Bending, Not Breaking

announcing a decision I've made

There’s a story I cannot get out of my head. The characters visit me when I least expect them. (Remember us? We had such fun being dragged through hell while you wrote us, didn’t we?)

Before I get into it, I need to tell you the story of this story.

Waaaaay back in 2017, after I finished writing my first two practice novels¹, I read this article about how there is a not-so-secret movement amongst the ultrawealthy to prepare for doomsday and it got me thinking: what must their teenaged children think about this? what kind of life would that be? 

My stories always come to me as “what if” scenarios like that, and so the seed of a story planted itself in my brain and grew rampant. The first draft was an awful mess, written in third person with inconsistent points-of-view until, by the end of 2019, I finally settled on two narrators, and then rewrote the whole thing in alternating first-person narratives. 

Somewhere in my drafts, I realized that my doomsday preppers needed a true and real doomsday to occur in order for the story to unfold the way it needed to. My what if grew to be: what if doomsday preppers became so obsessed with doomsday that they brought on the apocalypse themselves.

How would a cult of doomsday preppers bring on the apocalypse? Time for a research rabbit hole.

We writers love us a good research rabbit hole!

I came up with “they would steal one of the Spanish Flu viruses from the CDC, make a vaccine for themselves, and release the virus on the rest of the world.”

Yeah. You see where this is headed, don’t you?

So. In 2020, I was querying a novel about a group of powerful men who released a Spanish Flu-like virus in order to bring about a global pandemic so that they could overthrow the government. AWESOME TIMING.

Before Covid, while I was fresh out there with my manuscript, I actually had one editor at a conference tell me that my premise was unrealistic and that schools would never close due to a flu. I tried, very graciously, to explain that a threshold of unsustainability could easily be reached with something highly contagious and that quarantines would be realistic.

She laughed at me. Rudely, to be honest.²

Then, March of 2020 happened, and I ceased querying almost immediately despite some early requests prior to the pandemic hitting us in real life. I couldn’t imagine trying to pitch this book in those times and pivoted to other projects. Then, I received some strong encouragement from writing friends to revisit the manuscript and reframe the flu as an alternative history situation, which I did. Soon, I had reworked the manuscript to make it a “what if” scenario about Covid and these powerful men and their doomsday cult.

I eventually queried that manuscript, received several more requests; however, “Covid as the inciting incident” is not marketable (or so I’m told). 

One example submission reply. At the time, I was querying the novel as EVERGREEN, named after a key location in the novel. Did this agent’s comment that they “went back and forth on this decision” gut me? I mean, obviously yes.

That brings us full circle to what I said at the beginning. There’s a story I cannot get out of my head. The characters visit me when I least expect them, and I think their story is really great. It’s about knowing the world is a mess, knowing that the people in charge are the ones messing it up, and trying to fix it anyway. It’s also about love. This story deserves better than death in the graveyard of my computer’s harddrive. 

I have been thinking about this for a long time³ and a week ago, I shared an idea with my small writing group, who encouraged me to pursue it. 

The next day, I got a text message, utterly unprompted, from a friend who had read my novel with her husband back before Covid. Her husband is reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which, allegedly, reminded him of my writing and my pandemic novel, now titled, Kings of the New World, and he asked about my writing. Specifically saying that he cannot understand why I haven’t been published yet. *sigh*

I’m not one to believe in signs, but that text helped me make the decision I’m announcing today.  

I am going to publish this novel in serial style over on my Patreon. If you have any interest in supporting my work or reading the story that accidentally predicted the part of the future (at least the schools closing part), please join my Patreon (it’s free).

For now, I’ll leave you with some teaser copy below.  

Sophie Carroway, the senator’s daughter, wishes her biggest problem was living up to her father’s high expectations. It’s not. It’s the secret doomsday cult he leads. But when her best friend vanishes, Sophie is convinced the cult is the reason and vows to find her friend--even if she has to turn against her father. What she discovers instead is a lethal plan to turn a catastrophic pandemic into a true apocalypse with the cult at the helm.

Mason Wetherell stays out of the rich kid drama at Three Hills Prep. That is, until he’s the last person to see Sophie Carroway’s best friend before she goes missing. That night, Mason overhears a stark warning: his family needs to get out of town--and fast--before the Carroways drag them into their cult’s deadly plan. But when Mason’s dad decides to stand his ground, Mason is forced to ask Sophie for help. 

What starts as a sketchy alliance turns into a desperate partnership when the power goes out and Sophie and Mason are trapped in the cult’s compound. They uncover coded messages, blackmail, kidnapping, violent militia, and murder. Their mission is stopping the cult from taking control and killing thousands. But accidentally falling in love? That makes everything more explosive.

So, really, if that sounds like a story you would want to read, please consider joining my Patreon.

You might also be wondering why I’m not going straight to publishing this book independently. The truth is that I want to revise a little, chapter by chapter, as I go. I shaved away scenes and and interludes throughout this manuscript to get it down to a marketable length, and serial publication will allow me to work those parts back in at my own pace. Plus, this feels like a really fun experiment for me as I continue to pursue traditional publication with other manuscripts, like the one featured in this reel.

Words of Wisdom

I am drafting this post while the occasional tropical storm force winds whistle through my back patio during Hurricane Milton. I live out of the storm’s path and have avoided two terribly destructive storms this season so far, but hurricanes always remind me of other hurricanes. Back in 2017, before this pandemic novel of mine was an idea, my family and I evacuated for Hurricane Irma and I drew this quote.

I used to draw inspirational quotes on a weekly basis, and it’s something I hope to return to in the near future. It was a really cathartic and centering low stakes creative pursuit.

The thing is that bending in the wind is all about flexibility, and I think that’s what this decision represents to me: I’m bending in the winds of capital P Publishing (the business) rather than letting it break this one particular story.

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Let me know in the comments if you have any questions or thoughts on how to make serial publication successful from the reader’s perspective.

Thank you for reading!

All my best,

1. These practice novels helped me build the world I use for my fantasy Robin Hood reimagining, A TOUCH OF THE DEVIL, currently under review with several agents. Cross your fingers for me folks.

2. Not to mention that she was in a position of power and was doing her best to make me feel very small and foolish—publicly. No, I don’t remember her name. I was so shaken up by the whole interaction. It’s not that hard to be kind people. It’s really not.

3. I went back and realized that releasing my “pandemic novel” as a serial publication was on a five year plan I drafted awhile back anyway!