I cannot even begin to tell you how true this is. I am continuing to write the second book in the Wheeler series, and I’m thankful that I ended the first one where I did. You, my readers, may not be happy with where I ended it, but would you really have gone through another 200 pages to get to where I wanted to end it? Maybe, but probably not.
But hey, now you get a whole separate book about what happens in the following months. Will there be a third? Will they get married? What is Graham’s movie about – you never tell us! All in good time, my friends. All in good time.
A year ago, I never would have thought I would have a completed story, let alone a 495 page novel currently for sale on Amazon. Me? A writer? Who am I to dream like that? I’m not special.
I remember several things happening within a short span of time that started the thoughts, which snowballed into the first few chapters. I was furiously writing and I truly don’t know where it all came from. The words came like a flood and writing became a compulsion.
Living in the world I created for the past year – between 9pm and 2am, weekends, week days, my drive to and from work, my dreams – has been an experience. Some parts were easy to write. Some of it has been gut wrenching, and I still cry as I read the words. Aloud. With accents. Sometimes yelling. Often acting it out while my family is asleep. When I should be asleep.
While I have not actually lived what Loren has been through, I had to imagine it. I had to think about how she would react or not react. While all of the characters are, in essence, a part of me, Loren is more me than I would like to admit.
Then I had to trust someone enough to read what I had written. Let me tell you, that was fecking hard. And then I had to tell my husband I was writing a romance novel!
11 June, (click to read it) when Loren and Graham meet, wasn’t the first thing I wrote, but it was part of it. It wasn’t until later – much later – that I started to get stuck. But not stuck, like I didn’t know what to write. Some of it was connecting the dots.
My darling husband equated it to some of the episodes in The Walking Dead. The slow ones, where not a lot happens, but they’re necessary to move the story forward. The Mundane. Even in my favorite Dan Brown novels (which Inferno is coming out starring Tom Hanks in the fall), there are slow spots, transition periods, where the characters and the reader can take a breath and assess.
Then there were those scenes, but I’ll talk about that in a different post.
A HUGE thank you to those 102 people who took advantage of Wheeler being a free Kindle download. I hope you enjoy reading it and forgive me for the tiny errors that I’m finding as I read my hard copy. (GRR!) I’ll be updating those corrections so hopefully you won’t see them.
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I really do dance around when someone follows me on Twitter.
Wheeler 