My next release will come not via Amazon and iTunes, but rather, through the in-app purchase store of one of the most popular smart phone apps in the world. More about that when it’s time. Right now, we’re still trying to nail down a release date.
But, of course, I’m also working on a novel. I’m always working on a novel. In the early stages, I try out lots and lots of ideas that I mostly set aside. I write scenes that don’t work. I create characters that aren’t right yet. For every one idea I keep, there are many I toss. This part of the process used to frustrate me, but I’ve learned to accept that it is inevitable. I wish super-fabulous ideas just poured out of my head with ease, but it’s never like that. You start with an idea that sounds good, start writing it, and realize it isn’t really that great after all.
Then you think about why it isn’t so great and start modifying it.
With The Bonding Ritual, I had this idea of an Agatha Christie-style, locked room murder mystery. One of my favorite novels is And Then There Were None, and I thought the vampires in Girls Wearing Black, with their penchant for using humans as playthings, could arrange a setup where the students were locked at school with a mystery to solve.
I worked on that idea for months and was never happy with it. But in the process of working through it, I got to know Daciana better, I realized that Art Tremblay needed to come back into the story after having been mostly absent from Rose Ransom, and I realized that, at this point in the story, Jill would be more interested in the bigger picture in the human / vampire war than in any game going on at school.
All of those ideas drove the creation of the version of the novel that worked.
For the past month, I’ve been playing around with an idea of setting a novel in the present-day, but writing it using all the tropes and conventions of the dystopian adventures that have been popular since The Hunger Games. I’m not really sure the idea is working, but I am enjoying getting to know a bunch of new characters after spending the past three years with all the students of Thorndike Academy.
I’ll keep you posted on the progress of this as-yet untitled project.
