Once upon a time, I had written a sci-fi novel. Actually, it was published in 2000, with the title T?zsugár, in Hungarian. The English title would be Ray of Fire, but fortunately for my future writing career, it was never translated into English. The book had everything my 15-16 years old self considered fun, for instance, a great space war or passionate love between members of different sapient spacefaring races. The characters were miscellaneous human and non-human lifeforms stuck in a spaceship for most of the story. Some of my characters had a keen resemblance to miscellaneous video game characters, from games such as Mortal Kombat 2 or Might & Magic VI. They certainly lacked emotional struggles over insignificant things such as mass-murder or the end of the universe. As I certainly hope that you will never read that book, I will spoil the fun for you by telling the end. A whole planet died, hinting that the entire galaxy might share the same fate, with a faint hope for salvation. This could have led to a sequel, but fortunately for all sci-fi lovers, I stopped writing the sequel after nine chapters.
The book seemed to be a success. A national TV channel did an interview with me, and I certainly got to all local newspapers, as a young author. Even more importantly, I had lots of fun writing it. However, the book itself was hard to understand and probably impossible to appreciate. My biggest mistake was writing only what I considered fun. To be honest, I still write for fun, but now I have an audience in mind. I tell the story of my passion for user experience mapping to a great audience: you. I try to find things that are fun to write and still interesting to my target audience. As a true UX geek, I create the main persona of my audience before writing anything and tell a story to them. We will get to personas in the next chapter. For this book, I call the main persona Maya, and she shares many traits with my daughter. Could I say, I'm writing this book for my daughter? Of course, I do, but I also keep in mind all other personas. Hopefully, one of them is a bit like you.