How did you come up with all this stuff?

To understand what state of mind I was in to write this, I must first paint the picture…

It was a dark and stormy night. The lightening crashed just outside of my bedroom window, illuminating everything inside my room. I lay there,  violently tossing and turning in my bed while this ravenous dream steals my mind – it was like a movie playing, a mind-movie.

Okay not really. In fact, it was nothing like that at all. Actually, it all started while I was on vacation with my wife. Our last night on the trip, I was really struggling to get to sleep. I suppose I was disappointed that the vacation was coming to an end. (Everyone gets that way, right?)

Anyways, this idea about a boy somehow stumbling across a city completely inhabited by people uniquely identified by their distinctive race, and the abilities that comes along with that race popped into my head. Before I knew it, more ideas were coming at me with lightning fast speed. (We’ve gone plaid! – That’s a joke for those that have been around long enough to remember Mel Brooks movies.)  Ideas like Orion’s family members, the Frugg’al Games, Grayson, Cremmel, and Zora – all coming to me as if someone was giving me a nice, neat little package with a pretty little bow.

Before I knew it, I had written several pages-worth of material, but had no idea how I was going to connect it all; it was like a haphazard spider web that seemed to go nowhere. But that’s when the real fun began. I decided that I would just sit down and start writing. I wanted to see if I could even get a beginning going – you know, get the proverbial snowball rolling. The prologue quickly took shape and the most interesting part about it was that it was full of characters and material that I had not even jotted down during my vacation scribbles. What I had on paper was something I had not really planned for, nor really knew where to go with it. But as I continued to pump out each chapter, it became very clear that the general theme I had created in the prologue was one that I was going to carry on, not only through the first novel, but through the series.

In a matter of only 2 ½ months, I had the first version of Journal of Forgotten Secrets down on paper. I was really impressed with myself. I literally thought that I had, overnight, transformed into the next Michael Crichton or J.K. Rowling. Before I started the writing process, a common idea was prevalently  in everything I researched; the real work begins during the editing process. Well I scoffed at that idea, thinking to myself, No way! Editing this is going to be cake…I mean don’t you realize that I just created a masterpiece?! I honestly had no idea how wrong I was…

Jeremy Shory
@JeremyShory
Jeremy@TheOrionChronicles.com

photo credit: Personal Photo collection and Michael Dales via photopin cc