About Adam Misner

My Story

Hey there, I’m Adam and I’m an author with a great deal of passion for many topics and genres. I love sci-fi, especially bio-punk and cyberpunk, but I think at the center of it all is fantasy. It started with Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, then would be rekindled with fantasy books such as Sea of Trolls, Book of the stars, and The ranger’s apprentice. Many years later I’d discover the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. It was incredible. Exploring the wilderness, questing, and just living in that medieval fantasy world was amazing, but I spent a lot of time looking at the books, standing idle in Chorrol’s main square outside the tavern, imagining all the stories unwritten. I did the same between pages and chapters of books.

The feeling is hard to describe, but there’s all sorts of words that are almost right. wistfulness, hireath, wanderlust. I described it to someone, trying to explain what it was without really knowing what exactly it actually was and they suggested I try writing. So I did. I wrote on paper, faster and faster, squeezing my pen so hard I could hardly write for long. But in those long pauses, waiting for the cramped tendons of my hand to relax, I felt a nuanced form of that same feeling I felt between pages, and between quests. I realized this was where the feeling belonged, but now I had the frustration that all these ideas took so long to get out of my head. Then I got a computer. Still, I’d trip over the keyboard. Then I got a mechanical keyboard, and finally it could keep up with my thoughts. Then from there, I’m here.

I wrote a collection of short stories first, inspired by the visceral short stories by Andrej Sapkowski in the last wish. I loved that book when it was done. I still do. But I’d find the style I’d fallen into didn’t work for the long questing tales I wanted to write. I also found myself discontent with the lack of real contrast. In a fantasy woods you come to a clearing and find a troll or a unicorn. A beach is a mermaid or a kraken. I realized I hadn’t capitalized on the other half of that equation. The lightness to contrast the dark was barely there in Leaves of The World Tree.

So then I wrote a love story, harkening back to my introduction to fantasy: Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, the movie I’d watch over and over again as a kid. There was the prince and the dragon, but also the princess and love. So my next book, Treading Water, would be my quest to master that. I wanted to add a happy love story to a world full of far too many scummy ones. I made it devoid of love triangles or cheating, using just the real anxiety of two people getting together for tension.

It took me longer than I’d have liked to learn what Treading Water had to teach me, but once it was done I wanted to finally combine the highs and lows into one. I wanted to take the gritty violence of Leaves of The World Tree, and the lightness of heart from Treading Water. So I wrote Slayer in The Wide Valley to make the light parts brighter and the dark parts darker.