How One Unpublished Book Accidentally Acquired an Empire

August 2026   <>  From the Vale

There is a perfectly reasonable question someone might ask after looking around this website. Actually, there are probably several. But the most obvious is:

Why is all of this so elaborate for a first-time author whose book has not even been published yet?

There is a perfectly reasonable question someone might ask after looking around this website. Actually, there are probably several. But the most obvious is:

Fair Question.

There is a book,  a series, maps, character art, artifact art, a pressmark, a website, blog posts, and branding. There are probably three other things being developed somewhere that I have temporarily forgotten exist.

This might seem excessive for one lonely novel currently sitting on my computer waiting for me to finish editing it. It is. There is an explanation.

Unfortunately, the explanation. The explanation involves my brain and a squirrel.

The Problem Started Very Early

I learned to read before I have actual memories of learning to read. According to my mother, I was around three. I don’t remember someone teaching me letters or sounding out words. Reading is just sort of there at the beginning of my memory, along with the general understanding that books contained information and information was wonderful.

That became a pattern. Learning was easy for me.  More importantly, learning was interesting.

I loved school. I loved finding out how things worked. I loved discovering something I didn’t know yesterday. Give me a subject I had never encountered before and my brain immediately wanted to crawl inside it, take it apart, figure out all the pieces, and see what else was hiding nearby. As a result, I did very well in school.

Then I went to college. This was where things began to get slightly ridiculous. Not because college was academically harder. College presented a completely different problem:

There was too much stuff.

There was wonderful, fascinating, and completely unrelated stuff.  And no one appeared to be stopping me from studying all of it. English? Check. Pre-med? Sure. Theater? Obviously. Computer programming? Why not?  If I had never studied something before, my brain immediately regarded that as an unacceptable gap in its collection.

College was the first time I really became aware that somewhere inside my head there appeared to be a squirrel running operations.  I would become intensely interested in something, learn everything I could about it, and then the squirrel would spot something shiny across campus.

LOOK. SOMETHING ELSE.

And off we went.

Eventually I Found a Career That Could Keep Up

I finally settled into business management and, eventually, nonprofit administration. Not because I suddenly became a disciplined person capable of choosing one interest and remaining peacefully devoted to it forever. Absolutely not. I found a field that let me do lots of different things. Budgets, programs, websites, grant writing, research, policies, marketing, data, planning, and problem solving were all part of the constantly changing landscape.  One day could be completely different from the next, which meant my brain was much less likely to become bored, chew through its enclosure, and escape into the wilderness. And it has worked surprisingly well.

My hobbies followed exactly the same pattern. If you ask me for a list of hobbies, the answer gets embarrassing fairly quickly. Yes, I can sew you a ball gown. I could also come rewire your house. I am a fairly decent artist. I take photographs. I make websites. I build things. I research random subjects to a degree that no reasonable person requires. And if what you really need is a beautifully organized spreadsheet cataloging your extensive collection of stolen restaurant menus, cross-referenced by restaurant location and date of theft, I am your girl. (I am absolutely making that example up… probably.)

Then Apparently My Brain Got Tired of Hiding It

Things became much more noticeable once I reached my forties. The jumping around wasn’t merely amusing anymore. My inability to stay focused on things that didn’t actively interest me had gotten bad enough that I finally mentioned it to my doctor.

She suggested I be evaluated for ADHD. I laughed at her, not with polite uncertainty, I genuinely thought the idea was ridiculous. I had excelled in school. I could concentrate. I could sit down with a subject I found interesting and disappear into it for hours. People with ADHD didn’t do that, obviously.

My doctor, who apparently knew considerably more about ADHD than I did, still thought I should be tested. So I agreed, partly because she was my doctor, but if we’re being completely truthful, there was another reason.

I had never been tested for ADHD before. I had absolutely no idea how someone even tested for something like that. It was new. It sounded interesting. And suddenly the squirrel was sitting upright.

