SPFBOX Interview with Astrid V. J.

What inspired you to write this book?

In my early twenties, I had a series of vivid dreams that stuck with me and inspired a collection of short stories, but as I personally didn’t like reading collections of short stories at that time, I wanted to do something else with them. I settled on the idea of doing something like 1001 Arabian Nights with a frame story and have the short stories nested within.

Then, one day, I was listening to my favourite band, Nightwish, and their song Wishmaster struck a chord with the line: The Apprentice becoming… Master! That sparked the idea to write about a boy who learns the art of storytelling and I’ve kept a wink to this moment of inspiration in the titles of the trilogy I originally conceived: 1. The Apprentice Storyteller, 2. Becoming Spellwright, 3. Master Wordmage.

However, try as might, the story just wouldn’t come together. There was something missing.

Shortly after my second child was born, I took a course in personal transformation and found my secondary calling to be a transformational life coach. Less than a year later, during my certification training, the puzzle pieces fell into place. I realized each one of the vivid dreams I’d had, which I still remembered over a decade later, represented one of the 10 principles of transformation I’d been learning about for the life coaching. At the time, I had 8 short stories but within weeks of this realization, I had another 2 dreams that fit the remaining 2 principles.

That made me decide to flesh out the transformational message in each of the stories, turning them into novellas instead while I focused on the new idea that settled into me about the frame story having a transformational focus. Randomly, the passage from the Bible about Jesus, aged 12, sitting in the Temple and teaching the Pharisees about God, popped into my head and completed the last missing piece of The Apprentice Storyteller. I realized that “the boy” who wanted to learn storytelling was also a child who knew things about the way the universe works and would unwittingly teach the storyteller these “secrets”.

Even though I wanted the boy to be spiritually enlightened, I didn’t want to take away from his youthfulness, so he and the storyteller have many arguments fuelled by the child’s stubborn insistence in what he believes is an absolute while the adult who “knows the real world” argues back based on her experience.

Since all the pieces were in place, I wrote The Apprentice Storyteller in three weeks during NaNoWriMo 2019. Within weeks of finishing, covid hit the world, and further spurred me on to share the transformational message I’d worked into the novel. It also made me realize Viola, the storyteller, needed more focus after she parts ways with the boy, so I also wrote the rest of her story, which is in Finding the Way (the title also inspired from Nightwish ‘s song Wishmaster).

I’m currently working on my own spiritual growth and understanding of the universal principles to be able to write Becoming Spellwright. Also, for those readers interested in the novellas, these are currently published separately as The Wordmage’s Tales, but I am working on a new edition that integrates them with The Apprentice Storyteller as originally intended.