With The City of Veils releasing next week, I thought it might be fun to revisit how this series came to be, and how much fun (or lack there of) I had writing it.
City of Veils – I blinked and there was Book
When I get inspired for a brand new book, it usually comes to me as a concept. For City of Veils, I was in Biloxi at a very boring show (I didn’t even make the $100 table fee back). I read an article about a girl in China who’d been missing for five years, but was found two blocks from her house at an internet cafe. Apparently, she’d become some kind of online gaming queen. Anywho, it gave me the idea for a book about a girl who was hiding in plain sight.
As these ideas do, I spent the night piling on (and if memory serves, I think I actually live-tweeted my brainstorm). Soon, the idea of a princess vigilante grew into a fully-fledged book. I was so ready to write City of Veils that I ended up writing a cool 78,000 words in one month.
Veil of Ashes – *incoherent screaming of frustration*
Compare that with the nightmare that was the second book in the trilogy. I started working on the book last June. First, I realized while driving to ALA in New Orleans that what I thought should’ve been one book was actually, in fact, two. Then, I just… I don’t know. Struggled my way through August, September, October, November, December…until finally at the end of January, I had a draft that wasn’t a garbage fire.
Looking back, I think I tried to use the same magic from the first book, and it just wasn’t there. (Granted, it was there for the prequel novella. Speaking of: Free Download). For the final book in the series, I made sure to really brainstorm what I wanted to do before I put pen to paper. That way, when I come to the page, I’m not throwing away 60,000 words.
Yeeeesh.
