An Author’s Introduction.
Hello reader. My name is Chloe Morley, which you probably already know, and I am a performer, creative and newbie author. I wanted to start a sort of blog to document my progress with the hope of one day looking back on this journey with a clearly defined start. I am hoping you would also like to follow along with that journey, whether your reasons are inspiration, entertainment or judgement. We can navigate it together and perhaps make friends along the way.
I will talk about my publishing journey and experiences in an upcoming blog but for now I will give you a little introduction to my history as a writer and the story of how I came to write The Light Within the Shades.
Where the story began
From when I was about 10 years old, I enjoyed writing. It both stemmed from my love of reading and also existed as its own separate entity. I would love to create worlds and scenarios, playing them out in my head to keep me entertained during car rides or walking through school corridors (it was no surprise I ended up pursuing drama as well). I wanted to craft stories like the ones I would find in my books, go on adventures when the dreary British weather was getting me down and I didn’t want to focus in class.
I wasn’t at school when I came up with the concept for The Light Within the Shades, or Julia, as it was haphazardly titled back then, but it was a dreary day when I needed something to distract myself. I was fourteen and working as a cleaner on the weekends at a nursery.
I would spend hours alone, mopping floors, with only my thoughts for company, so I created characters to keep me company.
The first two characters to converse in my head were Lucas and Julia, both of which have changed so much as I and the story have grown. But they would talk, and I would listen and tweak and begin to create a world around them and scenarios to put them in.
After two years of them only living in my head, the story got too big to live solely in my mind, so in 2012 I began typing it out.
Safe to say I got out a few thousand words then forgot about the Word document until many years later, but I always held the characters in a tiny box at the back of my mind.
Picking up my old draft
Fast forward to 2019, I’m at drama school, and I am really hitting my creative stride. The years leading up to getting my place at uni were tumultuous; they may end up being their own book, so I had finally settled down and had started to consider other hobbies outside of work and study. I’m rummaging through my old documents when I see a file named Julia and decide to pick up the story again. I was at a time in my life where so much had changed, and I had learnt so much about myself, so naturally, the story changed too. That was when the big structural shifts happened, and I bought a beautiful new notebook to write them all down. The story matured, the world gained more depth. I fully planned the story beats, fleshed out the side characters, solidified the magic system, and did all the things other than actually finishing a draft. Eventually the momentum ran out, and I had to write other things, like my dissertation, so the file went back into long-term storage.
The last stretch
2022 was the breakthrough year. I was in a low place, the world was recovering from the “pandemonium”, and I was also going through a personal loss. I remember waking up one morning, and I said to myself, “Why am I not a writer?”. I felt such a void in my life, and it was at that moment I realised what that void was. It was the thing I had wanted to do since I could understand words. So I sang about it (because I’m a theatre kid), then I cried about it, and by the end of that day I had a determination I had never possessed before.
After that day, I had my first draft done in a few months, dedicating all the free time I had to getting the story onto the page.
When I finally finished it in 2023, I cried. By that point it had been thirteen years since I had initially come up with the concept and eleven years since I had started writing it. It was the most relief I think I have ever felt, and I don’t think I will ever forget the day I finished my first manuscript. It was not The Light Within the Shades yet. The name came to me after many edits, cuts and chats with beta readers; but it was a whole story, and that was something I had never achieved before. Little did I know that finishing the first draft was just the start of a long and varied journey, but more on that later.
To quote my own book, ‘You will not find all the answers on this day. I will merely tell you of the beginning.’