The Book that Changed my Life (though I never read it)
My Writing Journey Vol. 3
Here we are at the third of these Writing Journey posts, the beginning of what may be many weeks’ worth, talking through my self-publication journey from age twelve to eighteen, as well as some other stuff I was doing in between - basically my secondary school years.
There’s also an exciting announcement at the end of this post!
The story of how I found inspiration for my self-published books is lengthy but I think it’s worth telling. In the past I’ve looked back and reflected on all the little things that led to twenty-two books in a massive fictional multiverse, based on something existing but mainly of my own creation.
It began with my first few introductions to the video game Minecraft - for those that don’t know, the game is a sandbox of sorts where you can basically build and do anything you want in a world, or worlds, of pixelated cubes. There’s a survival mode with a basic sequence of tasks if you want to ‘finish’ the game, but I always had more fun in creative mode where you had unlimited resources to built whatever you want. Also, the game can be modded (modified), by others - downloads that can add stuff to and change the game, from a simple thing like adding pizza to thirty other worlds to explore, each with their own new creatures and resources. In a way it’s the perfect tool for fictional expression - you can add in and play whatever you want - make a medieval village, or a spaceship, or play through Lord of the Rings.
Anyway… my introduction. I think it was the son of a family friend who first let me try out the game on his laptop, but also definitely my cousin showed me how she built her first house, and then let me play on her account, creating my own worlds and also using her account on multiplayer servers - of which there are many that can range from survival to the most complex games within the game of Minecraft.
Here’s a link to the Wikipedia entry on the game, for any of those curious souls.
Before I’d even downloaded it on the laptop at home though, I was hooked. I started watching Minecraft YouTubers a lot. Since I was just getting to know the internet, I’d just hop from YouTube recommendation to recommendation, but eventually found a channel that I stuck to, and I subscribed to him and his friends and watched them for years. One of these friends that I watched more of was known as Ssundee. We’ll get back to him in a jiff.
When I was 10, I found that one of my friends also played, and we played together for years, for a while most nights, even though I’d moved to another county. He introduced me at some point to a channel similar to the main one I liked. They both were popular for doing ‘mod showcases’, which is, as it sounds, downloading a modification to the game and reviewing it for a video. But the channel my friend introduced me to was English - but, more importantly, he had characters in his videos, a quirky scientist and a skeleton dog that would help with reviewing the mods in their lab, as well as recurring other pets, a mailman, and an evil nemesis.
The channel was called The Diamond Minecart, and the man behind it was known as DanTDM. He also had a long-running modded survival series called The Diamond Dimensions, already up to over a hundred and thirty episodes by the time I subscribed around this time in 2014. It’s a series designed for him to go from nothing to being able to survive and explore all the extra dimensions (worlds), that he added to his game. It didn’t feature his main characters or their lab - in fact it started before they took off. It was a standalone thing, but the mythological scope and potential…
One day, when I was eleven, nearing twelve, when I’d only seen a few of Dan’s videos but knew his characters and had checked out a few of the current Diamond Dimensions episodes, I was watching through one of Ssundee’s series, catching up with a video each day before school. He played a ‘modpack’, like Diamond Dimensions, but less based on exploration and mainly just hard to survive. It was episode seventeen, released in August of 2014 (though I must’ve watched it early September), when he began the video by sharing a book he’d somewhat put his name to, something written by a fan but one that he’d checked out, thought was good, and linked to in the description of his video.
This book is the book that changed my life, though I never read it. I only checked out the blurb and first page - even nodded to it on the first page of my first Minecraft-inspired book. I can’t attest to its quality, only the fact that its existence was the catalyst for my writing career so far.
Because I thought: Hey, I can write, I like writing, I like Minecraft, what could I write about, a modded series, The Diamond Dimensions would be cool fantasy/sci-fi, I like DanTDM, and he’s got characters I can work with, and those worlds, and I’m sure he’d like it, and his fans would too, I’d like to see that story…
I’m sure that was the exact thought process. Anyway, I can remember quite clearly that evening after school, opening and writing a sort of one-page prologue, blending Dan’s lab-based characters with The Diamond Dimensions, saying that the scientist created a machine that sent him through the multiverse to another Earth-like world, (overworld, as the Minecraft Earth is called), and decided then and there that the plot of my books would be Dan exploring, learning new magic and technology, all in the pursuit of getting home - because the machine malfunctioned (or was it tampered with…?), and so the portal didn’t remain open, and he was trapped.
