Pyle of Books

Writing My First Novel

• Tyler • Season 2 • Episode 1

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After a year-long hiatus, Tyler Pyle returns to share exciting news - he's published his first novel! Bone Runeses, a 177-page young adult fantasy, marks the culmination of a writing journey that began in fourth grade with Digimon fan fiction typed on his grandmother's computer.

Tyler takes us through his lifelong relationship with writing, from childhood stories to the six-book series he's now launching. Drawing inspiration from Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Norse mythology, Bone Runeses explores themes of self-identity, finding family, and the power of hard work to develop abilities not naturally given. The book tackles the powerful message that everyone has the potential for greatness, even without innate talents.

The self-publishing process brought unexpected challenges and emotional revelations. Tyler candidly discusses his battle with imposter syndrome after receiving professional edits, feeling he "didn't earn it" until realizing that accepting help doesn't diminish his ownership of the story. He shares practical lessons learned about cover design, spine width considerations, and the financial investment of self-publishing. Throughout the journey, Tyler maintained his authentic voice, refusing to use AI for content creation while staying true to his vision.

Beyond promoting his book, this episode offers a moving glimpse into dream fulfillment. That fourth-grade boy who imagined seeing his stories in print has finally achieved his goal. Bone Runeses is available now on Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and other retailers. Follow Author Tyler Pyle on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter to keep up with his writing journey and future installments in this magical series.

Speaker 1:

How's it going, guys? I am Tyler Pyle and you might recognize this podcast as Three Geeks Chatting. Well, I wanted to come on here and talk about a recent update. It's been over a year now since we have last filmed and posted a podcast episode episode and we're all okay, nothing's wrong. There was no falling out. We just we were busy and recording a podcast with 30 people is a lot more stressful than I think we were physically ready for and we didn't have a lot of space and time and uh, with our work schedules it became once every other week and we would wouldn't have time to edit. But I wanted to come on here and I wanted to talk about pretty much life and what I've been up to.

Speaker 1:

And to start it all off is I wrote a book. Now the book is called Bone Runeses and it is a young adult novel. It is 177 pages and it's been out since June 5th, which, as of recording this podcast episode, it is June 27th, so it's been out for a little bit, and I published it through Engram, spark, amazon, kdp, which it's not free on ebooks yet. I'm gonna start looking into getting it on the ebook for KDP and let it be free, so everyone who has a membership can read it for free off of that. Who has a membership can read it for free off of that. And then I have it on um Lulu direct through my website, which, um, I'm going to be changing to, uh, where I just order prints and ship them out manually. But it's. It's been a journey and I wanted to talk about my journey through self-publishing as a debut author.

Speaker 1:

So, if you don't know, my name is Tyler Pyle and I have been writing since fourth grade and I used to read it was Digimon fan fiction. I used to. I used to write, and it was before I knew what fan fiction was, but it was essentially I, uh, me and a buddy of mine got sucked into a all the the virtual digital world, um, uh, digimon. And it came about because I found a microchip on the street corner, uh, which at the time I didn't know what a microchip was. I was like, oh, that's scientific, right there, so I have to do it. And so that's what we went with. And when we went with this idea, well, I say we like I wrote it with someone, I wrote it myself, it was all done on my grandma's computer and originally I was handwriting them but my handwriting was so bad that my grandma would type them up and she would do the proofreading and editing on it and it was a lot of fun. But it really got me into why I like to write nowadays.

Speaker 1:

And the the video of the um digimon fan fiction. Obviously you can't find it like I just printed them out and when my grandma's computer crashed it they went with it and um, that was years ago so you can't find them. But I remember to this day the opening was on an old school building. I made it like old bricks and vines and all that. And I mean I'm 28 now, so fourth grade was like decade, like I'm 28 now. So fourth grade was like decade, like feels like a hundred years ago.

Speaker 1:

But it got me into writing and I had been writing since then. I mean fourth grade, I was writing. Fifth grade I was writing. Sixth grade I started my first.

Speaker 1:

Like the summer after sixth grade I started my first series which was called the Hidden Animal and I'm not going to tell you the premise of that one because even to this day I outline it and I work on it. But it's a post-apocalyptic book and I've been writing them for I mean just as long as I can remember. So going through and writing my first actual book was a journey, and I can't even tell you all of the aspects because some of it's just a blur. Working swing shifts, there's some days I'm up all night, so I'd be sitting there up all night and I'm just tap, tap, tapping away on my PC writing chapters and outlines and stories and spinning around in my chair trying to figure out what I'm going to do next or what the characters are going to do next. That I made eight years ago.

