The story started like most of mine —with a colossal what if that got my gears turning. What if humanity coexisting with fairytale creatures discovered the gods of classical mythologies were actually fairy nobility making man dance to their whims? How would humanity have reacted to that betrayal? How would that have changed our history, our ability to coexist?

As pixies danced through a magic-infused western landscape summoning Gatling guns, a gunslinger stepped into the frolicking.  Hard, standoffish, he introduced himself as Rafe in a strong almost independent voice. This incredibly deep character offered a storytelling challenge. My preferred third person narrative wasn’t going to cut it. Rafe’s story had to be personal. What I didn’t realize was just how personal it would be for me, too.

My insistent gunslinger taught me what had made me averse to writing in first person—you have no place to hide. Rafe hid who he was to survive, and I did too. But . . . first person point of view lets people in too close, lets them behind the carefully erected barriers Rafe and I used to protect ourselves.

Early in my tech career, it became painfully apparent that the slightest display of anything other than banker-style professionalism meant another job search. I got fired for being too personable, being too honest, and for wiring up the red panic button my COO had glued to his keyboard and incessantly pushed any time he felt he needed to make a point. Big picture—I learned successful employment required hard work, suppressing my personality, and letting others hog the limelight.

Halfway through my career, I rediscovered my love of storytelling. I scribbled stories about boys escaping cannibalistic aerobics instructors, dragons addicted to cherry coke, and fairy rats demanding marriage to human dumpstermancers. I wanted to share all my madness with real readers, but in those days an author needed to blog and tweet in order to build a brand. Thing was, I wasn’t comfortable with I. Blogging about me wasn’t interesting and the stories weren’t ready for prime time—or so said the insidious “you’re just an imposter” syndrome which afflicted me at the time.

Then Rafe came charging into my life with six-guns full of enchanted bullets. He relived my childhood running barefoot through Oregon’s forests. Being a druid, he shared my love of animals and nature—though he could actually converse with his horses. His best friend filled Rafe’s bullets with elemental magic and a pixie superman watched his back.

Fey West was hands down the cleanest story I’d ever drafted. It was wonderful, glorious, and imposter syndrome be damned it needed to be shared with the world. I submitted the story to a very kind editor I met at a convention. She wrote me a long, detailed letter about how to help Rafe see his day in the sun. She gave me pointers and directed me to read certain books. When I’d followed her direction and revised the story, she told me that there was still something missing. I didn’t see it, so Rafe went into a box...mostly.

Lightning struck some time later when I picked up a book by that same kind editor to help me through another challenging project: Goal, Motivation, and Conflict by Debra Dixon. GMC contained a magic bullet, all right, just not for the book I’d intended. You see, I’d let Rafe bully me into a first person narrative, but I’d held back. Rafe and I were too alike. We had a life we longed for and a life we excelled at but hated. Neither of us knew how to merge the two halves.

I’d closed myself off to survive divorce, insecure bosses and unreasonable working conditions. Even though I didn’t realized it, I hadn’t opened up Rafe’s pain because it was my own. For Rafe to really live on the page, both of us needed to assess our motivations, identify our conflicts and prioritize the things we needed to change in order to achieve our goals.

For me, that meant cracking the hard shell I’d built up over the previous decade. Rafe’s solution came much faster than my own. Finding the people I needed in my life took much longer than creating the catalysts and allies he needed. Fey West is so much more than a writing challenge that started with fairies pretending to be gods.

I can’t say enough how much it means that my first traditionally published novel ended up being Fey West. Almost as indescribably wondrous is that Rafe’s first editor was also his last. Beyond the fey and magic, guns and mad fairy gods, this is the journey of self-discovery that Rafe took me on. Cover to cover, we learned how to balance our lives, combine the split parts of ourselves and fly.

It didn’t even take a six-gun and magic bullets. Though, I do have my very own pixie superman looking out for me now.