It is I, Sera Frost

I wrote my first short story when I was 12 or 13 years old. My mom had taken me school shopping, and instead of making me get plain folders, she let me get cool folders. Lisa Frank was a thing, and I loved all things Lisa Frank (I still do), but my eyes were immediately drawn to the ones with artwork from Christian Riese Lassen. If you haven't heard of him, please, for the love of non-AI artwork, look at his stuff.

I was in a rough spot in my childhood that would last another 20-odd years, but when I looked at his art, I could imagine myself in the places he'd depicted. Beautiful, tropical beaches with amethyst waves, secret sunset coves where the setting light shone through emerald waves.

Are you seeing this? I haven't looked at Lassen's work in at least a decade, and pulling up his website to find the images that used to inspire me was enough to kickstart it all again.

Anyway, looking at the art wasn't enough. I wanted to experience it. So, I began to write descriptive short stories about the paintings. It was meditative for me at that point. I was struggling to survive, even at 12, but when I wrote, nothing was wrong. Everything was okay. And if it wasn't, I could pull it out of my brain with a pen or pencil and confine it to a page, transformed into what I wanted reality to be. That was intensely therapeutic for a child who had no control over their life.

That love for writing grew and blossomed into longer-form fiction, featuring intricate plotlines and complex characters. Whenever I had a free moment at the end of class, during study halls and on slow nights at work, I'd fill notebooks with stories. When I was 15, I began working on what would eventually become my first book, Vanguard.

It took me almost 20 more years to finish it.

Now, Vanguard is in developmental edits with a fantastic professional editor I found through The Authors Guild. I don't know if it'll ever be traditionally published, and if it's not, that's alright. There's always self-publishing, or maybe it'll just stay a file on my computer. Who knows? My partner, kids, and niece love the Vanguard series, so if I accomplish nothing else, that alone makes it all worthwhile.