Erick Bates

I’ve been telling stories my whole life. As a kid I told my first stories through my GI-Joes. There was conflict, diversity, and even love triangles between my little plastic toys, but I was soon diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD. Reading was always hard. I would teach myself to study as I worked my way through college. I worked my ass of to get a B in English Comp II, and I have a lot of ass to work through. I wish my teachers would have used my love of telling stories to help me focus as a child. I remember writing a story every day in my school journal until my teacher made me stop. Those journals weren’t meant for stories. They were for what we did that day, what we learnt, but the real world is boring. That’s why I built my own worlds. The educational system failed me, but I have risen above the future others chose for me.

My first story was meant to be a mystery, a love story, and a ghost story. As I worked on that story I came to the understanding that I wasn't cable of telling that story, yet. To make the mystery work, what I didn't tell become more important than what I did. Giving the reader just enough so they could figure out the mystery before it is revealed. Not knowing how to do that yet, I decided to write Brotherhood of the Lion's Mane. A fantasy based on my friends and the D&D adventures we used to play. The story was to mirror our own lives. A group of people coming together, going on adventures, before life would drift us apart. What I ended up writing is nothing like that. The first book, Raven's Call, is still centered around the group coming together, but the characters have changed. They were flat, one denominational heroes. Do gooders in the most basic since. As I grew older, morality crept into the story. The heroes began to do questionable things as the story matured.

I wish I could say that I was always working on my stories, but truth is I stopped. When I got a good job, and wasn't living from paycheck to paycheck, I stopped writing. I didn't need my escape any more. I used to write every day. Than once a week, until once a month. One day I decided. I was going to finish my book. I was going to try to live my dreams, and become a writer. I would spend two year tearing my story apart and rebuilding. Raven, the title character, went from being a kindly father figure to my young hero, to a man cursed with regret. A simple, hero's journey became a complex tail of temptation and redemption.