Writing My First Novel

I mentioned in my introductory piece that I'd published my first novel in August of 2016. Since the beginning of that particular project I've been getting particular questions about it. Now, I won't go into the whole project from start to finish in one article because that'd take forever to read but I will go into it in segments. With that in mind, let's start out with the origins of the project and take it from there.

My first novel was born primarily out of boredom; I'd just finished my final exams for Grade 10/11 (this was at the end of October 2012) and I was facing a 3 month vacation. At the time, I wasn't involved in any social activities and I had literally nothing to read (I had tons of books but nothing appealed). So, I sat thinking about the upcoming 3 month vacation period and wondering what I was going to do.

Now, I should mention that for one of my exams I had to write a composition piece - short story, argument or something else. I thought about that piece for a bit and started typing into Microsoft Word. I didn't know much about writing; had no clue what I was doing. All I knew was that I needed something to keep myself busy for a 3 month period or I'd go crazy. I drew inspiration from the Underworld and Resident Evil films as well as a few other post-apocalyptic genre films.

I threw in a couple of vampire characters - this was at the time that the Twilight craze was going strong and vampire literature was selling - and the rest is more or less history. The first draft was 70 pages in length and I sent it out to a few members of my family and a few friends got a lot of positive feedback on the story and characters but found that the writing was extremely clunky in places; so it was back to the drawing board...this was in early 2013. I spent the next 3 years working on the project; refining the writing making story changes - adding stuff in, taking stuff out etc. the finished product was about 300 pages and on the 31st of August, 2016, four years after I started the book; The Feral: Book 01: Apocalypse was published to Amazon Kindle.