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My name is Joesph Miller and I've been a part-time freelance writer for the game industry since 2000. I used this experience to get myself into the habit of writing and creating new worlds for my imagination to explore.

One of these new worlds is called the Ethereal Realm and it is the setting of my first novel. I spent the last few years delving into the characters, elements, and themes of folktales and fables, myths and legends, and classical children’s literature. Out of all this research I fashioned a fictional world where imagination and meaning meet in a mythos akin to those found in Middle Earth and Narnia.

During this time I reflected upon three guiding questions: What if the persons, places, and plots in our traditional tales existed in another dimension? What if writers, artists, and other individuals could use their imagination to enter this world through their dreams or by other means? What if the characters and creatures we read about in stories were real and could move about our world, but masked from the senses of most people?

These questions and their answers drove me further and further into the Ethereal Realm where dreams and nightmares toil and play, suffer and hope, and live and die. Every story I read added another aspect to the setting’s overall narrative. Each author’s biography offered insights into the inner workings of the world, from the lost years of William Shakespeare to the mysterious death of Edgar Allen Poe. I coupled these literary references with musings about what they might mean and produced over two-hundred pages of background material. I cultivated the field of the setting before planting the seeds of characters, plots, or themes because I wanted these elements to grow naturally out of the ground I prepared for them.

The first fruit of this approach was Avery Mann, the narrator and main character of my envisioned series of books. He is an accident prone teenager, who possesses the boon and curse of an imagination powerful enough alter reality and enter the Ethereal Realm. Since inventing this character I have spent the last couple years shaping his thoughts, voice, and actions. I allowed him to run loose upon the page whenever I had time. Along the way he set into motion a series of misadventures involving a fiendish Raven named Nevermore, a shape-shifting shadow-wraith named Skiazo, the infamous and impish Puck, a fairy godmother who works in the school library, and a number of other eccentric and engaging characters.

With over 60,000 words under my belt, I have reached a point where I feel comfortable with the setting, characters, and plot involved with Avery Mann’s Book of Misadventures. I am hoping to finish the first book in the Avery Mann series, submit it to publishers, and work toward its publication in the next year or so. I also want to promote the book as a strategy for encouraging literacy in adolescents.

I believe the book’s numerous references to classical and children’s literature if handled correctly could encourage young readers to take a new look at the works referenced within its pages. I would like nothing more than to see more people reading Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio and Virginia Woolf’s The Mark on the Wall. I would like to work with my publisher to create a website with links to the literary works I allude to and advocate the reading of them through literacy initiatives in libraries and school. Once the book is published I plan to build awareness of it by submitting the book to the contests it is eligible for as a first novel in the fantasy genre.

My name is Joesph Miller and I've been a part-time freelance writer for the game industry since 2000. I used this experience to get myself into the habit of writing and creating new worlds for my imagination to explore. One of these new worlds is called the Ethereal Realm and it is the setting of my first novel. I spent the last few years delving into the characters, elements, and themes of folk... More