Short story: D&D, animations and a dream I had once.
Long Story.
I used to be a very imaginative person growing up, every time I watched a TV show or Anime I often found myself really immersed into it, thinking about ways characters that never talked would interact, or theorizing how certain technologies or magic would work... That was probably the first step in what would eventually become my writing.
I was always fascinated by the idea of making my own stuff, but never got into fan content creation as much, I was (and still am) a loner, I have a hard time interacting with people and often mess up simple conversations by being too weird, so to make fake content was off the table... But I still like doing it, heck, just the other day I was day dreaming about my own avatar series taking place after Korra to tie the loose ends of that show xD
I was kind of rebel and made a point not to like popular stuff like soccer and novellas... so flash forward a couple of years and I was a loner teenager with a passion for anything that the people around me didn't like. It suited me well enough as people interactions were such a nightmare to me, but I had recently found one of my brothers D&D 3.5 rulebooks.
Naturally the little nerd in me got tinkering with it, thinking about all this cool stuff and wanting desperately to play, but again, social ineptitude prevented me from just going to my brother and asking to join his friends (as well as general distaste for my brother in general, back then).
So I went with the next best thing and started thinking up my own stuff, my own rules and my own stories... Add a couple more years and my brother's old group picked up finally that me starring at them playing D&D for like 4 hours without saying a word was actually my way of saying I wanted to play... So they decided to invite me to join.
I was a teenager in mid teens playing with a group of 20 somethings, it worked fine... None of the D&D horror stories you'd get from reddit. I got introduced to the hobby and dived right into it.
I tried DM a number of times but I was too raw and green back then, it would be until i was 20 that I got to actually DM decently, and eventually I started coming up with my own lore and reasons for why things worked the way they worked... Druids were attuned to this magic entity and could see mana, dragons generated mana, and yaddah yaddah yaddah... lots of new concepts to me that I loved to explore.
So now we had a very active and D&D focused mind, and finally it came to me... the aforementioned dream.
I won't pretend to remember it vividly, it was almost a decade ago, but one thing remains constant... I saw a character talking to a much larger disform mass that I couldn't quite understand, that character is the same main character of my story today... Vernon's design and personality is the one that least changed over the years as he was catalyst for my story, I saw a little manned wolf guy, and I knew it was a manned wolf and not a fox, that much remains a constant.
So, you could say it was like it was calling to me, trying to will itself into existence.
And so I wrote the first version of JTA...
It wasn't very good... I had no idea what I was doing, moving my hands based on a mental image of a feverish dream that I didn't really understand... So of course it sucked.
I rewrote it over 10 times when i first started until I eventually found my thing, I started dissociating from D&D and creating my world and characters, Vernon was always the same and I gave him a last name, Ealdwine, meaning old friend as, well, he kind of is that to me ^^
I made other characters, populated the world and started developing the story, it is also thanks to this story that I met my husband and got more into the furry fandom, so make of that what you will, but it's a positive for me.
That version of JTA wasn't what you see today however.
As I entered college I started to feel the weight and burden of adulthood, and I realized just how little my 'natural talent' in high school mattered when I started to get faced with real problems... And eventually that overwhelming pressure started to erode at myself until it got really dark and I almost made a horrible mistake.
I stopped writing for seven whole years after that... I just didn't have the will.
Eventually, I started to get out of my own misery,
I dropped out of college, my mood improved, my life started to get better, my husband (who stuck with me through my worst years) moved in with me and life just went on... Until at the start of 2020 I remembered JTA as I looked through my old files, and suddenly that same image came back to my mind, like it had been waiting there and laying dormant inside me.
And then I decided to try again, really get into it this time, I wanted to make my own stuff, to actually get it to grow as opposed to letting it fall apart... And to try and make my old friend real for other people that weren't me.
And now we are here, most of the characters reimagined, most of the world and lore rebuilt, but some things remaining constant ^^
So yeah... A life's story if I ever told one
Not that it's going to sell my book, but hey, It felt nice to write ^^
