That’s such a sweet story!
I started to write first because I was frustrated with how little content there was in video games for a female PC. So, I wrote and coded mods for old games with friends.
On the tail end of it, I started writing original short stories to learn to write.
Then life happened, we had our lovely daughter, and I didn’t really do anything creative for about 7 years or so.
Around 2014-2015, I broke my foot twice in one year, and the second time, the recovery was hard, with huge loss of exercise tolerance and deep depression. My body wasn’t coping with that much healing.
To help things, I started playing video-games again, even played MMO for a bit. But I kept going back to Jade Empire, the game I loved very much that didn’t have a sequel.
Jade Empire had almost everything I wanted in a game. Bright setting, humor, cool characters, imaginative abilities... though it was of course short on romantic options for the female MC!
In 2017, I started writing a novel that was my love letter to Jade Empire with a modest goal of 50K words, something I had never got to before (about 30K on gaming fanfictions was my best).
I ended up with 104K novel and a desire to write more.
I had been doing it ever since and I love it. I learned a lot in the hard school of internet and I hope to one day to bring it all together in The Book, the book that will get noticed and gain wide readership and popular love.