Why I Started Writing?

 The ugly truth is that I started writing out of boredom almost 16 years ago. I remember sitting on my dorm bed in the evening after my shower, and since I didn't have a smartphone back then and the Wi-Fi was turned off at lights-out, I didn't know how to pass the time.

At least not every night.

Of course, I read a lot, I had my homework to do, and I went to the library a lot—not to mention how many books I exchanged with my friends at the time—but there were evenings when I just didn't feel like it.

So I grabbed one of my math notebooks and started writing all kinds of things.

My first writings were terrible, really. It's terribly embarrassing to read them back now, but hey... first works are bound to be terrible :)

I remember well the day when the story of The Phantom Chronicles took shape in my mind. One of my friends lent me a DVD of Interview with the Vampire, which I watched on a Saturday. There are few films in which I can tolerate Tom Cruise, but in that film he mesmerized me, and that night the character of Thomas Kresley was born in my mind. The next day, in the evening at the dorm, I wrote down his first sentences in a new notebook.

His first sentences were grammatically correct, but terribly unrealistic and undeveloped.

I remember that the first chapters were already finished when we watched New Moon with the class. I had no idea about the story, so I borrowed Twilight—the book—before, which I didn't like very much, but the first finished manuscript still turned out to be a vampire-ghost story, half fan fiction, or at least something like that.

I wrote two parts by hand, and after typing them up, I didn't touch the story at all until last year, except for a few very weak attempts.

And believe me, picking up a story you wrote when you were 15 after 15 years is an embarrassing experience.

Yet that was when one of the strangest and most exciting adventures of my life began. I had to get to know the characters again, and the story needed a major reboot. I wanted to retain a little of the "charm" of 15 years ago, but I also wanted the characters to show what kind of story they wanted to tell.

And they did.

Not every line was easy—in fact, some were really difficult to write—but I finally managed to create a world in which Thomas, Annie, Kyle, and the others can truly flourish.