Speaker 1:

It was a concept that I came up with about a magical high school similar to Harry Potter, but it was modern day and there was more adventure to it. Originally the concept was kind of Harry Potter mixed with Final Fantasy, and while I've kind of pushed away from the whole Final Fantasy aspect in this saga of books and that it's become more of Harry Potter with like a Percy Jackson vibe for the Camp Half-Bloods, and it also has Norse mythology, which the first book doesn't touch on a lot but it will expand into later on, I really think that, um, there's a lot of depth in it, that that is missed, that, um, there's a lot of character growth. I think the characters are realistic, um, trying to for one, the way they talk. I think they talk like you'd expect young adults to talk. You know there's a little bit of language, but nothing that would like push you into like thinking, oh, this is a full on adult book. I mean, these are children and I keep that in mind through the writing.

Speaker 1:

Um, it's about self-identity, finding your uh family and really understanding that just because other people claim that you're not special, it doesn't mean you're not like you. You can still be special. Uh, you don't. Even if you're not born with a natural talent. You can earn that natural talent, like you can earn it through hard work and um, it might take longer, but you still have that ability to learn from um what you're not born with. Um and some cases, I think a lot of people who aren't born with something uh can outperform those who are born with an ability. I mean, we're not all going to be great writers, but we all have the potential to be a great writer. I think that's really some of the undertones of what this book series is going to really touch on.

Speaker 1:

Book one, like I said, is currently out. You can buy it on pretty much anywhere you find books. Barnes and Noble is the one that I highlight a lot, uh, cause, personally, I like Barnes and Noble. It's where I get my books, um, but you can. You can get it through Amazon and, like I said, I have a website up that you can get it through. All in all, I really wanted to just express how how much fun it has been in this process.

Speaker 1:

The hardest part, I think, about the whole writing aspect for me was when I sent it to an editor. I paid someone on Fiverr to edit the book and there was some struggle there. But, to touch on the positive side, when they sent it back to me, I had a lot of struggle because it didn't feel like it was my book. It felt like I almost cheated the system because I had someone edit it. I didn't edit the book. They found the grammar errors, they found the mistakes and all that. They went through all this and fixed it for me and when they were finished, I cried because I was reading it and I felt like I didn't earn it.

Speaker 1:

I felt like I didn't deserve it. I felt like I didn't deserve it and, oddly enough, I had to think back to the main character, who struggles through a lot of similar concepts and you see more of it in later books, that I'm not going to spoil them. But I also had to think about what he goes through in the later books because I got all six books outlined goes through in the later books, because I got all six books outlined, and it really is something that you don't really comprehend until you're in those shoes where you're, um, have an identity, uh issue, like it's um, oh, what is it called? Imposter syndrome? You know, you really think like, oh yeah, like this is this is imposter syndrome. I'm not, um, this isn't really me. I'm playing a part that's not me. Like I can't do this. This is all fake and wrong and messed up. And you really feel that for a little bit when you first start and I'm not saying it's bad, little bit when you first start, and I'm not saying it's bad, I'm not saying that you, you're never gonna feel it, I'm. I'm saying that you, you have to realize that you wrote something and just because someone edited for you doesn't mean it's not yours. That is your story, those are your characters, that is your core.

Speaker 1:

You go back and double check what they edited and make sure they don't take your voice away, and I think that's a big thing is, I went through and I read, I reread my book and I missed some details and I had my wife read it through, um, a second time, third time, and they left uh, she left me sticky notes all over the book with what needed to be fixed and edited after the main edits, and I went through and I looked at every single one that she recommended and some of them I kept. Some of them I didn't. I did what I thought was best and kept my voice, but I also had to do the same with the professional editor. I had to make sure my voice stayed intact, no one else's voice and honestly, I, I cried when I, when I reread my book and it was edited, because it felt so surreal to be holding it, looking at it. Uh, with that said, um, there were struggles. I did struggle a lot. I uh, I paid for, I paid all of it out of pocket. I paid everything for my book to be made.

Speaker 1:

I did not use AI, um, and I think that was a very big thing, especially with books and stuff is people using AI, books and stuff is people using AI, but I did not use AI for my book. What I did do and I don't consider this using AI for my book is I would post my outline into the AI and have them reorganize my thoughts into proper bullet points, because I would write an entire page for an outline and then I would post it and I would say, hey, reorganize this for my outline. Like, just reorganize my thoughts, because my thoughts get jumbled up when I'm trying to figure everything out, and I did use AI for that, but I didn't use um. I didn't have it make anything and, honestly, I was very strict. Uh, if I felt like it was adding something, I would delete it. Uh, I did not want it in any aspect to be added in.

