Yay! It’s about damn time.
I can finally announce that Hell Wrecker Part 2 is finally done and scheduled to be released November 30th. YAY!
It’s taken a long time to get to this point. Want a run down? SUUUURE you do.
It all started as a dream …
A really good dream, too, one of those dreams that gives you the story from beginning to end, without weird jumps in time, or strange add-ins like clowns randomly riding through on unicycles or something. This went from Taye and Finn (though I didn’t know their names yet) battling against the demon Desmodius. Back to back, fighting. They were lovers, these two, and the dream followed them through their love affair.
I woke up all giddy. I DREAMED AN ENTIRE, COMPLETE NOVEL! This was one for the history books, folks.
Until, you know, I started writing it …
Wait a minute. HOW did Taye and Finn meet? Who are these two people? Where do they come from? Every time I put a scene down on paper, I thought of two more I needed. Two more that were in the past. This story would end up with WAY too many flashbacks if I didn’t do something.
I didn’t do anything. I kept writing. I did it out of order. It was chaos for my poor, writer’s brain that does best when thinking linearly. I wasn’t cut out to write my story in out-of-order pieces! It hurt my brain! Things started going awry.
I kept going back in time. (I need THIS scene and THIS scene.)
I had a brilliant idea!
I would write this thing in pieces as a serialized novel. I’d put out a section at a time to motivate me to write. (This was also a bad idea. My writer brain tends to get stubborn when it must Art for Deadlines. It likes to Art because Fun or because Self-Imposed Deadlines that have nothing to do with anything important.
I put out my first part and … choked.
I didn’t want to write. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what came next. The next part I’d written didn’t go with the first part, not really. It didn’t go with the character who’d grown with my retelling of her early years. (I’m a pantser. I discovery write. This is fun. This also means that, for me, I must write in order or shit happens that doesn’t fit with the other shit that will happen and … yeah. Chaos.)
It took over a year to get part two written.
Not because I didn’t believe in the story, but because I’d forgotten who I was as an author and because I hadn’t honored my quirks and foibles. I forgot that writing was fun, too, forgot that in my panic that I hadn’t written this thing yet and I felt like I should have had it done and obsessed that I’d screwed everything up. (Sound familiar? I hope I’m not the only crazy person.)
It took a year because I needed to forget the dream. I needed to forget what I’d already written. (I had over 75,000 words written. Separate scenes, separate events, nothing truly cohesive.) I needed to remember how to find the story buried deep in my subconscious and put down the words that would bring it to light.
Did I learn my lesson?
Well, it depends. If I get another dream story that I think is complete from start to finish, I might take notes on it and then let it stew a lot longer than I let this one. If I ever get tempted to write non-linearly, I might take a step back and figure out if I am willing to go waaaaay outside my comfort zone to get it written down. If I forget again that writing is fun and not something to be endured, I need to remember to fuck it all and write something that pleases me.
Long story short, Hell Wrecker Part 2: Craving will be available November 30th. I absolutely adore Taye and her fluid sexuality. I love Finn and his kindness. Jonathan is still an evil ass, but how could he not be?
I won’t promise when the third part is out, but I think it’ll come faster that part two. (I hope)
Your friendly, crazy author
Jen
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