Set the Scene

As promised, here is a bit of background about myself, and about my first novel, Force.

I graduated from the University of Victoria with a Bachelor's of Arts in English. A lot of people have asked me why I got an English degree, and to be perfectly honest, it was because it was the degree that got me out of school the fastest. At the time I had to declare, I had spent two years prepping to go into teaching, then when i realized that wasn't for me, I took another year of random courses trying to figure out what I wanted to do. At the end of the third year, I still had no idea, so I ended up taking my English degree.

In school, my least favourite thing to do was write essays. I never did well on them. The only thing that was somewhat tolerable about writing an essay was that, in the English department, you can pretty much say whatever you want, so long as you back it up. That was the only reason I got through a lot of it. I made a lot of stuff up.

So needless to say, I've never been much of a writer. I've dabbled here and there. The most I've written of anything up until now, was the beginnings of a novel (which I later reformatted into a script), loosely based on an alternate future of my own life, stemming from grade eleven, where something didn't happen, but very nearly did. (Isn't that nice and confusing?) Anyway, I never got anywhere with that story, despite working on it here and there over a few years.

Force came about from a sleepless night. I kept tossing and turning, trying to fall asleep, but my mind kept racing with ideas of this woman who could see magic. I had just finished the Twilight series, as well as The Girl's Guide to Witchcraft trilogy, and found I was wanting more. These books are fantasy for women, a genre that doesn't really exist right now. The closest thing before the Twilight era (which has bred numerous doppelganger books) was a series I read a few years back called Enchanted, Inc. My brain wanted more: more fantasy, more magic, more romance, more chick power.

So finally, after a few hours of restlessness while this concept brewed in my end, I turned my laptop on, more out of frustration than anything else. My plan was to just jot down the ideas so i could safely go to sleep without forgetting them, but I ended up writing the first two chapters. It was 4am before I finally tore myself away, and i literally had to tear. I had to work 4 hours later.

When i got home from work that day, I kept writing, spewing out thousands of words in one sitting. It never stopped. Less than three weeks later, I had written the 70,000+ word manuscript that is now Force. It's not as long as I would have liked (I was aiming for 100,000 words; Twilight is 130,000), but it is still quite substantial for a first novel. Plus, I kept notes of ideas while I wrote, which has now spawned the sequel (currently I'm 55,000 words into that, though I've been slightly delayed due to the fact I've been without a laptop for over a month), and also will breed the final book in the series. Both are untitled at the moment, and i will blog about them soon enough.

So that's the background of how Force came to be. I will leave you with my proposed jacket blurb (the writing you would find on the back cover):

"If you had asked me about myself a few weeks ago, I would have told you that I'm your everyday, girl-next-door, struggling to pay off student loans working in a job I hate. Sounds pretty normal, right? That was before I started working for Mobius, Inc., when my whole world turned upside down.

Why? Well, shortly after starting work at Mobius, I began seeing "force lines," strange energy-filled cords floating through the air. Unfortunately, no one else seems to be able to see them, or store their energy inside themselves like I can. Now, I find myself being chased by a deranged fallen star, watched over by a seven foot tall leprechaun with a penchant for Guinness, and occasionally conversing with an inanimate fossil suspended in the lobby at work. Needless to say, I feel anything but normal."