You can read that first page as a sample on Amazon here, if you’d like. (You can press read sample beneath the cover, then click back a couple pages as it sends you to the start of Chapter One). It’s not exactly my best work, but most of it survived the first typing up and in the later omnibus revisions, purely for the special place it holds in my heart as the start of this all, a single moment of full inspiration and creative joy.
Of course, I’ve kept that tattered English workbook. It was one given in my first year at my new school for spelling tests - though flicking through I later used it for a book review that must’ve been at the end of the first year, and a geography project for over the summer. And I need to amend something I said last week; I’ve just found now some notes amongst comedy sketches, but that must’ve come before I started writing Diamond Dimensions. They’re plans for paragraph 43 and 44 of Children of Shadows, and, at the back of the book, before the first page of Diamond Dimensions (I worked backwards through the half of the book remaining), I’ve found a plan for Son of Shadows, which leads me to believe that my father and I made those large taped-together mind maps in the Summer holiday of 2014, and that’s when I conceived the prequel and sequel stories… Anyway, the first page of what would become The Diamond Dimensions: Volume 1:
From then on, I suppose on the weekends, I’d sit in front of the TV with this book and my green pen, literally just writing down what was happening - pausing, noting timestamps of where I’d got to each day. Each chapter would correspond to one half an hour episode. It’s actually a fascinating thing to read through - for me, anyway. It shows the initial steps towards actually building out a story, a mystery, lore and backstory to the events, and connecting them with Dan’s wider characters and locations.
Although, the first two and a half chapters at least were mainly pure novelisations - those were what I gave Dan the first time I met him. Maybe one factor that affected my choosing The Diamond Dimensions to novelise was the fact that I knew I’d be meeting Dan at a gaming convention called Insomnia that November.
I’d just got to the point halfway through chapter three where I’d added my first segment of real forward-moving plot, not just references to the characters Dan left behind. For a moment in the video, Dan sees a monster, the Mystic Enderman, that I knew would be a big fight in episode six, what would be my chapter six. So, I added some mystery and importance to that moment, and that was where the story had got to when I met Dan.
Looking through the previously mentioned notebook, I also found a cover design and message to Dan about the work and asking whether I could publish it - he never responded to that message directly, though. My dad gave the two and half chapters a proofread, and my mum helped draw and colour a cover based on the title sequence for Dan’s series - a mysterious wraith character that I think I already had some plans for. (I’d of course begun watching through the series in my spare time to know where everything was going before starting to novelise the first episode.)
We printed out what I’d done so far, along with the little letter, and slapped the colour-pencilled cover on front. As you will learn in the next Writing Journey post, giving those over to Dan was an event much better than I could’ve imagined. And we’ll also go up to the release of the first volume in that post.
So, this was just the prologue of sorts to my self-publishing journey. I didn’t really know what I was getting in for with The Diamond Dimensions, just that I was enjoying writing it and couldn’t wait to show it to Dan (crossing my fingers that when I was done he’d give me permission to put it on Amazon, and maybe even share it in a video like Ssundee had done).
Like I said it’s fulfilling to look back and think would I be writing if my cousin hadn’t let me see her Minecraft world, or if my friend hadn’t shown me a DanTDM video. What if I didn’t watch that certain SSundee series? Maybe I would’ve finished Children of Shadows a lot sooner…
Before you go here’s the exciting announcement!
If you’ve read down this far, thanks. There’s a fantastic publication on Substack called
, a celebration of books and their impacts on our lives. If you enjoy reading - or even if you don’t - check it out! When pitching to the guy who runs it, I wondered whether it would be fun to talk about the subject of this post, a book that made me that I haven’t read. It didn’t quite fit what he was looking for, though, and I wrote instead about my much better other idea. That post, on his massive publication, will be coming out tomorrow! I’ll be talking about my experience reading The Return of the King on a class trip to Italy - how there was a moving confluence of stories as two fellowships’ journeys were ending. I’m very excited to share it with you - I’ll try and cross-post it here.Thank you very much for reading,
Harvey