The genesis

The story of Awakenings began in 2001, when I got the go-ahead to write a fiction serial for my college newspaper.  The first installment of The Vision, as it was then entitled, involved college junior Marin Astoris seeing a vision of a mushroom cloud rising in the distance and hearing a voice whisper take a breath and wait to die.  It was scheduled to run in the September 13, 2001 edition of the paper.

The events of September 11, 2001, ensured that the story never ran, and I switched gears, instead writing the original incarnation of What Once Was Lost, which ran for the 2001-2002 school year.  Discovering Phoenix followed in the fall semester of 2002 but was never finished, cut from the paper due to space constraints and the paper has not had a fiction serial since.

The tale begun with Marin’s vision, however, never quite left me.  She always had a place in the back of my mind, whispering that she and hers had a story to tell.  In 2008, I decided to adapt her story into my NaNoWriMo project, Awakenings.  Graduate school conspired against me and ensured that I failed to finish the piece.  Awakenings and its sequel, tentatively entitled Ambrose, have waited patiently for the attention that they so richly deserve from me.

The decision to serialize Awakenings on the web was inspired by a most unlikely source: webcomics.  I have been a reader of many of these over the years.  Most recently, I have followed the work of Sarah Ellerton (Inverloch, The Phoenix Requiem, and with Bobby Crosby, Dreamless) and Lora Innes (The Dreamer).  Works such as these and a desire to not only reconnect with my original fiction but to share it with more than just a handful of (occasionally ravenous) readers selected from the ranks of personal friends has fueled this project.

I hope you enjoy what you find here.

Any questions or comments can be directed to doc (at) embklitzke (dot) com.  More information on my work beyond Awakenings can be found at www.embklitzke.com.

2 Responses to The genesis

  1. Anna Harte says:

    Hiya Erin! I may be a little brain dead at the moment but I was trying to find your email address and couldn’t see it anywhere.

    Could you ping me? We were hoping you’d be our next Webfiction World guest 😉

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