I'm Scott Holmes, and Journeys Start is my first novel.
I write software for a living, and I've always been the sort of person who takes things apart to see how they work. I was a computer nerd well before it was a fashionable thing to be. The fantasy came first, though. As a fairly awkward teenager I worked through stacks of Dragonlance and Ravenloft paperbacks, and Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality, where Death and Time and Fate are offices that ordinary people get stuck holding down.
That last idea never really left me. Three decades later it turned into the question at the center of this book: what if a world had a keeper for beginnings but nobody whose job was to end things, and what would it cost the person who finally had to?
The most recent push came from Frieren. It's a quiet story about an elf who outlives everyone she travels with, and it spends its time on grief, memory, and the shape a life takes rather than on the next battle. Watching it, I understood the book I actually wanted to write. Something less about defeating evil and more about the price of finishing what you begin.
So that's what Journeys Start is. A first novel from a computer nerd who never got over those old paperbacks, trying to write the kind of fantasy that stays with you after the last page.
Book One arrives in 2026. If you want to look around the world before then, the public wiki is open, and the Book One overview lays out the shape of the story.