Nelson Chereta

Please feel free to visit my Facebook page, just search my name. That's where I'll leave updates about what I'm working on, and even the occasional free preview. As an added bonus you can hear my opinion on things completely unrelated to my writing! About Me I am from New Bedford, Massachusetts and have lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, Naples, Florida, and Tampa, Florida. I am Portuguese -American, Catholic, a registered democrat, a sarcastic bastard, a Red Sox-Patriots-Bruins fanatic, a single male, and someone who has always loved to write. Even as a kid I always loved telling stories and used to fill up notebooks with tales of superheroes and giant robots battling monsters. Growing up my dream was to conquer and rule the world. My secondary goal was to be a male porn star. If both of those didn't work out I decided to settle on being a writer. I still have some hopes for the whole world conquest thing, but the damn killer robots are really expensive. Stephen King introduced me to horror and helped give me a taste for the tragic. The original Dragonlance books opened my mind to fantasy and impossible worlds filled with magic and great heroes battling terrible villains. Robert Asprin's MYTH series showed me how wonderful light hearted humor could be. Watching old reruns of the original Star Trek interested me in science fiction. I discovered fanfiction because I was a fan of the anime Naruto. Having devoured all the original source material I went on line to try and find more. I stumbled across fanfiction and began reading those stories. About ninety percent were just horrible, but a handful were worth the effort. Up until that point I had continued to write, but rarely showed any of my work to anyone. My stories have always been intensely personal to me and I didn't want anyone telling me they were bad, or worse boring. I'd submitted a few short stories and gotten form rejection letters. When I discovered online fanficiton I suddenly had a forum where I could let people read my work, but stay safely anonymous. I can't stress how much writing fanfiction helped me develop as a writer. Over seven years I cranked out more than seventy stories and over two million words. Readers were quick to tell me what they liked and what they hated. (I would strongly recommend that any aspiring writers out there looking for critiques give it a shot.) I learned about pacing, foreshadowing, character development, and a whole lot more. Perhaps the single most important lesson was that not everyone will enjoy what I write, and that's okay. You can't please everyone, and you shouldn't try to. As a writer I focus on creating stories I myself would enjoy and let the readers decide if they like them too. Along the way I wrote some stories that were very popular and developed a small following. I still enjoy writing it, though I have less time now. My pen name is "Lord of the Land of Fire" and if any of you are interested here is a link to my fanfiction https://www.fanfiction.net/u/1308758/lord-of-the-land-of-fire. In any case, I decided to try and self-publish a novel. All the cool kids were doing it. I spent two years writing "The (sort of) Dark Mage" and submitted it to Amazon. I hoped to get a hundred sales. To be honest, I just wanted to make a something that was completely mine and to give people a chance to read it. I was also curious to see if anyone would actually pay money to read something I'd written. In twelve months that novel has sold over seven thousand copies, mostly as an ebook. Seven thousand may not sound all that impressive, and it's definitely not getting me that beachfront mansion, but for a debut self-published novel it was quite a feat. The success of my first novel has led to my second in what will be a series "After The Rabbit." It has also given me real hope that I will be able to make my living as a writer. Which again is good, 'cause I'm starting to worry the killbots may turn on me.