I was in high school when I wrote a thirty-something-page short story called Prophesied Child. It followed a five-year-old girl named Sara who had been left as a baby at a rebel camp. The rebel leaders, Peter and Lance, discovered she was the child from a prophecy — the one destined to kill the evil queen, Felicia.

Felicia’s daughter, Ana, was her commander and ended up being captured by the rebels. Sara instantly felt connected to Ana, not knowing the truth: Ana wasn’t loyal to her mother at all — and she was actually Sara’s mother, forced to abandon her as a newborn before stumbling upon the rebel camp shortly after giving birth.

Peter hated the queen with everything in him. Felicia had murdered his entire family — even their pets — which fueled his rage toward both the queen and her daughter. In the end, it turned out Lance was the one who killed Queen Felicia, and the big twist was that he was the true king and Ana’s birth father. Peter and Ana ended up together, raising Sara as their own.

It stayed a horribly written short story for years (and I mean horribly 😅) until spring 2009, when I quit my classes and used that time to turn Prophesied Child into a full novel told in two parts — both in first-person POV. Part One was told from Craig’s point of view, and Part Two from Diane’s.

The book was critiqued for the first time in fall 2010, and my Novel Writing teacher, Lisa Shapiro, read about three chapters before telling me she thought the story should be in third person instead of first. So I spent the next three days ripping the whole thing apart and stitching it back together — which became the first draft of what would eventually be Child of Prophecy.

During that rewrite, I added new characters like Melanie, Dave, Nabil, Frank, and several other rebel leaders. A lot of names changed along the way, but Sara was the one name that stayed the same from beginning to end.

It was also during this process that I decided to combine several different story ideas into one bigger series — what eventually became Prophecy Series.

The original short story was written around 2005 or 2006, and in November 2011, Child of Prophecy was finally published as a Kindle e-book. After five or six years of writing, rewriting, critiques, and inspiration, I officially had a novel out in the world.

In January 2013, I rewrote it again and released it as a paperback. Then in summer 2014, I had another moment of realization: I can write this story way better than this. So, I tore it apart (again) and rewrote it for the third time — including changing the character Dave into Thatcher.

In January 2015, I republished Child of Prophecy: Third Edition, which is the version currently available on Amazon.
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And if there’s one thing this whole journey taught me, it’s this: don’t be afraid to make changes, accept critique, learn from others, and never throw away a badly written story — it probably just needs refining.