Well, this is my first blog ever. I began it for my book so I suppose I should discuss "Come What May" :)
I love to read. If I could do nothing but spend my days curled up with a book, I'd be completely happy. Like many people, I love to travel but often times, the funds for traveling are unavailable. For me, the cheapest way to travel is to become absorbed within the story of a book. Through books, I've become a world traveler and have been all over the U.S., Europe, South America, and parts of Asia.
I remember reading a book back in high school, my first ever romance novel that took me to medieval England (so I guess I’m a time-traveler as well), and I thought...I could do this. I can write a book like this. So, I went to the library and began researching medieval times and the aristocracy (Want to write a good historical romance? You have to have a smoking hot knight!). Unfortunately, I quickly realized I didn't know how to express what was within my imagination. So after several attempts and a full wastebasket, I gave up on writing, but not reading.
Throughout the rest of high school and all through college, I would bang out research papers, lit reviews, policy papers, etc. and receive decent grades. So much so that after reading one of my papers, my mother stated I should write creatively. I remember laughing it off, mostly due to my previous failures that she didn’t know about. I told her, there is a significant difference in writing non-fiction (as in research papers) and creatively. After all, I had experience in getting a fabulous story idea in my head but completely blanking out when it came time to put it to paper.
Fast forward about 15 years. I began spending a lot of time wandering bookstores and coffee shops. If I didn't have at least 2-3 books on me, there was something wrong. However I began to notice a pattern with the books I was reading and the style in which they were written. Many authors had begun to write in first person as in, a character was telling the story through their eyes. Though I'd read books written in the first person before, I began to look at it from a writer’s standpoint and thought...I can do this. So one day, while sitting outside at a coffee shop, I pulled out a pen and notebook and began the early stages of "Come What May." However, about two weeks after I began writing, I started graduate school and the story was put on hold.
When I had breaks from my studies and or vacation time, I would return to writing. The story began drastically different than how it ended up. Alexandra and Michael were always the main characters. She always had a twin sister. But instead of being an FBI agent as she is now, Alexandra was a cop for the Detroit Police Department. Michael, on the other hand, was a hockey player for a fictional NHL team in Detroit (FYI - the hockey player is now Michael's little brother Will who has a thing for Alex’s sister, Charlie).
It is funny to look back and see how the story originated. I have a binder filled to the gills with paper containing my original notes, original plots/storylines, character profiles, dialogues, etc. (and this isn’t including the files on my computer!). But it is wild to see how it slowly began to evolve. It was like going through the basement and finding a paper I wrote in 7th grade and then taking that paper and comparing it to one I wrote in my senior year of college. The more I wrote, the more my style matured and I quickly discovered it was the same when it came to creative writing. My first attempts at creative writing were similar to that 7th grade paper but I pressed on and slowly, my style began to mature and grow. Sometimes the journey getting there was frustrating, but I wouldn’t change anything about it because I realized I found a style that allowed me to travel within my imagination and the means to express what I was seeing in a creative manner.
