ECKHART — Allegany College of Maryland graduate Jeremy Twigg has published a first novel, “Destiny of the Sword,” a fantasy adventure that opens a planned trilogy which he is already advancing.

Issued in August by Baltimore-based PublishAmerica, the 185-page book gives adult and adolescent readers characters they can identify with and a story they can relate to in a fictional narrative.

The 31-year-old Eckhart resident credits his studies at ACM, where he graduated in May 2006 with a business management degree, as a key factor in his writing success.

“You have to be self-disciplined,” he said. “Coming to college was a big part of that.”

The novel has themes of universal value, including friendship, self-sacrifice for a greater good and courage in the face of difficulty, amid a classic good versus evil struggle.

The story centers on Ayden, a 20-year-old member of a royal family torn apart in a medieval kingdom felled by civil war. A magical sword appears and the challenge is to keep it out of the wrong hands.

The fast-paced narrative follows the young protagonist as he determines his destiny. Every choice made has consequences, and revenge, redemption and heroism all play their part.

Twigg long had “Destiny of the Sword” in mind. He allowed three years for the story to come together in his head before embarking on a two-year period of writing.

He continued to work as a quality control inspector at Hunter Douglas, the window treatment and coverings manufacturer, as he pursued a college education.

While on campus and in between college classes and course work, he wrote a great deal of the novel in the ACM library.

After he graduated from ACM, and won an outstanding business student award from the Allegany County Chamber of Commerce, Twigg closed out his 10 years in manufacturing.

Settling into a regimen that saw him complete “Destiny of the Sword” and have it accepted by a publisher, he decided that writing would be his full-time career.

Twigg is well into the second installment of his trilogy. “I have a goal, so I force myself to write five hours each day,” he said. “The more you write, the better you get at it.”

His goal is to complete the second novel in January and submit it for consideration by his publisher, a traditional house whose primary goal is to encourage and promote the work of new, undiscovered writers.

“If everything goes well, it should be out by next year,” he said. Until his book was ready to come out, and PublishAmerica issued a news release two months in advance, few knew of his talent.

“I didn’t tell anyone I was writing,” he said. “My father knew, but I think he thought it was a hobby.”

Now, Twigg’s novel is available through the Web sites of such major booksellers as Amazon, Target, Books-A-Million and Barnes and Noble. He constructed a Web site about himself and his work, www.destinyofthesword.com and has a page on a Web site for writers, www.authorsden.com.

Twigg said readers of the first novel will see the need for the second part of the trilogy when they finish reading it. “They’ll know immediately because it ends in a cliff-hanger,” he said.