Ayn's Healing

Author's Note - One Year Anniversary

I started writing stories when I was eight. I wrote fanfiction when the term fanfiction didn't exist. The basis of my first attempt was Karl May's Winnetou and, as a teenager, I progressed to spin-offs from Wuthering Heights and the obscure 1956 movie "The Journey". Let it be noted that I did not cringe at all while reminiscing about this.

I then kept writing in different worlds of my own, but I wasn't successful in completing a story in any of them. I had (and still have) a box full of sheets torn off from math notebooks, lab notebooks, those little books they give you at hotels, with fragments of dialogue, small descriptions, pieces of a puzzle I thought I could one day put together.

A series of personal crises put my creative writing on pause for a ridiculously long time. I didn't really mourn. I found other passions and I adulted like nobody's business.

And then one day, one of my social media apps pushed me an add for a werewolf romance. I had no idea that was a thing.

As one who hates the uncertainty that exists at the beginning of a romantic relationship, I was intrigued by the concept of the soulmate bond. And in all truth 🤭, by the smut which, in that first book I read, was pretty tasteful. It was a universe in which my stories could finish. I didn't have to spend much energy talking about the initial flirting and mating dances or whatever the hell humans do when they first meet their object of interest.

On the 2. July last year, I had a busy morning at my day job, the payback for the long weekend I had spent in the mountains. The weather was moody and by lunch, a thunderstorm started, making the lime trees in front of my window bend crazily and dangerously. I settled into my break, with my private computer, and I started to write the first chapter of what I called Book One and would become Ayn's Healing. I had no idea about the plot, only that my female character would go to that plateau I had wandered on some days before and to which I myself was dreaming to return.

It took me ten weeks to write the whole book. It then took me many more months to complete a hefty series of rewrites so that Ayn doesn't come out as a damsel in distress and Kari is not an absolute-asshole-abruptly-turned-nice-guy (which they kind of were in the first versions :)).

One year, some 300K words spread over several stories and a file aptly called „xtra_txt" later, writing still brings me joy.

So I think it's a good time to thank again those who read this story for their support - I am incredibly grateful for the silent reads, the votes and the comments, and for the soul-rising experience which is watching somebody binge on one's book (I won't name you, you two, just know that you have made me very very happy!).
THANK YOU 🙏🏻.