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BIO
Debra Koehler is an avid NaNoWriMo participant. She cut her novel-writing teeth with the fantasy Amoran, the first volume of The Amoran Chronicles. Both Amoran and Elvener's Legacy, the second book of the Amoran Chronicles, received Honorable Mention in the Scintillating Starts novel contest. Debra also writes songs, poems, and the occasional memoir piece, and has been published in the anthology Vintage Voices and the poetry anthology And the Beats Go On. She is a member of the California Writers Club and the Authors Guild.
MY BACKSTORY
A class assignment pushed me to write my first story at age nine, thanks to my fourth grade English teacher, who—in full dramatic voice—read to us from an anthology of Edgar Allan Poe. Yes, Poe. To fourth graders! Hence, my initial—and unfinished (there’s a theme here)—offering to the literary world was twelve handwritten pages full of phrases like “eerie, utterly dreadful” (Oy!). I quickly lost interest in horror, gravitating to mystery, fantasy, and science fiction. But as much as I wanted to write my own stories, I could rarely get one down on paper, let alone finish it. Whenever I tried, my stomach twisted in knots and a weird sort of mental paralysis set in. By the time I reached adulthood, I had pages full of ideas and nothing more to show for it other than the knot in my stomach where those stories went to die.
HOW A CRAZY WRITING CHALLENGE CHANGED MY LIFE
After years of inhaling every cozy mystery I could lay my hands on, I was determined to finally break through whatever mental barrier held me hostage. I set out to pen my own cozy mystery series during my first attempt at completing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). But, thanks to that ever-present knot in my midriff, I couldn't get down more than a few thousand mish-mashed words. Three weeks later, I gave up.
Opting to drown my non-writing depression in someone else’s stories, I sat down with my nerdy family to watch a Lord of the Rings DVD (yes, it was that long ago). As the plucky fellowship struggled to open the Gates of Moria, I wondered idly what it would be like to have an adventure with a wizard, a dwarf, and an elf. But not in Middle Earth; that had already been done. What if someone like me—a mom with a family, job, responsibilities—got to have that adventure? Now, in modern day. What would that look like? Then, as with all my ideas in the past, those idle thoughts continued their merry march out of my brain. I didn’t even bother to write them down.
That night, I had a dream. I don't recall the content, but I woke up totally energized and convinced I had to give NaNoWriMo one more try. This time, as my fingers tapped along the keyboard, a dwarf appeared out of nowhere in my—um, I mean Kerrin’s—kitchen. The elf and wizard showed up soon enough, and the story I was supposed to write all this time began to take shape. So, thanks to NaNoWriMo, Chris Baty's pep talks (one of NaNoWriMo’s founders), and an apparent “kick in the pants” dream, The Amoran Chronicles came to be.
I didn’t hit the 50,000 mark that year—although I did log in an impressive word count in the remaining eight days that November. But I’ve hit that mark—and well beyond at times—for the other eleven years I did NaNoWriMo. And a few of those years birthed the other three books in the series.