Writing The Daystar Prophecy: Where It Began

Where do I begin?

Writing in the beginning

Summer 2019. I was working at a mexican restaurant as a waitress, and one of my friends got me a second job working with her at a golf course on the maintenance crew. Thus my summer became 5 am wake-ups, mowing grass for eight hours, an addiction to monster energy drinks, and dinners serving chips and salsa to the people of Utah County. I actually loved it.

Picture this: I get to the shop around 5:30, the sun is just creeping over the Rocky's in the east. Utah Lake is glass and resting a couple hundred yards from where I'm riding onto the course atop my orange mower. Fifteen hundred pounds of machine and steel blades crawls at a top speed of 7.5 mph toward the flag

that marks the green of the tenth hole. For the next two hours I mow the back nine, green by green, meeting my friend at the joined ninth and eighteenth hole.

After that's over, we would wash and refuel the mowers if needed, then we'd go and mow or cleanup whatever was on the whiteboard that day. We'd get snacks at the proshop, fill the work cart with whatever tools we needed, run around to sprinklers or bunkers or curbs and do what needed to be done. And at two o'clock we would tidy up the shop and go home.

With all of that time on my hands while I worked each day, I got tired of music after about a month. So I went on to podcasts, and then to musicals, and then to just nothing. I'd stow my airpod case in the armrest and I'd just talk to myself. Sometimes out loud, with the mower drowning out whatever I had to say. I'd plan stories or rewrite scenes from my life, thinking of much better dialogue for a conversation that had happened a year ago.

The stories and the writing took on loose shapes. Like the Fooglies from that Spykids movie, they were half-finished thoughts. One that kept on creeping onto the main stage of my mind was about a dystopian world, where magic was banished and societies separated. There was a love triangle and an adult version of Zuko, and the FMC (female main character) had a sword and powers that she didn't know about. The villains (yes plural) were unexpected and also terrifyingly relatable. Somewhere in my head the story changed settings and was now in a medieval world with deserted gods and castles and knights. I think Jude Law was there playing as the King.

Who would play a better King of Holwood?

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  Jude Law
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  Mads Mikkelsen

I sorted around the names and places of the story for a few weeks until one day my friend and I were asked to move the markers on all the tee boxes. Easy job, but at every hole we'd be sitting and waiting for the golfers to tee off before we could move the markers. While we were sitting and watching a particularly slow foursome, she told me to tell her a story. And thus, The Daystar Prophecy was born.

Writing in the middle

Now the book didn't just spew onto the golf course in one afternoon, easy to pick up and sort out and type into existence. No. It sort of flipped and tumbled and danced around the remainder of my summer, pretending it wanted to be written and I pretended I wanted to write it. We did not see eye-to-eye for a while. In fact, I wrote about 20,000 words in a google drive and then left it there to marinate for a year. In 2020 I went on a mission for my church. I spent April of 2020 to September of 2021 volunteering my time and energy to teaching people about faith and Jesus Christ, teaching english lessons, living in another country, making the most amazing friends and really growing in ways I couldn't have without that opportunity.

Skopje, North Macedonia

Since I was serving during heavy covid lockdowns the leader of our mission area (called a mission president) gave us time each day to work on or develop skills, like poetry or learning to play a musical instrument or baking. I decided to work on my book, and in the few hours each day that I could (and probably some dinner hours too), I finished a very rough draft. But I finished it.

When I got home I wrote it again, then I moved it into a word document and wrote it again. After about my fourth or fifth revision I gave it to my family to read. Three sisters with varying degrees of imagination and genres they enjoy, my dad who read the Narnia books to me as a kid, and my mom who tends to lean far away from fantasy into more historical or documentary works.

It was the moment of truth for me when they each finished it and came running to me for book two. THEY LIKED IT!!! I cried and I jumped around and I hugged the manuscripts that I had been working on for three years. It was nowhere near done but it was good and they liked it. I shared several other versions of my revisions with them, and a few of them have read my first draft of book two in the Tales of Termont series, but those initial reads will always stick with me.

Writing in the now

So if you can do math you probably realize that 2019-2022 is three years... and it's now 2025... So the last three years, what was I doing? Well I was revising, I was writing book two, and I was juggling the hardest part of finishing a manuscript. The doubt and anxiety to query that book.

Here's the thing, I'm going to be so honest when I tell you guys how I have decided to publish my book. It's not going to be the right way for everyone else, it's not going to work for everyone else, and maybe there are things I should have done differently myself. But the only thing I believe could truly be worse than the way I'm publishing my work would be to do nothing at all. My goal has always been to write the stories I have, and share them however I can.

So I started to query agencies in 2024, I reached out to about a dozen, and the waiting process got to my head. Looking back I could have written to three dozen more and maybe I should have, but I won't lose sleep over it, and I don't expect everyone to understand that or agree with me. I thought "Nobody wants to read another fantasy book." But I do, and my friends want to read it. And Barnes & Noble has shelves of this stuff, (and I know there are ways to get on them myself) so what if I find 100 people who want to read it? Maybe I find 200? The book is written, I just need to talk about it and I just need to get it printed. So here we are!

I built the website, took the headshots, found the editor and I'm doing it. I'm formatting and finding printers, I'm researching and creating content for social media. I'm spending hours online reading and watching lectures about writing and storytelling and marketing. All this along with my day job lol. But it is so so worth it to me.

I hope my words find the right people, that my stories are something I can talk about with new friends and old ones someday, so that the other books and ideas that are starting to build up in the corners of my mind will have a chance to come to life, too.

For now The Daystar Prophecy is what I get to share and I am so happy with how it is turning out. Stay tuned for what's to come this summer, and I'll save you a spot in the clouds to journey through Termont and all the worlds to come!

Hailee Hendrix