A Bloemfontein student and tattoo artist, Caylynne King (25), recently published the first novel in a four-part series: Gods and Monsters.
Caylynne says she became aware of an urge to write at around eight years of age. It was when a video game she was playing broke and she could not continue playing, that she seriously started to put her thoughts to paper.
“I just had to know how the story ended, so I created my own end to the story,” she says.
The idea for her first novel, Gods and Monsters: The Lock, started forming when she was around 11 years old.
“This was a very innocent version of the story. Since then I have worked a lot on the storyline to refine it.”
This former learner of the Eunice High School used to work in book stores before she started her studies in Psychology and Linguistics at the University of the Free State (UFS).
“It was while working in book shops that I really got an idea of what people like to read.”
She describes Gods and Monsters: The Lock as a fantasy mystery, with a story within a story.
Before the story was published in book form, the pilot episode was nominated by the Writers Guild of South Africa at the 2019 Muse Awards, becoming a finalist for outstanding achievement in script writing and earning her a certificate in the category for TV Drama: Unproduced.
She is working on the second edition of the series named The Space in Between.
She published the story through The White Rabbit Warren, a platform that she created to help inexperienced and unknown writers. She says the aim is to prepare and teach writers how to edit, write fiction and nonfiction and how to prepare their novels for publication.
Visit her webpage caylynneking.com for more information.
