Melissa May Snow

Hello everyone! I couldn’t resist keeping the default title for my first blog post – as a programmer in my day job, “Hello World” is a tradition for the inaugural test of any project.

Like many writers, I’ve been writing as long as I can remember, and have been seriously writing since I was a young teen. My first love has always been fantasy, but my first attempts at the genre were stumbling and derivative. I didn’t yet know what kinds of stories I was trying to tell, or why they mattered to me.

That didn’t change overnight. Nor did I figure it out just by reading widely in my genre – though that certainly helped my craft. It took growing up and learning to be an adult in an increasingly unstable world. It took discovering what I really believed and what really mattered to me. In short, it took living, and only recently have I begun to understand how much our own lives, our own stories, power our creativity. I plan to keep discovering answers to these questions all my life.

My other core foundation of storytelling is Dungeons & Dragons, and more broadly all TTRPGs. I still remember the incredible feeling the first time I played: the endless possibilities, the chance to make a difference in the story, and most importantly, the sense of community. No art is made in a vacuum, and nothing has taught me that more than playing D&D.

And so now I write fantasy that, while remaining aesthetically unique, I hope captures the spirit of sitting around a table, rolling dice, and creating something meaningful – a story where, finally, we can all be the hero.

I hope you’ll join me.