Hey there! I'm Alexandrina, author of the Books of Lightness. I started writing what would eventually become the first book in the series, "On Virgin Moors", in 2013, when I was fifteen years old. It took me more than eight years to get the book ready for the world - and boy did the story grow in the telling! The first draft, which will likely never see the light of day, barely squeaked to 70,000 words, even after some egregious padding to get it to the length it was "supposed" to be. By contrast, the final draft was pushing very near 300k words.
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So yeah. I guess if I had to describe my weakness, I'd have to say brevity!
So Who Am I?
I'm an English lass through and through - born in the 90s, though not early enough to actually remember them at all! I wrote my first 'book' when I was about five years old. It was a tale called "The Colourful Tree", written on a pad of miniature sticky notes. Sadly that old adventure's lost to time - but the interest it kindled still endures. At school I always loved the creative writing assignments. Once, I got carried away and turned in a twelve-page, three-chapter story when my poor teacher was expecting a page and a half. That story does still exist, but I won't ever be sharing it.
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In these years I focused my creativity down other avenues. I was a keen filmmaker (and still am, to be fair) and made Lego brickfilms for YouTube, and later started a film production team with a friend of mine. Between 2015 and 2018 I studied for a degree in film production & cinematography at Bournemouth University - I graduated successfully. And those were also the years I spent coming to terms with my gender identity. I'm a transgender woman, still at the early stages of my transition and excited to see what the future holds.
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My first attempt at a serious novel came during Year 10. I'd gone on a Star Wars book kick, after my mum won about fifty of them in an auction, and I think I wanted to try my hand at one of my own. Except without the Star Wars label, obviously. That book was called "The Biosphere", and it had all the clichés of edgy adolescent writing. I also never bothered to figure out what the actual story was, so once I'd written a few thousand words of set dressing I ran out of steam. The project died.
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In February 2013, I wrote the first words of what would eventually grow into "On Virgin Moors". Like "The Biosphere" before it, this was an adventure plagued with youthful poor writing and narrative structures ripped from the classic Star Wars literary canon. And like "The Biosphere", it wasn't well-planned out. That first draft was entirely made up as it went along. Bessily Edwards, at that time called Jessica, was originally written as a single-scene filler character, before growing into a far bigger part. Caroline Ballard, one of the series' POV characters, was introduced without prior warning two thirds of the way through, because at that point in the writing I decided it would be cool for Chris Ballard to have a wife. Tasha Wrack literally did not exist.
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I'd probably have been well advised to drop the project, but something about it grabbed me. And it kept on grabbing me, even as the years went by. Time and again I'd move onto other things, and time and again I'd get pulled back.
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And now I've written a book.
Connect
You can find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MissLexie97