Ask the Author: J. Marc Harding
Answered Questions (2)
J. Marc Harding
I worked on Painkiller Ghosts, which was published in 2010, for years and wrote a handful of vastly different versions of the story. I had the characters in mind, but changed the plot over the years If you've read the book this will mean more to you than if you haven't, but the (ghost) dog was not in the first few drafts. The last thing I did was title the book; it had a very different working titles over the years.
Drowning In Sand was a little different. I was in a hospital bed for about a week after a back surgery; I woke up one night after a dream and picked up a Get Well card that was at the side of the bed, and wrote down a dream that I just had. That dream was the bones to the story Drowning In Sand; I even had the title and the plot from the start ... but opposite of Painkiller Ghosts, I had no characters. Map came into existence rather quickly, and did Dr. de Gouge. I stole the character for Ms. Nevershe I stole from a similar character from a short story that I had written years ago. Tonya and Thom, both of whom are major characters in the final draft, came around in the 2nd and 3rd drafts respectively. While the main plot was about the same, over the handful of drafts that I wrote, I had different side-characters come and go, which changed the sub-plots of the books.
I am currently working on a novel titled Thymegeist, named after the main character from Painkiller Ghosts, Thymothy X Exler, a.k.a.: Thyme. While come of the characters will be familiar to those who have read Painkiller Ghosts, Thymegeist is not necessarily a sequel to Painkiller Ghosts.
Drowning In Sand was a little different. I was in a hospital bed for about a week after a back surgery; I woke up one night after a dream and picked up a Get Well card that was at the side of the bed, and wrote down a dream that I just had. That dream was the bones to the story Drowning In Sand; I even had the title and the plot from the start ... but opposite of Painkiller Ghosts, I had no characters. Map came into existence rather quickly, and did Dr. de Gouge. I stole the character for Ms. Nevershe I stole from a similar character from a short story that I had written years ago. Tonya and Thom, both of whom are major characters in the final draft, came around in the 2nd and 3rd drafts respectively. While the main plot was about the same, over the handful of drafts that I wrote, I had different side-characters come and go, which changed the sub-plots of the books.
I am currently working on a novel titled Thymegeist, named after the main character from Painkiller Ghosts, Thymothy X Exler, a.k.a.: Thyme. While come of the characters will be familiar to those who have read Painkiller Ghosts, Thymegeist is not necessarily a sequel to Painkiller Ghosts.
J. Marc Harding
I am currently working on a novel titled Thymegeist, which follows the protagonist from my first novel Painkiller Ghosts, Thyme Exler.
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