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The Birth of Crimson…

THE BIRTH OF CRIMSON…

 

When we first published Crimson Midnight, Cassidy wrote a piece about how it was born. It is still so strange, looking back on how it began before it became the book it is today. So, sit back, relax, and have a read of how the Crimson World was born 🙂

Cassidy:

There is a story behind every book’s creation. It begins as a stray thought, a germ of an idea or a vivid dream.  It catches hold of the mind and consumes your thoughts until ignoring it is impossible and writing it down the only way to exorcise it from your mind.  Okay, maybe that sounds a bit pretentious, but you get the gist, right?  Crimson Midnight sprang from a vivid dream that I, Cassidy, had.  I couldn’t shake the dream, my subconscious mind was building a story. In the end I sat down and began my research. Originally I even had a name for the book; Covenant. Things were going great until I came up against a stumbling block.  My plot had a huge hole in it and try as I might I couldn’t figure a way to fill it. I decided to put the idea aside and come back to it at a later date.

It was a year later that I dug out my notes for Covenant.  Amos and I had decided to write together and I was eager to share the seed of my idea in the hope that two minds would be better than one. Amos did not disappoint.

A very excited brainstorming session later, Covenant had morphed into Crimson Midnight.  New characters emerged, a more streamlined plot presented itself and, as if by magic, we had the plot lines for a series.

Seems pretty simple, right? Well it proved to be harder than that.  We wrote the first draft of the book as a YA novel but upon finishing it decided we weren’t happy with the YA spin, so what did we do? We decided to rewrite it!

The plan was to allocate and rewrite the chapters, what more could there be to it?  The answer is, a lot! We found that the story did not want to stick to a plan, the story had its own ideas on how it should be told and as we began to write, the characters took over.  We wrote in a daze, our fingers guided by a phantom force across the keyboard.  It was frightening and exhilarating and it meant a lot more meetings to discuss the changes that were occurring to our carefully planned novel.

The conclusion? Just go with it.

A novel doesn’t write itself but in this case it felt that it did.  Maybe the problems we had faced were due to the genre we had originally picked, maybe we were over-planning. Whatever the reason, going with the gut and letting the story take over worked.  And a year later we had the finished product.

The last three years have been a steep learning curve for us and we are still learning, but as long as the Ether is open to us we will continue to create.