Three Worlds, Thirty Years, One Book

How a wannabe video game designer, comic book artist, and D&D host finally wrote a novel

I’ve always been a creative type.

I designed video games. Drew comic book characters. Wrote and hosted D&D campaigns that my friends still talk about. And I daydreamed — for a very long time — about writing a book.

I had a lot to learn first. I just didn’t know it yet.

The first world I built was called Venicia. High fantasy in the truest sense — floating islands, walking gods, avatars, and a system of race and class combinations that would drive most tabletop gamers insane. I had a war between angels and demons, a fallen angel named Tier’gan Hul with a new religion that was anything but religious, and ambitions to build the next Forgotten Realms.

I was young. It showed.

Time passed. The high fantasy outgrew itself, and my ideas matured. I stripped Venicia down to its bones and built something new: Earil. This world had a simple rule — keep it real. Grounded. Modern in scope. Still a fantasy landscape, but one where every action had a consequence and nothing came easy. I wrote a massive bible for it. Detailed. Thorough.

Too thorough. I’d fallen into my old trap — building too much into something that didn’t need it. So I set it aside.

Then came the science fiction phase. The Jodiss Wastes — a fight for resources across vast wastelands between habitable oases that fought and outgrew each other. Mechanical marvels. No elves, no gods. Just human beings at their absolute worst. I loved the ideas. The world died anyway.

Three worlds. Three dead ends. Years of work sitting in folders and notebooks, going nowhere.

About five years ago, I decided to try once more. I started drafting a new world from scratch — and immediately felt myself falling back on old ideas. The same patterns. The same trap forming around me.

Then I had an awakening.

I’d already built my world. Three times over. I just needed to stop starting from nothing and start working with what I had.

Earil was the most detailed — I pulled my heroine from that world and built around her. I took the early mythology from Venicia and updated it with the grounded, mechanical sensibility I’d developed in the Jodiss Wastes. I merged all three. Simplified. Gutted everything that didn’t work and kept everything that did.

What emerged was something I hadn’t expected. Not a fantasy world. Not a sci-fi world. A post-collapse world where the old technology has gone silent but the consequences of it haven’t. A world that felt real in the way Earil was supposed to, dangerous in the way Venicia wanted to be, and human in the way the Jodiss Wastes demanded.

Now I had a world. I needed to learn how to write in it.

I wrote the short stories first — Forged in Blood & Steel — to learn the craft and understand how publishing actually worked. I built The Palisade Journals, five novellas of backstory and complex narrative threads that taught me how to sustain a plot across hundreds of pages. I kept tweaking. Switching focus. Finding the voice.

Then I wrote the novel.

What was originally planned as a trilogy has grown into a saga of five books. And the story demands much more beyond that. Three decades of world-building, three dead worlds, and three women who refused to stay in the drawer.

Peri Blackwood, Kitt Ota, and Wynne Kaede are ready to share their journeys with you.

Wilted Crowns — Ironforged Book One — is available now.

Thank you for partaking in their stories. Enjoy.

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