A Thinker in Space

On February 27^th of last year, I announced that I was going to be retiring from posting on this blog weekly/bi-weekly. And that was exactly what happened, as followers of this blog have likely seen. I came in swinging then with three writing-focused posts. My first one, about the novel I have coded Dragon, written in a 29 day sprint starting on February 28^th of 2025. It was mostly advice and my thoughts about finishing my second novel, which I truly hoped would be the first of many to come. My second post was about Gauntlet, written over the summer. It followed the same pattern, giving some advice. I have reread this article and am pleased with it despite its shameless attempt to ride the coattails of a rather successful reddit post from my first article. Then, I came back with a retrospective at the end of 2025, discussing my journey and mentioning the completion of my fourth novel, Vault. I also showed a picture of my classroom, which I will mention later

I return now on the anniversary of my return to this wonderful journey with a few things to talk about. First of all, I cannot begin to express how grateful I am for the gift of this year. So many things have been set into motion that I never could have dreamed. I am thankful for my wife for bearing with me through this process, as I have been engrossed in a project now for a year straight. I’m sharing my brain with worlds and ideas and plots now, and it’s definitely been an adjustment. I am thankful for my family for supporting me and being willing to read and critique honestly. I see so many people online talking about giving their books to their family. There are so many stories of potential authors whose families either don’t care about their writing and don’t see it as valuable, and about writers who give their work to their families and get only praise.

I am incredibly blessed to be born into a family of readers and critics who will give me paragraphs and pages about what didn’t click for them in my story as easily as they compliment. That is something I do not take for granted.

Over the past year, I have finished a total of four novels, making my personal count five total.

Dragon – Spring, 122k words

Gauntlet – Summer, 108k words

Vault – Fall, 88k words

Gem – Winter, 85k words

Gem is my most recent novel, and I am quite proud of it. I crammed that book into the past two months, trying to finish I before my writing anniversary, and succeeded a week beforehand. I started it January 13^th, and finished February 21^st. It was a lot of fun to write, and I connected with these characters in unexpected ways. Which is great, since I don’t intend to retire them any time soon.

All four books are separate from one another. But they all are easy to build out. So when I query, I will be starting with Neverhold, and I’ll be revising other books to try and land at least one. The age-old writing adage is that it only takes one yes. But I’m going into this with a stack of recently written and soon-to-be revised novels, which I hope will make this process a bit more palatable, even though it is rife with rejection and disappointment. I talked about all this a bit in my end-of-the-year post, though, so I won’t bore you with the details. But know that even with writing Gem, my timeline is still on-track!

Under Construction

Okay, here’s where the update part of this post comes in. This website is officially under construction. You won’t see it – I’m working on the backend. But at some point, changes will go live – I’m shifting things around here a bit. This will officially turn into my author website! This blog will still exist, and the blog homepage will be basically identical – I like the way things are set up around here right now. But I am going to be resetting the website so that it is an introduction to who I am and my books! As I begin my querying journey, it could be years before I get published, but I will keep this blog occasionally active and update on the projects I am working on through my main website, just like I do for my students!

I am super excited about this shift – it feels like a concrete first step from going from amateur to professional. Someday, I’d like to reclaim some of my time to revisit the content I used to put out on this blog, especially as things get rolling. But I have a jam-packed life right now, so squeezing in writing is basically the only thing I am doing with my free time right now that is not spent with family or friends!

Speaking of:

An Introduction

It’s been ages since I’ve actually introduced myself here. And since this is going to become my official author website, I guess it’s time to share some information behind the scenes more clearly. Even though it might attract more students to the site! A version of this bio is likely to be on my homepage at some point soon, but for now, here you go.

My name is Stephen Van Ness. I am married, with one kid who I love to pieces. He is turning two this March, so we are revving up for that birthday celebration! As my day job, I teach – specifically 7^th and 8^th Grade English and Literature. Grammar, novels, short stories, and all that fun stuff. This is a huge part of my life, and it is something I don’t talk about a ton here but I should talk about more. I am currently in my seventh year teaching, and that has been a huge blessing for me. I am passionate about teaching kids, and especially about teaching kids how to write.

I’ve talked a lot about my writing journey before. But this will be the most complete version to date, I believe.

My handwriting is not great. It was always a struggle to put words on the page – I have a lot in my head but getting them out there on paper was always difficult. This is how it was for my entire elementary school career. In fifth grade, when I was 10ish years old, I had an incredible teacher who nourished my love of reading – something that was awesome for me since my household was also super pro-reading. I was surrounded by stories since I was a child, and my love for stories only grew as I did. But that teacher did something special for me as well – she let me type assignments. She put me on the computer and let me go while the other kids were writing by hand.

