I realize I haven’t been active on here in a while, which I’m sorry for; it doesn’t necessarily reflect my productivity as a person, although it is I suppose representative of my work as an author over the past few years.

It might be time for the story of my creativity over the course of my life. You see, even as a young child, I was always trying to make things. Some of the earliest stories I remember telling were hand-drawn comics, before I was much good with words; I was inspired by the comics of my childhood, and wanted to make my own. Not much later, I started reading voraciously, and of course wanted to tell stories like those, as well. Sometimes the stories would exist purely in my head, but others I would write down, and therein began the earliest stages of my craft.

When I started learning piano, around age eight, I soon wanted to make music, too – inspired by the Mozart and Beethoven I was learning at the time. Since creative writing is less taught in schools than music, I ended up leaning more in this direction through my adolescence, to the point where I specialized in music and languages in high school (A levels) in preparation for a higher education in music composition. For a while – a good while – I gave up my hobby of writing in favor of creating music.

Well, life didn’t go to plan and due to a number of consequences of exceptionally severe depression, I ended up with a degree in music composition and a career in retail, thus relegating composition to a mere hobby, as well. And then, for nearly ten years, I just … did nothing. No music, no writing, just bare existence.

Then, in late 2012, I learned of this thing called NaNoWriMo, in which people around the world would endeavor to write 50k words in a month (November). Inspired by a friend who pointed it out to me, I took up the challenge and wrote a rough draft of a backstory to a fantasy world that I had been imagining for a little while with no real idea of what to do with the imaginations. So began my tentative career as a novelist. Under the pen name of Satis, I started writing fantasy novels, the first book being (self) published in 2014, and two more in the series following over the next few years. (The series is far from finished, sadly.)

Bolstered by the confidence of knowing I could actually finish an entire novel, I turned my hand to a story I had been wanting to write since my teens: a story of utter misery and depression, of self-harm and suicidal thoughts – that is to say, my story.

This finally came to fruition in 2017 with the publication of my first novel under my own name, 22 Scars. To this day it remains the story I’m most proud of; it’s the story that took the most out of me to write, and is in almost every way deeply personal and filled with lived experiences. Through extensive giveaways it’s racked up a fair few reviews on both Goodreads and Amazon, though I certainly don’t make any money from it. The second novel under my real name, The Broken, followed in 2021, telling a story of music and passion, but still against a backdrop of misery and despair.

While writing The Broken, I became intrigued to know more about what this fictional band I was creating might sound like. So sometime in 2019, as I was beginning to draft out the novel, I returned to my roots as a composer and began to write songs that could have been written by a 90s rock band. In the end, I actually completed all three albums that The Broken supposedly wrote, and although I can’t sing or play guitar and therefore would never release my mockups as-is, it brought to life a passion I had thought long-lost: creating music.

Soon enough, I started feeling the desire to create more music, and something more original than a pastiche of 90s rock, and over the summer of 2023, I wrote a complete requiem for full orchestra and choir. I found myself really enjoying the process of creating music once more, and finally found the courage to apply to a masters program at Rutgers to see if I still had what it took to pursue this creativity at a high level.

Well … I was accepted into Rutgers’ composition program and started my studies part time last fall, and have learned an enormous amount about writing for classical instrumentation, and I’m really, really enjoying it. So much so that I’m starting to consider leaving behind a retail career of twenty years to pursue a new career in music – that thing I wanted to do when I was nineteen but never actually found the impetus to make it happen.

So all of this to say … I have been active recently – in fact, more active than perhaps at any previous time in my life – but not in the author space, and I haven’t put (digital) pen to paper in quite a few years. It isn’t to say I won’t be writing more books, but I only have so much bandwidth, and right now all my focus on my education.

If you’re interested in learning more about my musical journey, you can check out my blog over at therevenantcomposer.com, or find me on Instagram as @cmnorthmusic. I may find myself more active there for a while, but I haven’t forgotten about writing books, and I know I still have a story or two in me.