How It All Got Started (part 2)

So, before I continue rambling on about the creation of the series, I have to first thank you for continuing to read this incoherent ramble. It means a lot to me to know that you care enough to not only read the first part, but to find it interesting enough to continue reading onto the second.

To quickly recap, here’s what you would have learned in part 1: I was on vacation, I hate ending vacations, lightning-fast ideas, “We’ve gone plaid,” prologue, new themes/ideas, 2 ½ month later = masterpiece!

All caught up? Good!

80,000 words by hand – talk about crazy hand cramping.

Now, as I was saying, I thought for sure that what I had written down was so impressive (at least to me), that the mere concept of picking it apart and altering it was laughable. I had gone through it a couple of times on my own to fix some grammar issues and clean up a few of my concepts, but hey, it was awesome! Right?Well with the help of an unbelievable friend, Carissa Rossi, I began a true, formal editing process. (Let me quickly interject this side note – it is truly amazing how much value an outsider can provide to any project. Something could be so pristine in your mind, but the opinion of someone else can really take it to the next level. Because they can give you an honest opinion and some fresh ideas. Okay, I’m off the soap box.)

Yeah, my finished product is at the top of that jagged piece of rock.

My editor read through it the first time, and I can only imagine what her face must have looked like at the end. I imagine it was an expression like if you were standing at the bottom of Mount Kilimanjaro, looking up, knowing that you had a long and arduous journey ahead. About half way through the first round of edits (which by the way had way more grammatical fixes than I had anticipated – just shows you that it is ALWAYS a good idea to have a fresh pair of eyes check out your work), I got an idea to completely change the stylization of the story; this is the point where I began to add all of the internal monologue for each character, by the way.After several months of additions and subtractions and tweaks and fixes and more additions, my original first story had blossomed from just under 80,000 words to over 92,000. Yeah. That is a lot of additions, right?

Do they still make these? If not, what a shame – they really helped me get through High School

After all of the tedious editing, and during it for that matter, the ideas continued to come at me. I like to think that a lot of the notions came from people and places around me – you know interjecting some of my personal life into each chapter. (An example of this would be the conversation between Francine and Pollack about the comfy bed in book 2.) As the ideas came, they really begin to almost divinely mesh into each other, as if they were being provided to me by someone reading the series’ Cliff’s Notes. Remember those?

So in closing, don’t do drugs! Okay, that was just a joke.

But seriously, The Orion Chronicles came to me in one restless night on vacation and has continued to write itself, chapter by chapter, as if it was an animal clawing to break out of its cage. The ideas and plot points were just the means to getting the ball rolling, but the stories have honestly written themselves. I have been more fortunate than I could have ever imagined with this series, and I could not be more grateful.

Get out there and start writing. It only takes one small nugget of an idea to truly become something unbelievable.

Jeremy Shory
@JeremyShory
Jeremy@TheOrionChronicles.com

photo credit: kpwerker, JenWaller, and gigi 62 via photopin cc