Today we’d like to introduce you to Dominic De Souza

Hi Dominic, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.

I was born on the north Island in New Zealand, with a mountain at the end of the road and a clear memory of causing havoc with a yellow bike and dog named Barney. I blinked, and was 9 years old in a country school in Fiji, thick with fascinating, faithful Indians and thin, active Fijian children. Everything was beaches and late night dinners, mango trees and mosquitors, and massive frogs that edged the smoky pit-fire cooking. I’d been homeschooled till that point, so this was a deepend dive into squealing busses and grim bus drivers and the crush of curry-scented sweat as we kids rattled shoulders on rough dirt roads.

And then Australia, where our large family grew a little more. I was the eldest of eight kids, a total ’80s family, where we didn’t have much money, and my parents were always working together on new projects. So we kids grew up semi-feral, scrambling around on the roof, making our own treehouses with split wood and bashed thumbs. We told stories, hiked and biked the local woods, explored every pipe and fallen tree, and ate like wild hogs. Every stick a sword, every karate class a proving ground, every school day a clock-watching waiting game till the explosion of break time and more games.

During all this, I discovered a love of books, and a love of writing. I read the local library dry, ordered in huge lists of things, started drawing my own comics, and writing my own novels. The satisfaction of building and sharing my own worlds was incredible, and I couldn’t stop. What if a crashed pilot had to fend off T-Rexes with a lightsaber? What if Star Wars and Jurassic Park mashed up? What if two children got sucked into fantasy world on the brink of war? What if… What if…

And after three months, I found that I’d written my first novel, and those magical words, ‘The End’, were a prophecy. I was going to do it again, someday. Sure, it was only 50-pages when typed, but to a tousled, 13-year old kid with big teeth and aviator glasses, it was a magic that smelled like fresh copybook paper, blue, Bic ink, and any dark weird corner where a cramping hand could craft letters and lines into worlds and weirdness.

Let’s fast forward, with a whole host of very-bad, no-good, awesome-stories, a year lived in a French boarding school, and a final move to the USA. I dropped out of college and high school to work for the family business, and discovered that all my love for creativity was really, really helpful. I became the back-of-house problem solver. The IT guy, the database and emails guy, and customer support contact. That’s when I discovered graphic design, and the first flashes of copywriting.

25 years later, I’ve been hard at work trying to skill up. I have a small, young family of my own, and fight every day to create peace and space for them to thrive. And at the same time, to dig down through the layers of silt and guilt that have covered up the wild, feral energy of that young kid I once was. With the beginning of Covid, I launched an online community for fiction writers, partly because I wanted friends, mostly because I wanted to have a lot more fun.

Three years later, this community has grown, and my inner creator started to surface again. I burned through a new novel draft, which feels like pure fire in the belly. Seeing this thing grow and take shape, to breach the 100,000 word limit for myself, and to see the lights go on in people’s eyes when I start to talk about it… it’s sheer magic.

Just the other day, a friend described my worlds as vivid and untamed, and I’ve never heard anything so perfect. That urge for adventure, for self-discovering, for cracking the mysteries and diving deep into the wonder and danger of this thing we call life, to get back to an enchanted world thriving with meaning and purpose, and to capture a glint of this weird wildness in a story… maybe that’s why I’m here. I plan to keep finding out.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?

I struggle with the bumps and dents and straight up black holes that show up in my life. I’ve mentally tacked the koan ‘the problems are the path’ over my desk, mostly so I can get mad at that too. But it’s true – and always in retrospect.

Looking at the shambles of my life around me, and the treehouse I’ve cobbled-together from the parts, I’m pretty impressed that I’ve gotten this far. I can’t speak for anyone else, only for the hand of cards that I’ve been given. And I think that’s the point of life. You’re dropped into this sandbox, and given a random hand of cards, never a complete deck, and the whole point is to know what you’ll do with it. Who will you become? How will you react? What will you build?

From early on, the myths of Robin Hood, the Arthuriad, the Olympiad and Maharabahata and the Dreaming, have been my friends. And they always come back to two themes; real heroes are merry and brave. So I want to be like that too. And I fail twice a day. In my case, where I work and where I have to be in life, I’m remote from all the friends and family I’ve ever known. My wife has been struggling with a debilitating medical condition for a decade. It’s a perfect recipe for shutting down your creativity and taking a hard left into left-brain survival thinking, because bills and breakfast must happen every day.

My problem is that my wild, feral, inner creative rebel will not take no for an answer. So whether it means losing sleep, sanity, or cycling through routines of Netflix, philosophy, creative insanity, and then burnout, it must happen. Now obviously, that’s not a healthy routine. And it’s taken me several years to see what I was doing to myself.

Some of what needed to change was my own outlook. I learned that no one else will ever care about the things I do. That’s on me to do. But I also learned that almost no one will step up and create a vision that empowers others, to create an ark and reduce risk for others by taking that risk on themselves. Or at least finding a creative way to reduce that risk, so that others – and myself – can get moving.

Looking back at the last few years, I tell myself that my limits were self-imposed… but they were actually the rules of the game I had at the time. No budget, no time, and no credibility. So how do you change the world, or make a dent in it, when you’re a nobody, and no one knows you? I don’t have all the answers. But I do have a rebel edge to throw spaghetti at a wall longer, faster, and with more grit than anyone I know. And if it doesn’t stick, then I’m grabbing the brownies.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?

LegendHaven began three years ago as a bold dream: I wanted to create the online version of ComiCon for Catholic and Orthodox communities. It has to be different, not just better, than all the other online conferences I’d hosted and seen. I wanted something fun, ludicrously epic. I want to share the spark of thriving life and excitement that I feel when I dive into a mythical world, or a fantasy adventure, or a space epic.

In the last century, Christian contributions to fiction have steered into a literary and evangelistic mode, and I’m not satisfied with that. Most of us are secret nerds, and have our hardcore fandoms. And I think there’s a massive truth in there, and a massive need for more of it. We don’t need more Christian fiction, but more fiction created by Christians. Less of the preachy soapboxes, and more of the blockbusters, the cosy adventures, the introspection and myth and antiheroes and epic worldbuilding.

As of right now, LegendHaven is the biggest online con for Catholic and Orthodox nerds, because it’s the only one I know of. I plan to collaborate and grow this every year to reach new audiences, and empower more gamers, streamers, media makers, and authors to create and publish and share. Maybe one day we’ll have an in-person event, which would feel like walking into a League of Legends or a Blizzard gaming convention, thick with costumes and board games, and author panels.

Today, we’re on a quest to have fun, share that fun, and inspire more fun, with our faith and our fiction. All this because we believe that the deep, humanist truths and the mythology that saturates our lives is healthy and helpful for human thriving. Most importantly, it is born from a love of life, an excitement to engage with the world and its peoples, and a call to lock arms with friends and build a better world right here, right now.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://legendhaven.com