Saruuh Kelsey

I began writing fiction as a (terrible and cliched) fanfiction author on fanfiction.net. I won't tell you the username I wrote under, because some of the stuff on there is incredibly bad, but I will say that I started off writing Doctor Who and Sherlock Holmes fan works.

When I was fifteen I began drafting my first original work, an urban fantasy series that was originally known as Fate and told the story of twelve individuals named after the months of the year. Looking back now it's very badly written but it did help me to grow as a writer. I wrote three novels between that first original work and The Forgotten, my first published book.

I first got the idea for The Forgotten, the first in The Lux Guardians series, when I was on a bus. I get a lot of my ideas on buses; not quite sure why. I had been reading a lot of Dystopian books and I had ideas swirling around my head. So when the bus went through a particularly run-down area and I saw a man hobbling through the streets, my mind created The Sixteen Strains and a man infected by them, living in a world of death and disaster. The Forgotten Lands expanded from there, characters appeared, and I knew from that one moment on the bus how everything would tie in with the future world and the Victorian era.

It was a very complex initial idea and resulted in some frantic tapping away at the notes on my iPod (oh those glory days when you needed separate devices to listen to music and to call someone.) The man I saw on the street even features in one scene in The Forgotten, though he does die within the same scene. Guess I even killed my inspiration for the whole thing. That sets a nice precedent for the trauma of The Lux Guardians series as a whole. (It's entirely painless, I promise)