Twenty-One Days until Thirty-One and a Half Regrets!

Thirty-One and a Half Regrets

January 9, 2014

The countdown is on for the release of Thirty-One and a Half Regrets! Only twenty-one more days until you can read Rose’s most harrowing adventure yet. But after the end of Thirty and a Half Excuses, so many of you have questions! And I love talking about Rose and the Rose Gardner series so I decided to indulge us both.

On Facebook, I encouraged readers to throw questions at me to answer. And did they send questions! So for the next twenty days I’m going to post a question a day and answer it, either here or on my Facebook author page.  Stay tuned and I might give away a prize or two along with posting excerpts and the first few chapters of Thirty-One and a Half Regrets!

So let’s get right two QUESTION #1!

Where did you get the idea/inspiration for Rose/the Rose Gardner Series?

 

Short answer: I thought it would be fun to have a character who worked at a DMV.

Longer answer:  I took my son to the DMV to get license plates for his new car. While we sat in the waiting room, I noticed how grumpy everyone was. I thought about what a day working there would be like and all the strange characters that surely came in and out everyday. Seriously, no one wants to be a the DMV. So I looked at my then-eighteen-year-old son and said “You know, it would be fun to have a character who worked in a DMV.” To which he rolled his eyes and ignored me.

Longest answer: Back when I started writing, I had no plans to self-publish. My goal was to get an agent, get a book deal, then get published. (Little did I know that the book deal I hoped to get  probably wouldn’t be the panacea I expected.) I wrote Chosen, my urban fantasy/paranormal thriller, first and began to query agents.  I got a lot of  interest and a lot of requests for full manuscripts based on my query letter– which happens to be Chosen‘s blurb.  I’d been querying a little over a month– not very long really– but I’d already gotten a lot of responses which all said some variation of “I love this but don’t think I can sell it.” In the mean time, I’d already begun writing Hunted, the second book in the Chosen series.

My DMV epiphany came on a Thursday.

On Saturday, a friend emailed and asked if I’d just gotten a rejection letter from the one agent I really, really hoped to sign with.  (She had requested my full manuscript earlier in the week.) My friend said the agent had tweeted that she had to turn down a project she loved then hashtagged it #agentregret

You guessed it. The project was mine. Her rejection letter came right after I saw the tweet.

I was devastated. But I also couldn’t deny that the overwhelming consensus was that paranormal was on the decline.

So I let myself wallow for twenty-four hours then told myself it was time to either be a writer or a whiner. I had to pick. I just needed to change genre’s. But what was I going to write?

The three day old DMV idea popped into my head. But by Sunday afternoon, I had the barest of plots. On Monday, I began to write.  Thirty days later I had a 102,000 word monstrosity titled Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes.  And damned if I didn’t love it.

If you want to read more about my journey to write Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes,  click in the links below:

Something New

OMG Stick a Fork in my WIP–It’s Done!

***Tomorrow I’ll tell you how and why I came up with Rose’s visions and why she blurts out what she sees.