I’ve never had the famous writerly “fire in the belly” or one great personal story I felt destined to tell. I write because the next story is usually more interesting than anything else I could be doing. It gives my mind somewhere to go, a focus I seem to need, and sooner or later, even after an impressive amount of procrastination, I always return to it.
My four-book Eye of the Ocean series began, quite literally, with a dream. At the time, my commute included walking the final two miles to my job in health care, and during those walks I repeatedly found myself back inside that same dream, wondering what happened next. The original dream still survives in the first book of the series, Intersection, inside the story Garm begins to write just before what he believes will be his death. From that small opening grew four very large books, an entire history, and a fictional world I immersed myself in for years.
What fascinates me is how things fit together. I spent seventeen years in health care, including six as a full-time clinical instructor. I wrote training materials, developed curriculum, produced a departmental newsletter, and tackled a truly massive policy and procedure manual. Later, I moved into business communications, where I continued doing much the same kind of work in another form: taking complicated information, finding its internal logic, and building a path through it that other people could follow.
That same instinct shapes my fiction. A character is never simply the person visible on the page. Every person has a history, connections, pressures, and an entire private relationship with the world. Even someone who passes through a scene for a moment has a life extending beyond it.
After Eye of the Ocean, I deliberately tried to write something smaller and more directly to market. Enter the RiverWatch Thresholds universe.
Rachel’s story began as urban fantasy with a kick-ass heroine who discovers she is also an energy-vampire and slowly uncovers a hidden magical world.
Not a bad start. But I found I couldn’t make her feel real without first understanding the world she was entering. That led me to Mira, who already lived in both the human and magical worlds. Writing her story created the depth I needed and, inevitably, changed Rachel along with it. Apparently, I can make a setting smaller, but I cannot resist digging downward.
I published Eye of the Ocean under my own name and now write contemporary fantasy as Laurel Greenway. Whatever name appears on the cover, what keeps me writing is the same thing that began on those long walks years ago: the sense that beneath the visible story lies a vast network of other lives and possibilities, a second rhythm running deeper than the one on the surface. Writing is how I listen for it.
Laurel Ann Hickey