My new, but profound, I assure you, dream of becoming an author (read this entry for a reference) hit a major bump in the road on Thursday when I stopped by my favorite computer equipment pusher, Datakjeden, to pick up the ultimate tool of the writing trade, an ASUS Eee PC 1000HE.

They were all out!

This means that I have to wait until the middle of next week to start working on my masterpiece. But, as an aspiring author, this is not necessarily a bad thing, because it will give me some time to outline my epic story in my head before the actual writing starts.

One book is not enough to really make it in a world where it seems every Joe Sixpack with a typewriter can get something published. This means that I have to start planning several books already, and the best way to do just that is probably by preparing to write a trilogy - or maybe even go all in straight away and don’t limit the number of books and aim for a full blown series. If people are throwing money at me, why stop writing? Personally, I enjoy reading series instead of stand alone books. In addition, single books are rarely “epic” books. Sure, they can be very, very good, but they need the other books in the series to really bloom.

I guess that the first three things to decide are genre, writing style and language.

I’ll start with the last of the three; language. I’ll probably go for English, even though it’s not my native language, something that will most likely limit me quite a bit in many ways. Still, an English book means a potentially huge audience and if I write in Norwegian and have someone who actually knows English translate it I run the risk that a) something important gets lost in translation, and b) it will take too long to become a famous author. So English it is.

As for writing style, I will try to keep it fast paced and do my best to avoid using too much time on scenery and personality descriptions. Sure, it’s a good thing to know a little bit about Mary, but we don’t need her life story. Unless that’s what the book is about, of course. I’ll also try to keep the chapters short - short chapters make it convenient for the reader to quickly read a chapter when he or she has the time.

The most difficult thing is probably the genre. I’m a great fan of science fiction myself, but right now I’m reading the third book in Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower” series, which is best described as fantasy. I’m not sure if I’m going to decide in genre right now, it’s quite possible that the genre will decide itself when work on the first book has started.

No matter the genre, I’ve already got the first sentence for you:

This is only one of the many ways this story could have begun.

All grammatical mishaps aside, you really want to read on, don’t you!?¹