WE SHOULD GO SEE HOW THEY DO THAT.

Which, in retrospect, was perhaps not the strongest evidence for my argument that I definitely did not have ADHD.

I went through the testing. Two weeks later, they handed me an extensive twenty-three-page report explaining in painstaking detail that yes, there was absolutely a squirrel controlling my brain.

I was floored.

My doctor explained that I had apparently spent most of my life developing ways to compensate for it. I was bright, school came easily, and I had built systems without ever realizing that was what I was doing. So the ADHD had always been there. I just hadn’t recognized it. Once someone handed me twenty-three pages of evidence, though, quite a few things began making considerably more sense.

In Retrospect, There May Have Been Clues

The endless parade of hobbies? Maybe.

The constant migration from one fascinating subject to another? Fair.

The ability to become completely consumed by something interesting while possessing approximately seven seconds of patience for something boring? Apparently relevant.

The impulsivity? Well…. There may have been a period in my life, lasting approximately from the time I learned to walk to… let’s just estimate it at current day, when I was on a first-name basis with a suspicious percentage of the emergency-room staff because I had a tendency to do incredibly stupid things before the part of my brain responsible for saying, perhaps we should think about this first, never arrives at the meeting.

Looking backward, there were signs. Possibly signs illuminated with flashing lights. I simply hadn’t known what they meant. Now I know and at this point, I have mostly stopped fighting the squirrel.

Which Brings Us Back to the Book

I am currently writing and editing Awaken the Raven. Editing is important. Editing is absolutely necessary. Editing also involves repeatedly reading something I already know. You can probably see where this is going.

Eventually my brain says: Nope, I am done. This is boring now. But do you know what this book really needs?

A WEBSITE.

And rather than forcing myself to sit there while my attention slowly dies, sometimes I let the squirrel play. So I build the website. Eventually the website raises another question. Well, obviously if I am going to publish the book myself, I really should have some sort of publishing imprint. Oh, that’s new, and interesting, we should definitely learn about that. And suddenly Echoes from the Vale Press exists.

But now the publishing imprint needs a visual identity. You know what I have never designed before? A pressmark. That was excellent news for my brain. 

And then a fantasy series really ought to have a map… And then the location names lead to mythology research… And then I decide the website needs a whole section about the world with a dictionary… And obviously I should create artifact images as well.

At some point I always do remember that I was editing a book. So I go back and edit for a while. Until the squirrel sees something else.

This Is Apparently My Process

For years, I would have regarded this as a failure of discipline. Now I don’t. I have learned that sometimes the easiest way to keep moving forward is to let my brain change which part of the project it is working on. I am still working on the book. I am simply doing it sideways occasionally. When editing becomes unbearable, I spend an hour designing something. When designing starts feeling tedious, I research more mythology. When research gets too dense, I write. When writing stops cooperating, I work on the website. Eventually the squirrel always circles back.

And strangely enough, things keep getting finished. Not necessarily in the order any sane project manager would recommend. But finished.

And That Is How the Empire Happened

So yes…. This whole thing is elaborate, possibly even absurdly elaborate. I am a first-time fiction author. Nobody has read Awaken the Raven yet. There is currently no ravenous audience demanding maps, lore, publishing logos, character art, magical artifacts, blog posts, or an entire digital ecosystem surrounding this fictional world.

And yet here we are.

One unpublished book has somehow acquired a series identity, a publishing house, a pressmark, a map, a website, a growing collection of worldbuilding art, and whatever else the squirrel thinks of next.

I did not exactly sit down one day and decide:

I shall build an empire.

I sat down to edit a novel.

And then my brain got bored and things escalated. And honestly? I’ve decided to embrace it. Because eventually Awaken the Raven will be finished.  And when that happens the website will be waiting. And Echoes from the Vale Press will already exist, looking suspiciously like a publishing company that knew what it was doing all along. Not bad for one lonely book that hasn’t even been published yet.

Thanks, squirrel.