Celestial Blues – the beginning that never was.

It's been a week of good news. I received word of not one, but two amazing blurbs coming back from authors whose work I admire and respect. I'll talk about the second one soon – I want to talk about that author a bit, and this isn't the post for that – but it's Kelley Armstrong's blurb that made me jump for joy this weekend, and I want to share the story behind that. It's a doozy.

But first the blurb:

"A delectably dark paranormal thriller. I've always been a fan of Pettersson's work, but she knocks it out of the park with this one."

– Kelley Armstrong

To understand how much this means to me, you need to know how anxious I was to get THE TAKEN into Kelley Armstrong's hands. Not only have I been a long time reader of her work, but she kinda, sorta, inadvertently started the whole thing. And by that I mean THE TAKEN.

During the time that my then-agent was shopping Zodiac, and I was waiting to see if it would sell or if I should write something else entirely, Kelley had a contest on her site to win an ARC of her latest in the Women of the Otherworld series (I'm a diehard Elena/Clay fan, btw). She had a great writer's forum going, and I lurked there for years. (Along with the CompuServe Writer's Forum, where Diana Gabaldon held court. That was my writing boot camp. But I digress.) In order to win the ARC, you had to enter a writing contest: a 1,500 word short story that had only to be supernatural in nature.

I was determined to win this ARC.

So I slaved over a story about an angel, formerly mortal, who was charged with ferrying the newly murdered into the afterlife. It took me a whole week to craft those 1,500 words, both imagining the world and condensing it, but I submitted the story, it got an amazing critique, and a much-trusted friend also told me that he liked it even more than Zodiac. There were over eighty entrants in the contest, but I was sure I was going to win.

I made the top thirteen.

The short story was not published on her site.

No ARC.

G*ddammit, Kelley!

So I bought Kelley's book when it went on sale, my story remained a bunch of unshared potential, and…

It was the best failure I ever had.

Because the idea never let me go, and this is how I learned that stories with legs haunt you. It's become my personal tenet: I won't write anything that doesn't haunt me.

So as I sold Zodiac, and wrote six contracted books in nearly as many years, this humble little loser short story sat in the back of my mind like a weight, taking up space, and beckoning me over now and again. I'd revisit it, laugh over my fabulous wit, and reread the sole critic's accolades, and hear the voice of my friend say, "This is the best story you've ever written."

That 1,500 word scene morphed into the first chapter of THE TAKEN. The main character, a smart-mouthed kid who'd been offed in the 80's, wasn't strong enough to carry an entire book, but I liked him, so he became a secondary character.

Heaven morphed into the Everlast.

A chance encounter, and utter fascination, with a rockabilly hairdresser melded with a recent obsession with the onscreen romance of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and that brought me Katherine (yep, for her namesake) "Kit" Craig .

And just like that, click, not only did I now know who my new male lead needed to be – her particular form of kryptonite, a hard-nosed P.I. from the 50's – but I finally had a real fucking story.

I'm of the mind, you see, that the best ideas need to germinate for a bit – as I said before, to see if they have legs, and so that you can poke at them and find the best fusion of characters and ideas. I also don't believe one good idea is enough.  A mash-up of two or three is best. So a retro P.I./crime/mystery with an angel/supernatural elements and a modern-day reporter involved with the rockabilly subculture? Yeah. Fuck, yeah.

So, anyway, that's my long-winded explanation of why this Kelley Armstrong blurb means so very much to me. I owe her a debt of gratitude not only for her generosity with her readers, of which I am still one, but because she didn't choose me. (Top thirteen isn't bad, though!) The story didn't go out into the world, thus it retained its energy until the time that it was ready.

And in four months, on June 12th, seven years after the story germ was initially conceived, it will be in my readers hands.

I think that's a pretty good story, too.