Introduction

How I started this?

Every writer has different experiences in life. Some of them had learned from greater writers, wrote real life stories, or just created worlds for millions of people. Writing is a big challenge and whenever you start doing it seriously, it will change your life, your point of view, your life cycle, everything. 

I started my writing career in 2008, as P.L. Ladislaus, with a short novel, Paper-Figures. During writing, more and more ideas assaulted my mind, and this short novel became longer and longer, and finally turned into a complete book with more than 300 pages a few months later.

As it was one of my dreams––to have a book written by me–– I felt great satisfaction. However, I didn’t share my work with anybody; I wrote it only for myself and just kept it on my computer on the hard drive.

When the first book was finished, I felt some strange emptiness. As if something was missing. I had an idea how to fill up this emptiness so I had started to write again, but something else.

It was the time of start the second part of Paper-Figures. The first story continued with some old and many new characters but took place one and a half years later. The size was doubled, and I spent one whole year to write and finish it.

Unexpectedly, something wonderful happened: my flatmates and some of my friends became interested about what I was working on so hard. When I showed them my work, they were surprised because they never expected that I was capable of writing something like this. And they started to read it.

Six people, my first readers, finished my first book, Paper-Figures, within only two days. Then they gave me excellent feedback and encouragement. After finishing the second part of Paper-Figures I returned to the first one, polished it up, and gave it to a publisher in Hungary to have my book printed for my family and friends. It was just a limited series, around hundred copies.

Half a year later, while I was playing a multiplayer game, EVE Online, a new idea rushed into my mind. As the world of EVE Online was very huge and rich, and I always wanted to test myself in Science-fiction, it was my chance to improve my writing skills and show my style for a big audience.

When I started my third book called The Antiainen incident (the first in Rampage in New Eden series), I created a webpage and uploaded the chapters there as a promotional work, however, I just simply enjoyed writing. I was a bit shy and nervous about the welcome, but very soon the Hungarian players’ community appreciated my efforts and as a result, I became famous among them, and the news about my book was spreading from mouth to mouth.

Within four beautiful months, I finished the first book of the series. More than 30% of the Hungarian EVE Online community was keenly interested in my book. The feedback I received stated that my writing is excellent in characters, and in plots, but, obviously, there were some weak points too, so I heeded their advice, and rewrote some chapters, dialogues. And it was done.

Two weeks later I started to write my fourth book, The Anti-Concord Alliance (second in the Rampage in New Eden series), the longest one in my life. It has 800 pages and it took four months to finish. By then the readers became sort of fans, and everybody was excited to read the first chapters of the new book.

Unfortunately, just before I could finish the last chapters of this book, a serious motorbike accident happened. After getting out of the hospital and starting my two months of recovery, I finished the book with only one a half hands because my dominated arm was badly injured. But I could make it.

My readers became excited, encouraged me, and an interesting thing occurred: some of them said: “Leslie, you should translate your work into English and introduce your style to everybody around the world.”

This was the moment when I started to think differently. I knew the book translation was one of the hardest work with any language.

It was a lucky moment, but when I started to upload the episodes of my second EVE Online book, the editor in chief of a famous guide for this game asked me to help in translation from Hungarian into English. I participated in the final polishing of volume 1 of the book, and volume 2 is coming out soon. I became the main translator of volume 2, as my translation accuracy is 99%. It was good for practice. More info in Projects and future work.

While I was on sick leave, I took my first book, Paper-Figures, and began the translation. I had time, I could finish the translation within three weeks, however, its quality wasn’t the best, I wasn’t satisfied, so I began to train myself with more grammar, idioms, syntax, and read as many as I could from great writers like Philip K. Dick, Stieg Larsson.

Meanwhile, having nothing to write, I felt the same emptiness as before. I announced to my readers that there would be no more EVE Online book, but I had to change my mind because a new idea of a story, out of the blue, assaulted my mind again. On the last two weeks of my sick leave, I wrote my fifth book, which had only 250 pages.

And a brand new idea came. As I’m a big Silent Hill fan, I created a story which took place in the mysterious world of Silent Hill. Since this idea was actually deep in my mind all the time, it broke out with extreme power: the first Hungarian Silent Hill book was written within 28 hours. And a bit later I realized that this is not just the first in Hungary, this is the first Silent Hill book on the world. This was the next step in my translation queue.

Many more readers downloaded this book, and a new idea came: the fourth EVE Online book. It was taking a month to write, but I had to take some breaks due to some real life issues.

Meanwhile, I read more in English, and I really wanted to write again in English too. As I had translated one of my books, I began to polish it, but I was still not satisfied, therefore I was studying more about syntax, and grammar techniques. Meanwhile, I rewrote the original Paper-Figures and translated again (based on a better written book).

After requesting an official critique, my life has changed: the critique was awesome, I was extremely happy: except some really small, easily ignorable issues, the writing (all the plots, story, characters) was nearly excellent.

I hired a proofreading company to find those small mistakes and polish my work. It cost me a lot of money, but two months later it was done, ready to be released for not only the Hungarian communities any more, but also worldwide for everybody who likes to read an energetic non-stop novel where there are no boring chapters, there are no boring pages, there is no predicted story.

As you can read in My books and their synopses page, this is just the beginning. I have many books written already, and have many ideas for the future including short novels, books, both stand alone ones and series, and so on, and since all of my books are like a movie, I’m thinking about scripts, and more synopses for movies too. 

I just hope I can finish all my plans before the years are creeping up on me :)