By the time I had the first book, I thought that meant I had a head start on success as a novelist. And yeah, so I became a professional novelist at age 24. And by 2010, I had my first published book in my hand, that was almost exactly 10 years ago. She started querying publishing houses and got the first publishing house she queried.

I started querying for an agent a year after I wrote it. And somehow that combination of passion, simplicity, with hints of this more complex world that I wanted to write ended up being something kind of special. And so I wrote my heart out with this super, super simple story. And then I had this little simple jewel of a concept. I had been playing with these huge ideas that were so far beyond me. And that simplicity was exactly what I needed. Fast forward a couple of years, a couple of years spent studying English Lit and really immersing myself in great literature, and some of the great minds of all ages and I actually got an idea for a much, much simpler story, which was Heartless. I was super passionate about it and totally unable to write anything like that at the time. And it was just going to be this super vast, complex thing. Sylvia Mercedes: When I was quite young-I was still a teenager-I had this idea for a complex world with many facets and layers of reality, and I wanted to write this fantasy series where I could basically jump in and out of it at any point in time and write complete standalone stories, but with threads of connection throughout history. You had seven full-length novels and three novellas…and then you just sort of disappeared.

Josh Olds: Tales of Goldstone Wood was published between 2010-2015. You can listen to the full interview by clicking the play button above or subscribing at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This excerpt has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity. Along with that journey came a new name: Sylvia Mercedes. The result is this hour-long podcast of love and loss, high-acclaim and low-sales, and a sweeping epic journey from traditional to indie publishing. I happened to have Anne’s email and reached out to her. Or, as one friend suggested (and you were even correct on the pen name, Emma), started writing under a pseudonym. It was as if she’d dropped off the face of the earth. It had been a few years since I’d thought of the series. Almost immediately, I ran into my reviews of Tales of Goldstone Wood by Anne Elisabeth Stengl.

As the site has grown (over 15k visitors this month!), I’ve started to work on reformatting or republishing our years of archives. When Life is Story relaunched, we did so from scratch.

Shadow Hand by Anne Elisabeth Stengl