This is the novel that taught me how to write a novel. The Amazon description of this book is:

A 3,000 year anniversary sets off chaos in the underworld when Charon, mythological ferryman, undertakes a mission to liberate his young daughter from damnation.

Although my novel has a 5 star rating on Amazon, marketing a self-published book about an aging ferryman from a Greek myth was no easy task. It has always been hard to say what attracted me to the idea so much I wanted to write a novel about it.

Although I had some knowledge about Greek mythology, my spark of inspiration came to me when I was playing “Castlevania 2.” In one segment a skeleton rowed Simon across a lake for a coin.

The setting was misty and dark. Atmospheric music was playing. And I wanted to know more about the skeleton, which I knew was based on Charon, the ferryman of the river Styx.I wanted to know what Charon did with so many coins, since he apparently never left his boat to spend them. Did he just like shiny things? Was he a miser? Did he care about anyone?

In the world of my imagination, he had a young rebellious daughter, a strained relationship with the god Hades, a purpose for his coins, and a habit of trading insults with Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog.

I imagined the scenes set up in comic book frames, like a graphic novel, and wished I could draw what was in my head.

Although I suspected weird fringe characters from Greek myths were not a marketing goldmine, I wanted them to be humanly motivated. I was convinced the best stories were driven by memorable characters with powerful emotions.

For many months, Hades became my playground and I developed my characters: a determined, miserly boatman, a controlling witch, a stubborn god, a condescending dog, a volatile wife. I was happy with the finished product.

Though the book did not sell many copies, it changed my life. I had a successful book signing in my home town. Readers responded strongly to my characters, and someone from Australia wrote a thoughtful review, which I treasure. Since then, others have reviewed it favorably.

Most of all, my first novel gave me confidence that I could write others. The novel remains on my bookshelf. Inside its covers, my characters still play, speak, and roam.

Every time I see the cover, I am reminded that words can make this possible.

Buy Thief of Hades at Amazon

Writing a novel is hard, but certain beliefs about creativity make it harder. The need for rigid discipline or a magical mental state are a couple. My book advocates a more playful approach based on freedom. When writing is about having fun, when you want to write, there is no need to force it. Once you stop fighting yourself, you can fully focus.

Writing a second novel during a severe bipolar depression led me to this insight. I was more painfully blocked than I had ever been. I hated writing, but I also missed it. I wistfully envisioned a “trail” leading back to when writing had been fun.

Lacking that, I did what I could, which was to write, good or bad, whether I felt like it or not. During the long painful struggle that followed, I learned what inspired me and unlearned mental habits that impeded writing.

My book is about summoning creativity, ending self-abuse, and replacing guilt with freedom based on a love for writing.

My title is my dream of going back to being creative again, based on my longing for direction – a trail. Since I had lacked this when I was blocked, I made notes about my novel writing process so that if I ever found myself creatively lost again, I would have a way back.

This book is my trail.

Buy A Trail of Crumbs to Creative Freedom: One Author’s Journey Through Writer’s Block and Beyond.

Amazon description:

A collection of short stories by L.E. Henderson ranging from personal prose to fantasy and science fiction.
Fictionally addresses questions such as:

• What if you could write your way into a new life?
• What if the only way to cure mental illness was math?
• How would a cat who had just become human react when she runs into a Christian determined to save her soul?
• How would the human race react if they made first contact with extraterrestrials only to find that the aliens have no interest in humans at all?
• What would an immortal race of human descendants think about being human if some parents mysteriously gave birth to a mortal human baby – an atavist?

Transcending time, space, and death, “Becoming the Story” explores how life produces “real world” stories that can disappoint and define us until we begin to answer them with our own – and how the power of imagination brings the impossible down to earth.

Buy Becoming the Story and Other Tales at Amazon

Remembering the Future: and Other Tales

Amazon description:

“The best stories are the ones in which a character wants something more than anything else in the world. In Remembering the Future, fantasy and science fiction author L.E. Henderson explores bizarre settings in which characters form universal desires made unique by their strange worlds.

