Author N.R. Ashworth on writing and creating a ‘whole journey, a whole world, scenes I could already picture before we’d even rolled initiative’.
I never imagined being a writer. That’s the truest sentence I can open this with, and I think it’s the one most worth saying out loud. My creative passion has always been music. That’s been the through-line of my life. I love composing, playing, and getting lost in a soundscape for hours. So writing wasn’t a dream I chased, it was a dream that ambushed me.
A Whole World
Here’s how it actually started. I sat down for my first ever Dungeons & Dragons campaign and built a character named Azariah. I loved her instantly — and not just in a “fun character for a game” way, but in the way you love someone whose whole life you can suddenly see. I had her arc playing out in my head like a film series. A whole journey, a whole world, scenes I could already picture before we’d even rolled initiative.
I told a close friend about it. I expected him to say something like “that’s cool.” Instead he said, “You should write a book!” I laughed. Genuinely. Me, write a book? I was the girl in school who could barely get through English class. I’m dyslexic. I have ADHD and anxiety. My brain has never met a straightforward task it didn’t want to take the scenic route through — only to never fully arrive at the intended destination.
But it isn’t only the finishing that’s hard, or the million detours along the way. It’s the fear of even starting the engine. Of putting the key in. Of admitting you want the thing badly enough to try for it, when trying means risking the discovery that you couldn’t do it after all. Beginning is its own mountain. Some days it’s the whole mountain.
Writing a Novel
So the idea of writing a novel — a whole novel, with this brain that has never been kind to me — felt absurd. Yet my friend kept at it. He believed in me before I believed in myself. Eventually I thought, “Okay. Fine. I’ll try”
What I discovered is that I love it. Genuinely, truly love it. Not the easy parts — there aren’t any easy parts — but the act of building something out of nothing. Taking a character I’d dreamed up at a tabletop and giving her a real life on the page. Music has always been my way of making something beautiful out of feeling. Turns out writing is too. I just didn’t know the door was there.
A Magical World
So why Fantasy?
Fantasy was the obvious world to step into. I’ve loved the genre my entire life. I’m a girl who loves D&D, LOTR, Renaissance Faires, and any magical world. So naturally fantasy is the place where all of that lives at once. It’s a genre that takes the big questions seriously. It lets you build a world where the moral weight of a choice is visible. Where love, loss and inheritance are large enough to see. I didn’t have to convince myself to write fantasy. The story was already shaped there.
What I wrote isn’t the D&D campaign. It’s the story I would have made of it — the version I saw in my head, the one that needed a book and not a dice roll to find its ending. Azariah came with me. Everything else became its own thing along the way.
I should be honest about what the actual writing was like, because the finished book is a performance. It shows you the polished, perfected version and hides everything that built it. The edits. The outlines. The drafts that didn’t work. The years of learning the craft from absolute zero. Sleepless nights. Frustration so complete I’d close the document and swear I was done. Times where my brain genuinely did not feel compatible with this kind of work. Many stretches where giving up felt like the reasonable choice.
A Book Mirrors Life
A book mirrors life, in that way. We’re all giving the performance of ourselves — the polished, edited version we’re willing to hand to the world. Only a select few people ever get to see the vulnerability underneath. The rough pages. The parts that didn’t work. The parts we almost cut. The few who get to see under the mask are the ones who save you.
That’s the unromantic truth of how I finished this book. The myth is the lone writer, candle burning, finishing the manuscript by force of will. The reality, for me, was a handful of people who kept showing up — who reminded me what I was building when I couldn’t see it anymore. I owe them more than I can ever put into words.
To the reader who recognizes themselves in any of this, with a brain that fights them, anyone who’s been told that they aren’t built for this kind of thing. You can do it. It will be harder for you than it is for some people. That’s true. But “harder” is not “impossible,” and the thing on the other side of all that hard work is yours in a way it can never be for someone it came easily to. Don’t let yourself become your biggest obstacle. That’s the trap. Everything else you can work around.
The World is Bigger than One Book
The book is out now. My story finally exists outside my head, which is still a completely surreal sentence to type. I’m working on what comes next — the world is bigger than one book, and the adventure has only just begun — but I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to anyone who’s read it, reviewed it, told a friend about it, or sent me a message about what it meant to them. That has been the most unexpectedly emotional and beautiful part of all of this. People, holding a story I dreamed up at a tabletop, telling me what it gave them.
If you want to come along for the rest of the journey, the book is here.
(c) N.R. Ashworth
Author Website: https://sites.google.com/view/nrashworth
About Tales of Virillia by N.R. Ashworth
In Tales of Virillia: The Last Light, N.R. Ashworth invites you into a world where memory is fragile, magic is restless, and identity is something that can be stolen – or buried.
Azariah lives in a quiet cottage at the edge of nowhere, tracing the same inked paths across a worn map, chasing fragments of a past that refuses to return. Each attempt ends the same way: a pounding ache behind her eyes and the unsettling sense that something inside her is trying to break free. The map marks a journey she must have taken. The red X marks where she is now. But everything in between is gone.
Until the cracks begin to show.
A sharper pain. A flicker of recognition. A feeling that the life she’s living isn’t hers, not entirely. And beyond the safety of her small, dim world, Virillia waits: vast, dangerous, and threaded with secrets that seem to know her better than she knows herself.
As memory and reality begin to blur, Azariah is pulled toward a truth that does not want to be found. Because forgetting was never an accident. And remembering may cost more than she’s ready to lose.
Told with a quiet intensity and a steady pull of mystery, The Last Light unfolds like a secret being uncovered piece by piece – where every answer leads deeper into the unknown, and every step forward risks awakening something long buried.
Some stories begin with a journey.
This one begins with what was taken, and what refuses to stay lost.
Order your copy online here.
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