This is my first blog on my website, and I just want to say I'm excited to get into this! I've been fortunate enough to get more time to dedicate to writing, and I've always enjoyed having a place to dump information during my creative process and log already established information about my work, so a blog just made sense to start. Most of these will be really informal (and probably ugly/lacking pictures, wow look at those blocks of text!) and just a way to write when I don't feel like getting into the intricacies of one of my books.
Thank you for visiting my blog! My name is Sara Tunder and I'm an author published under my imprint, Crow's Nest Publishing House. My favorite main genres to write are steampunk and fantasy with an action/adventure sub-genre. I honestly didn't realize that most of my work fell under the steampunk genre until one of my beta readers pointed it out right before I published my debut novel, The Acros Raiders: From the Ashes. I've always loved the steampunk style, but I never identified with the community until recently.
Fantasy has always been a no-brainer for me because all of my favorite shows and books growing up were fantasy or fantasy-related. Avatar: The Last Airbender and Warrior Cats were my two favorite off the top of my head. Adventure has always been second nature for my work, too, because I just love writing about new settings for my characters to explore. I grew up in rural Ohio with 100+ acres of woods that my sister and I would explore, and we used our imaginations to turn every nook and cranny, every little stream and pathway, into something bigger than it was. I think that's where my love of adventure comes from.
For pretty much my whole life, writing has been something I've always done on the side. I started when I was 6 or 7 when my sister brought home a book she had wrote in second grade. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, so I grabbed some computer paper, folded and stapled some pages together in a binding that my family (who worked a collective century in the printing industry) would be proud of. I wrote my first work, The Adventures of Splashy and Ruby, in this computer paper mess and my sister proof-read it for me.
So the big question I'm answering for this blog: Why do I write?
The boring answer is that it's just something I've always enjoyed. I like to escape to my mind. The still boring but somewhat more exciting answer is that I have stories to tell and I hope these stories can help someone during a tough time in their life.
When I was in Middle School, I struggled with anxiety and depression and reading was one of the main ways I escaped my feelings. This isn't really a sad or horrible story, I had a great childhood, I had a lot of friends I loved, I was a little too dumb to realize people at school were making fun of me (maybe I just didn't care), but my brain just got really funky about living in 295-days-of-overcast Ohio. (Going on a tangent here, but I live in Florida now and while it's hot as heck, the sunlight has helped my mental health incredibly.)
Inspired by the books I read, and by my friends who wrote stories around me, I started to write as a way to vent or escape my emotions. I still do that to this day, and it's a wonderfully constructive way to handle feelings. From the death of loved ones, to feeling love, to heartbreak, it's healing (or inspiring if it's a good emotion) to write (or read!) characters in similar situations. (I do recommend it, but I also recommend a good therapist first.)
Going into publishing, I knew that one day, I'll get my first one star review, I'll have people who love the work, I'll have people who hate it, but I really wanted one thing: for someone to find solace in my work the same way I did while reading in Middle School. Soon after publishing my debut novel, a book centered around grief and the loss of a significant other (and steam guns, don't forget the steam guns), I gave my mother the first proof copy. This was not too long after my dad passed away, who my mother had been with for 34 years. She was able to connect with Scotty's grief on a really personal level. The situation really sucks that my mom could relate to this character that I put through the ringer, but I'm grateful to have been able to help my mom by giving her something to relate to in what was a pretty awful time.
I don't want to leave this on too negative of a note, but hey, thanks for reading these 6 blocks of text! I hope my next blog is prettier with pictures and all that good stuff.
Comments