Speaker 1:

Uh, my cover art was made by um, uh, milbart, uh, m-i-i-l-b-a-r-t. If I remember correctly off the top of my head. Uh, they did a phenomenal job, um, and I absolutely love the book cover. What, what I didn't know, though, was, when you have a book cover made, have everything inside the cover finished so you know the proximate length of how big the book is gonna be, because it will affect your um publishing, self-publishing on ingram and amazon, because you have to have it a specific way so nothing gets cut off. I didn't know this and I had a rough estimate that was wildly off, because I had about 20,000 words removed from my book after editing, which was fine because I loved the the new look on it and how it all sounded, and I removed a lot of the constant like.

Speaker 1:

We Didn't like restating stuff that I did and very common in writing, so it was a very nice touch and it left my spine to not be as large as originally planned, which meant that the letters when it said Tyler Pyle on the spine was curved and so Ingram wouldn't accept it, amazon wouldn't accept it, lulu Press did for some reason. I take that how you will, but Ingram and Amazon wouldn't take the book covers. So I actually had to remove my name from it and I used Canva to do it. I removed my name from the spinal cord altogether and I just left the rune that is on the spine where it was. But it was an adventure and I wouldn't change it for the world.

Speaker 1:

I feel like I finally did something that I'm proud of. I'm proud of the Twitch. I'm proud of the YouTube stuff. I'm proud of my um videos I've made. I'm proud of the podcast we had. I'm proud of all of this, but this was something beyond expectations of how it made me feel as a kid. I didn't care about YouTube as a kid, I didn't care about Twitch. As a kid I didn't even like podcasts. I mean, I didn't like none of this stuff.

Speaker 1:

But ever since I was a small child, I had been writing and writing and imagining the deal and the ideas that I could have in the plans of when this hidden animal book gets turned into a movie or a TV show, because I always wanted to do a cartoon. I always wanted it to be a cartoon when I first wrote it. When all this happens, you know I'm going, I'm gonna be ecstatic and I would tell my uh, she's my sister-in-law now, but at the time she was my brother's girlfriend. I would go uh, you need to. Uh, if you, if you edit my book, I'll, I'll give you five percent, ten percent, of all of the earnings that I make and we'll, we'll be rich together. Um is stuff I would say.

Speaker 1:

And I was like I think I was 11 or 10. No, I was in sixth grade, going in seventh. I don't know, I was young, I was young, young, young, young. Um, probably like 10th or 10 years old, maybe I don't know, but I just I remember all of this ecstatic and excitement that I would feel when doing it and, um it, I did it. I mean, to be honest, all I can really say is I went out there and I did it. I created something that I'm proud of and no one can take that from me, um, that I'm proud of and no one can take that from me.

Speaker 1:

If you're listening to this, I really hope you've enjoyed my little insight, and I wanted to Bring this back Because I wanted to talk more about Stuff that I've been doing with the book and talking about book stuff. Well, I don't know the the drastic change if I'm going to change it from three geeks gaming or not. I mean, I used I've been paying for buzzsprout to keep my these podcast episodes up, so obviously I'm going to keep them up. I don't want to lose them, um, but I don't know where I'm going to go with the podcast. But my wife messaged me an hour ago and goes hey, you should. If we're going to be paying for the Buzzsprout to keep the podcast up, you should use it. You should make book content with it. And so I sat down and that's exactly what I did. She told me make a whole bunch and get a weekly schedule set up, so that's what I'm doing.

Speaker 1:

With that said, guys, I hope everyone's doing good and I'm really appreciative of everyone who has been watching the podcast and checking out the episodes, who don't even know anything about us outside of what they find on here. To reiterate, everyone is good, we're all good. My wife's good, hannah's good she's still being Hannah where we were just talking about Death Stranding 2 um, we've just, we've just been living life and getting through everything, um, so I really appreciate everyone who still watches and or watches, who still listens, and I hope you guys enjoyed this episode and I will be doing more book content in the future. So, as always, guys, check out Tyler Pyle on TikTok and Instagram. Author Tyler Pyle on Instagram, tiktok and Twitter. Thank you guys, so much for listening. I'll see you guys in the next episode.