raised to fear?
The idea gripped me, like the lightning bolt scar or the mockingjay pin, this would become a symbol for the book that would be interpreted in many ways. Part of moments of pain, but also stories of hope.
I started typing, using my lunch break every day to plot and write this story. I had this feeling that the book would save me. I just didn’t know how…
Ember Dragon Daughter came to be. A teen in a fantasy setting with scales on her chest. Her moms told her to hide them, that the royal family would kill her for it. They moved frequently, not staying anywhere long enough to become part of a community, because any attachment would mean vulnerability, and they couldn’t have that.
Until one day her moms didn’t come home. Ember was told they died in a rebel attack. What would she do now, alone in the world she was told to fear?
Rip away the rules she was told to live by, of course, only to find the secrets her moms kept were hiding more than she could have ever imagined.
I was close to finishing the first draft, making so many mistakes, when I got the call that would change my family’s life.
“It’s cancer. Come meet me so we can tell him together.”
I was a commuter, working an hour away from home, sobbing as I drove down the highway to our apartment, so my father-in-law (who was a doctor) could help me tell my husband his test results.
Our son was about to turn one years old, we were planning a family vacation together, I had gotten a better job, and things were starting to look up. Until they weren’t.
Eight years later, my husband is seven years cancer free. It took multiple ER visits, hospital stays, eleven rounds of chemo, surgery, an average of fifteen appointments a month, and so much crying.
But we’re here. Together.
This book was finished in hospital rooms.
And with that, Ember faces some similar challenges to me. Life changing from one moment to the next, a sudden responsibility thrown on her, family situations beyond her control, and a drive to make it all better despite the odds. She took on so much, and if she can be okay at the end of it, I told myself I could be too.
She took down the walls of her kingdom, opened her citizens up to the destinies that had been taken from them by unjust rulers gripping to power they should not have, with her fated mate by her side.
Sitting on a cot next to him while he slept in the hospital, I wrote the words that I would then publish. Now ten books in, I’ve sold over 50,000 copies of my words, for readers that need escapes just as much as I did.
Ember’s story was published a year after my husband got a clean bill of health.
I would have never finished it if we didn’t have this experience together. In the back of my mind with each word I typed, my drive grew. He had to read it. I wrote it for him.
In those moments where I wanted to give up, I gave my book a reason. If I worked on finishing it, that meant there would be after to this health journey. A before cancer, and an after cancer, where our family got to be okay again.
Life’s plot twists took me down a winding road, and I’m glad it brought me here, talking to you about the stories that held me in the dark, when so much felt like it was fighting against my family.
Ember got to be in the light again. So did my family. If you are in the dark, I see you, I care for you, and know you can do it to.
Remember, you are unstoppable,
Rebecca