Hey, Fam!
I think I'm a little bit crazy.
Wait. Let me clarify. A person would have to be crazy to make the conscious decision to sit down and commit massive amounts of time to writing a novel that you hope people will read and enjoy, right?
I think so. So why did I do it?
Because I had to. I know this sounds wild, but as the meme goes--hear me out.
Some of you signed up to roll with me after reading something from my Ebony Nights series. Advertising for Love was the first book I ever published. One day, I was in the shower (which is where all the best ideas happen, btw), and a ridiculous question popped into my mind. What if there was an all Black male escort agency located in Chicago that was dedicated to "servicing" women? With that thought in mind, I jumped out the shower, ran to my laptop, and started typing. (Well, not exactly, but you get the gist.) And the Ebony Nights series was born.
The idea for A Deviant Beginning was birthed differently. I was living in St. Louis at the time (note the callout to a previous week's newsletter), and I had just seen one of the X-Men movies. Don't ask me which one; it was a long time ago, and they all blend together at some point. Now, as a kid, I had always liked the X-Men and superhero movies/comics/cartoons in general, but something about them just hit different when I watched the movie as an adult. I loved the idea of having a cool superpower (doesn't everyone?), but my grown self took it to a darker place. What if you had to hide what you could do? What if very few people had superpowers, which means that you're a minority? What if that minority was persecuted by the larger society? And the biggest question I asked myself was--how would you cope?
Now, as a Black woman, these questions really resonated with me. And after mulling them over and over again in my mind, Kathryn was born.
Here's were it gets extra messy. As I writer, I'm a pantser. A pantser is a person who writes “by the seat of their pants,” meaning that I don't do outlines. I don't methodically map out the entire story before I start writing. Instead, I jump out of the shower, sit down at my laptop, and just start writing (sound familiar?).
I also daydream. Like, a lot. It's something I always did as a kid in order to pass the time when I was forced to be in places where I was supposed to sit still and pay attention, like church (SHH! DON'T TELL MY MOTHER!). Who knew that the habit I developed as a kid would help my creative writing process because I essentially “daydream” the story when I'm away from my computer.
For example, while I commuted to work, I started thinking, “Okay. I need a sexy MMC in this story. Who is he? What can he do? What would be cool?” For some reason, an incident from my childhood popped into my mind. My younger brother once stuck a hairpin into a socket. It popped, scared all of us, and left a scar on his hand. HEY! THAT'S IT! Electricity. Boom. Charge is born. As a character, he slowly came into focus, then Susan, then Jonathan, then the external forces driving them together, then Kathryn's internal motivations, then the inciting incident, then the antagonist, then…
Well, you get the point.
Of course, there were lots of drafts, rewrites, crappy scenes, a couple of good scenes, then problems, solutions, some inspiring ideas, some terrible ideas, until finally I could type “the end.” Which wasn't really the end because of the grueling editing process, but you get the drift.
So that's how it started. That's how it finished. And that's what's in store for you on August 28th (or the 14th if you're an ARC reader). Speaking of…