A loner looks for the meaning of life by traveling to Mars.

A young woman prisoner awakens to a digital apocalypse that rocks the prison system and leads her to a startling realization about humans.

A sociopath seeks the emotion necessary to become a great pianist – and enters a world of suffering he could never have imagined.

An under-confident teenage boy searches for his true identity in a technological house of mirrors.

A mad scientist takes up the strange hobby of collecting and caging human minds – until one of them rebels.

A confident young girl resolves to to vanquish an illusory dragon that all the adults have failed to destroy, until she discovers that illusions are far more powerful than she ever knew.

A technologically advanced library card offers glimpses of omniscience – at a painful price.

In “Remembering the Future,” desire transcends time, place, and technology to do what fiction does best: to reveal what is common and universal to being human.”

The best stories are the ones in which a character wants something more than anything else in the world. In “Remembering the Future,” fantasy and science fiction author L.E. Henderson explores bizarre settings in which characters form universal desires made unique by their strange worlds.

A loner looks for the meaning of life by traveling to Mars.

A young woman prisoner awakens to a digital apocalypse that rocks the prison system and leads her to a startling realization about humans.

A sociopath seeks the emotion necessary to become a great pianist – and enters a world of suffering he could never have imagined.

An under-confident teenage boy searches for his true identity in a technological house of mirrors.

A mad scientist takes up the strange hobby of collecting and caging human minds – until one of them rebels.

A confident young girl resolves to to vanquish an illusory dragon that all the adults have failed to destroy, until she discovers that illusions are far more powerful than she ever knew.

A technologically advanced library card offers glimpses of omniscience – at a painful price.

In “Remembering the Future,” desire transcends time, place, and technology to do what fiction does best: to reveal what is common and universal to being human.

Buy Remembering The Future at Amazon

Amazon Description:

In her third and most eclectic story collection yet, fantasy and science fiction author L.E. Henderson explores the twilit realms between dream and reality where anything is possible.

Blending different genres, forms, and styles, she seeks to identify what is common about good story-telling of all genres: human drives and emotions, the quest of humans to understand their place in the universe, regardless of the planet, solar system, dream realm, or age.

Buy The Age of Erring

When Mitalla turns three, she learns that her mother has kept a dark secret from her: Mitalla is a slave. Being a member of an intelligent feline species, she has never seen a “pink and furless” human until a cruel overseer takes her and her siblings from their seemingly safe home and into a life of bondage.

Even though Mitalla has struggled to survive as the runt of her litter, she is unprepared for the harsh world of the desert where her enslaved species is forced to mine a precious mineral collected by the human king of her world.

As Mitalla comes of age, she constantly seeks ways to escape with her siblings into “the greater world,” a place her mother once described as having lush green grass and an abundance of food and water. To her advantage, her early struggles have honed her persistence and wit.

Despite her strengths, cruel guards, barbed wire fencing, swords, whips, and constant hunger make escape seem all but impossible.

Frustrated desires finally erupt in a tragedy that forces her to make a decision: to stay and suffer or risk her life and the lives of her family to escape. Either way, she will need all the cunning and courage she possesses to survive.

The Ghosts of Chimera is a psychological fantasy about a troubled 13 year old boy who is drawn into another world in a search for the ghost of his younger brother.

There he learns of an ancient menace called the Scavenger, a creature that uses the powers of wishful thinking and denial against humans. The Scavenger is threatening to destroy its world Chimera, a place where human dreams take on physical reality, a place so interlinked with the human world that the destruction of Chimera will mean the end of humans as well. Caleb’s quest to find his brother broadens as he becomes entangled in a struggle against the Scavenger.

However, as Caleb moves through Chimera, worrying signs accumulate that Chimera may not exist at all, but may be the product of his own mind, and his own attempt to deny a terrible truth he does not want to face.

His journey through Chimera forces Caleb to confront the dangers of an alien world and, finally, the most perilous landscape of all: the secrets that lie, deeply hidden, within himself.