And my output exploded.

One of our weekly assignments was to take ten vocab words and use them in sentences. I had always liked making these sentences connected, to form a kind of story. During this year, my teacher okay-d me writing them in story form. So I wrote little 100-300 word “chapters” every week of an absolutely insane story called The Gold Mine. It was an absolute mess. But that was where I started learning how to write, and how to write stories. From then on, I was a story writer. At the end of fifth grade, I wrote a roughly 2k word short story. Also, of course, a mess. I kept going through middle school, and in 7^th Grade an idea struck me like lightning for a novel. It was my first novel idea, and the one I stuck with for many years. I kept writing stories, into high school, but I was starting to truck away at this book concept. Words hit the page in 8^th Grade, making that the year I started actually writing what would become my first book.

Sophomore year of high school brought me into a creative writing elective that I stuck with for the rest of high school with another teacher who heavily nurtured my craft. There were prompts and assignments, and though getting the poetry done was part of my assignments, he allowed me freedom to work on the novel I had started in 8^th Grade as part of the coursework as long as I could show progress.

Which, of course, I did.

Those three years, I worked my way through an almost 60k word rollercoaster of an insane draft of my first novel. It was an absolute blast. I also fell into worldbuilder’s disease hard, and did a lot I would probably never do again. Made maps, diagrams, tons of stuff that I to this day draw reference from. My Junior year, I was struck with another inspiration – a massive, interconnected universe. I charted it, mapped it, and created encyclopedia-style entries for it. It probably looked like a distraction from a story I had thoroughly decimated and couldn’t make any more progress on. And it definitely was. But it also became the basis for all four novels I wrote this year, so all of that work I did had tremendous value and is paying dividends today.

Senior year, I returned to that 60k monster and reset, starting Imagination over again. I worked through it and got a lot of serious work done that year.

College saw me walk away from my writing for a season while I focused on assignments, readings, and friendships. I fell in with friends both writer and non-writer that became like brothers to me, and whom I am still very close to today. Senior year of college, I was permitted to make my incomplete novel my Senior Seminar for my English major, with a word count goal I had to hit and a deep revision process which was tremendously helpful for the novel. I worked on it a ton that year, and got a lot done. I also had a pretty fun presentation on the book that I set up!

And then life started, and the writer in me went to sleep. That isn’t to say that I didn’t keep going. It was just that writing took different forms. I was no longer pursuing creative goals nearly as much. I occasionally would have a resurgence, tackle the book again, but then it would fade and I would continue forward. I had sat on that incomplete book so long that it earned a slot on my brother’s musical wedding-day roast of a best-man speech.

Come 2021, and I ended up sick during Christmastime, alone for a few days. That old drive to write crawled back into my mind and nested there, and in around four days I took that novel I had been working on and finished it! Imagination was done, and wasn’t half bad for a first draft that took over fifteen years to write. Was it publishable? Nope. But it was done. After so many years, I had finally finished my novel.

I took that energy and funneled it right into the next book. It wasn’t a sequel, it was a new novel set in that universe I had designed in high school. I worked on that for about two months or so, but my first draft got tangled and I threw it out, starting again. I took that one further, but then went back and did a deep rewrite to get rid of one of the characters.

Finally, I took that book all the way through to 42k words, and my pace slowed. Something felt off to me, the book wasn’t doing what I wanted it to. So I put it down, shelved it, and stopped writing. That draft collected dust, and though the idea continued to marinate in my mind, I then stopped writing again.

Years passed. I put my writing joy into creating skits for my drama class, which was a ton of fun, and an excellent creative outlet for me. That took me to last February, which of course I have talked about a ton here already.

Now I am again at a precipice, but now that I’ve started, I don’t see myself stopping. This is going to be a part of my life for many, many years. I still have tons of stories to tell, ideas to sculpt, and plans to make. These four novels have barely scratched the surface of my creative ambition, and now that I know I can sit down and write a book, multiple times, I have the security of knowing that this will be something that will be a part of my life from here on out.

Someday, I hope to see my book in the bookstore. That’s a dream of thousands of authors. Maybe I’ll make it, maybe I won’t. But I am going to keep writing no matter what. This is my passion. It is what I love to do. And I hope it is the beginning of a prolific authorial career, even if the only audience is friends and family.

I’ll hopefully keep updating here as my author journey progresses, so keep an eye out for more posts! And for the change coming soon, where I will overhaul this website. Someday, I hope to be here announcing a book release! And then another, and then another, and then another!

Until then, I’ll keep my eyes on the horizon and keep writing. Thank you for reading, and joining me on this journey. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, but I know it’ll be a fun one.

Until next time!