Lydia Kuerth
Growing up in the suburbs of Wisconsin, Lydia’s formative years were spent rather normally: playing in the snow, reading books, weeding the garden, walking to the library, going on extensive family bike rides, and playing video games. However, she also took interest in less common activities — namely, carrying a notebook everywhere she went and writing fictional stories by the dozen. More than once she drew rebuke from her parents for hiding behind written pages rather than socializing, but if anything, this only made her defiant, and her love of writing grew.
Soon, Lydia was a master of terrible fanfiction and absurd fantastical tales. As her experience and age increased, she began producing longer and more original stories — all of them handwritten — until eventually she created her first pseudo-novel, a rambling tale uninspiringly titled Sea Dragon (which bears no connection to The Scales Within and is better off missing the light of day). Lydia was extremely proud of her work and guarded it jealously, until one fateful day when her cousin Anna cajoled her into lending it for a time. Somehow, Anna grew attached to this disjointed story and pushed for a sequel, which Lydia obligingly wrote. That story was nearly as bad as the first, but it exercised Lydia’s writing muscles, and Anna's enthusiasm inspired her to create a brand new, twelve-book-long fantasy series.
Thus, the Twelve Tyrants were born.
It started when Lydia brainstormed up a dozen hybrid creatures and a realm for each one. From there, she began gathering ideas for other inhabitants of this world and created a main character by the name of Lythimore. She then selected a tyrant and a realm, whipped up some other characters, and tossed them together to see what would happen next.
Needless to say, the first draft of The Scales Within was a mess without plotting, a maze of random events plagued by many contrived rescues and riddled with characterization issues.
After this early The Scales Within, Lydia proceeded to write the rest of the series. Though the proceeding books gradually improved as she learned to plot ahead of time, the series was still a jumble of poor pacing, contrivances, and confused plot sequences that eventually necessitated the excision of two of the twelve books. When at last the original ten-book series was complete, Lydia, exhausted, suffered a long period of writer's block and went dry of good writing for quite some time. In the midst of all this, she and her family moved to Florida, where she enjoyed the tropical temperatures but had trouble adapting to the new large school and South American culture. Indeed, middle school was a busy and complicated time.
But with her promotion to high school, Lydia's writing passion and skill returned from their vacation stronger than ever. She penned an original Twelve Tyrants prequel, produced her longest story to date (722 handwritten, college-ruled pages long), and, after assessing her old books, decided that there was some gold hidden among the slag — so she embarked on a quest to rewrite the entire Twelve Tyrants Series and publish it at last.
A somewhat daunting goal? Sure. That's why Lydia makes sure to take frequent breaks in-between revitalizing and sharing her stories. At these times, you may find her reading fantasy novels, playing games on the ancient Xbox or modern Nintendo Switch, or pleading with the family cat Cherry to please, just this once, agree to be petted.
To learn more about Lydia and her books, visit www.lydiakuerth.com
