Some "unexpected things" are happening
If you’re here, it’s probably because you saw some announcement somewhere that I’m coming out with a new book soon. This Unexpected Thing will hit Amazon in both ebook and print on August 27th. Not much longer now!
I did a “Fun Facts” post for the release of Breaking Lacy when it came out, so in keeping with tradition (or starting one?), below are some random factoids about this new book as well!
For instance:
*The entire novel took only one month to write! I wrote the whole thing from start to finish during the 2010 annual NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).
*This novel, under the original title, won a quarter-finalist spot in the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. That was the top 250 out of 5,000. Not trying to brag, but not too shabby, eh! LOL
*The first draft had approximately 73,000 words. The final draft just clears 80,000 words.
*The original title was Diary of a Ghost. I changed it to This Unexpected Thing just this year. When I decided it was finally time to publish this story, I did some research to see if I would be able to keep the original title. Naturally, I realized there are LOTS of works out there already using Diary of a Ghost, one of which was fairly popular, apparently. It was a painful decision, but I decided for the sake of originality and to avoid confusion, I had to bite the bullet and make the change.
*Same as with Breaking Lacy, this story is also set in a fictional small town that is loosely based on a city near my hometown in the mountains of NC. And also, just like Claryville from Breaking Lacy, Shively is also occasionally referenced in my Olivia Saga as being a neighboring city to the town where that story is set.
*No characters were cut from the first draft to the final. This is notable only because this is my only story to date – out of ten! - that hasn’t lost a single character to the Revision Gods. The cast of this one was so small to begin with, there were really none to cut.
*Wayne was the only character to undergo a name change.
*At one point circa 2015-ish, I got a wild hair to include a dual POV for Julian. I spent the better part of three years revising to interweave his side of the story, but just couldn’t make it work in a way that satisfied me, so in 2018-ish I scrapped it all and went back to the original.
*The main reason this book took ten years to come out was because I wasn’t sure about the ending. I had a mixed bag of opinions on the ending from my beta readers that filled me with crippling uncertainty and eventually led to the writing of an alternate ending. But I still loved my original ending, and every time I attempted to get serious about publishing, I started second-guessing which one to use and couldn’t make up my mind. So, I would put it off again. And again, and again and again. I did ultimately end up going with the original ending. The alternate may or may not be released in the future as bonus content for the mailing list subscribers. (Hint, hint!)
*This story was, literally, inspired by the cover art of Placebo’s Sleeping With Ghosts, and the song “Sleeping With Ghosts” from the same album. More details on this anecdote are written in the book acknowledgments so I leave it at that for here. At any rate, Placebo is one of my top favorite bands and this entire album is probably my favorite. If you’ve never heard of them, you need to check them out. Or at least check out the song and cover art that inspired this story.
That’s it for now! Keep an eye out for a cover reveal to come in the next email! I should be sending that out early next week so stay tuned!