Want to Pretend to Learn How to Write a book? Because I Can Pretend to Teach You!

I finished drafting the Wrong Way series earlier this year. I am pretty sure it contains the vilest villain I have ever put down onto not-paper. It makes sense though. She is not some brooding and insane god of evil, abandoned for thousands of years with all that time to plot their ultimate acts of depravity. No. She is a teenaged girl, competent, canny, and jealous of all the attention her father gave to her kinder, sunnier sister.

Brr.

Due to the vicissitudes of publishing, book two won’t be out until later this year, and that third book I just wrapped up will be a year after that. All the work, cooperation, and simple planning that goes into it is sort of astounding. The job itself is sort of like catching a T-Rex with a roll of duct tape. It’s hard and it’s scary and there’s every possibility of it going disastrously wrong at every turn. But mostly—can you even imagine—if someone handed you that roll of tape and pointed you toward some primeval wood, just how much planning would it take to make you feel comfortable about setting out? I bet it’d be a looong damn time.

I’d be planning how I’d use that roll of tape to rob a hand-held rocket store, but maybe that’s just me.

But. . . that extra time has left me an opening to do a little sci-fi project (working title: The Gordian) that’s been spinning in the back of my brain for years now. It’s goddamn exciting!

At first, I wanted to take a break from writing in the Thirteen Kingdoms to write The Gordian, but that turned out not to be possible once the decision was made to expand my fantasy world with other writers under the Misplaced Adventures banner. I needed a new series under that umbrella too, which turned out to be the Wrong Way books. 

I suddenly find myself hoping there is no deeper, personal meaning behind that title.

Overall though, I have to say just how much I appreciate the extra time to work on The Gordian in my head before starting it. At first, all I had was an interesting setting and a desire to write a smaller-scale story. I didn’t even know what that story would be. (The setting is our world where climate change has been accidentally solved, but it’s up for debate how much better the solution is than the problem.)

Then I was, somewhat adjacent let’s say, to a major, too-true-to-be-believed string of crimes, and suddenly I had my story. The only downside was that the murderous couple in question might murder me if I centered the book on them, so I still didn’t have a main character.

Don’t hate. If I had gone ahead and tried to write the book at this point and been killed to death, you never would have gotten to read it. You know everything I do, I do for you.

Finally, Lena and I were wandering the parks one morning, conversation roaming wild, when something she said sparked a thought in my head. Why didn’t the asshole in her conversation try to hire someone to seduce and marry his ex-wife so he could stop paying alimony? That’s what I would do if I were a divorced asshole.*

Bam. I had my main character. And if the ex-wife in question is the drug fiend murderous woman of the couple . . . now we were cooking.

So, if you ever decide you want to write a novel, I suggest getting a publisher who will make you write three other novels first to give you plenty of time to think about it. Either that or head down to Home Depot for a roll of duct tape and a tyrannosaur cage.

*If I were a divorced asshole with money, is really what I mean. As it is, if we ever got divorced, Lena would definitely be paying me.