Books I've Written, and What Happened to "Blue Forest"
I had two journal entries I wanted to post about my whole "dual writing identity" thing I've had going on for the last decade or so. Originally I was going to write this one second, after an entry where I explained just why I decided to "out" myself at all, as it were, but after thinking about it some more, I decided to go with this entry here, instead.
One of the weirdest things for me to do on Unsheathed over the last couple of years has been to act as if I hadn't written and published any books. In retrospect, it was a silly thing to do, because half the point of the show is that kyellgold and I nominally know what we're talking about, and pretending to have less in the way of writing credentials hardly did any favors to my image as anything but the comic relief on the show (not that I mind in any way being the comic relief, I should point out).
But yes, for years and years, I've had people telling me, "You should write a book!" And while I've been working on Summerhill for over two years now (the final draft is in with the publisher now, honest), the fact of the matter is that I actually already had two books out before that.
This dovetails into one of the questions I get more often, which is, "Whatever happened to your Blue Forest stories?"
Honestly, part of the reason is that those stories are really old and I don't think they're very good. And yes, I know that a lot of people will insist otherwise, but the fact of the matter is that I'm the writer, I wasn't happy with them, and I don't really feel like they're representative of my work.
The less snide reason is that, in trying to sort of some of the details on the backstory of that series, I came up with something (that I think is) better. That's where Thousand Leaves and The Seventh Chakra come in.
If you're one of the people who read the "Blue Forest" stories before I took them down (and if you didn't, don't worry, honest), you might remember that I had all this backstory about the world and this political and social situation that was coloring everything. One day, I sat down to try to nail some of the details of that backstory down, I think because I wanted to create a timeline so that I could accurately reference how many years ago which events took place. In doing that, though, I realized that the core to one of the biggest elements of this backstory was kind of interesting in its own right.
And in the course of hashing out those details, the idea for my first novel, Thousand Leaves, was born.
It was an interesting time in my life. My career was going smoothly without a lot of snags, and I'd recently become friends with a certain writer-fox who lived nearby and who provided some excellent feedback on my writing, and even better inspiration for me. And so I thought, hell, why not giving this novel-writing thing a try?
Okay, so that makes it sound easy, and it wasn't. It took almost two years to go through, and as has been the case with every book I've written, I threw away almost as much stuff as I wrote in the process of getting it finished. Now, with the hindsight of seven years (holy cow, has it been that long?), there are a lot of things I would have done differently, but for a first novel, I think I did okay. Okay enough that I don't cringe too much when people ask me to sign it. :)
The way this relates to "Blue Forest" is that I essentially wanted to go back and tell the story I'd been telling, but I wanted to do it right. When I first started the series, the entire point of it was that it'd be a bunch of stories that all took place in the same city, but which didn't really interconnect except for small backgroiund details. But that didn't happen; in short order, I had this long, continuing narrative that I hadn't ever planned on, and so earlier stories in the series hadn't built the proper foundation to support it. Also, it was getting harder and harder to string together a sociopolitical thriller plotline and still shoehorn raunch gay sex into every installment.
My plan always has been (and still is) to get back to that story someday, and to do it right. Thousand Leaves might not be "Blue Forest," but it's part of what "Blue Forest" is going to stem from, so if you were a fan of those old stories, I'd ask that you check out the novel.
Now, with The Seventh Chakra, I was kind of caught off guard. I was actually in the middle of trying to write a different novel when the story and characters for this new story kept insisting on taking up more and more of my time, demanding I write that story instead. Ultimately, it took is also related to the events of "Blue Forest," in a way that I hope becomes clear when I eventually write further books in the series.
Anyhow, if you've been interested in my stories before and have been wondering what a novel by me would be like, now you have two to choose from. You can read them in either order (I wrote them specifically to support that); The Seventh Chakra takes place first, chronologically, but the story doesn't spoil anything for Thousand Leaves, and vice-versa.
So yeah, there you have it. I hope that answers some questions some people might have had, and maybe intrigues a few people more.
One of the weirdest things for me to do on Unsheathed over the last couple of years has been to act as if I hadn't written and published any books. In retrospect, it was a silly thing to do, because half the point of the show is that kyellgold and I nominally know what we're talking about, and pretending to have less in the way of writing credentials hardly did any favors to my image as anything but the comic relief on the show (not that I mind in any way being the comic relief, I should point out).
But yes, for years and years, I've had people telling me, "You should write a book!" And while I've been working on Summerhill for over two years now (the final draft is in with the publisher now, honest), the fact of the matter is that I actually already had two books out before that.
This dovetails into one of the questions I get more often, which is, "Whatever happened to your Blue Forest stories?"
Honestly, part of the reason is that those stories are really old and I don't think they're very good. And yes, I know that a lot of people will insist otherwise, but the fact of the matter is that I'm the writer, I wasn't happy with them, and I don't really feel like they're representative of my work.
The less snide reason is that, in trying to sort of some of the details on the backstory of that series, I came up with something (that I think is) better. That's where Thousand Leaves and The Seventh Chakra come in.
If you're one of the people who read the "Blue Forest" stories before I took them down (and if you didn't, don't worry, honest), you might remember that I had all this backstory about the world and this political and social situation that was coloring everything. One day, I sat down to try to nail some of the details of that backstory down, I think because I wanted to create a timeline so that I could accurately reference how many years ago which events took place. In doing that, though, I realized that the core to one of the biggest elements of this backstory was kind of interesting in its own right.
And in the course of hashing out those details, the idea for my first novel, Thousand Leaves, was born.
It was an interesting time in my life. My career was going smoothly without a lot of snags, and I'd recently become friends with a certain writer-fox who lived nearby and who provided some excellent feedback on my writing, and even better inspiration for me. And so I thought, hell, why not giving this novel-writing thing a try?
Okay, so that makes it sound easy, and it wasn't. It took almost two years to go through, and as has been the case with every book I've written, I threw away almost as much stuff as I wrote in the process of getting it finished. Now, with the hindsight of seven years (holy cow, has it been that long?), there are a lot of things I would have done differently, but for a first novel, I think I did okay. Okay enough that I don't cringe too much when people ask me to sign it. :)
The way this relates to "Blue Forest" is that I essentially wanted to go back and tell the story I'd been telling, but I wanted to do it right. When I first started the series, the entire point of it was that it'd be a bunch of stories that all took place in the same city, but which didn't really interconnect except for small backgroiund details. But that didn't happen; in short order, I had this long, continuing narrative that I hadn't ever planned on, and so earlier stories in the series hadn't built the proper foundation to support it. Also, it was getting harder and harder to string together a sociopolitical thriller plotline and still shoehorn raunch gay sex into every installment.
My plan always has been (and still is) to get back to that story someday, and to do it right. Thousand Leaves might not be "Blue Forest," but it's part of what "Blue Forest" is going to stem from, so if you were a fan of those old stories, I'd ask that you check out the novel.
Now, with The Seventh Chakra, I was kind of caught off guard. I was actually in the middle of trying to write a different novel when the story and characters for this new story kept insisting on taking up more and more of my time, demanding I write that story instead. Ultimately, it took is also related to the events of "Blue Forest," in a way that I hope becomes clear when I eventually write further books in the series.
Anyhow, if you've been interested in my stories before and have been wondering what a novel by me would be like, now you have two to choose from. You can read them in either order (I wrote them specifically to support that); The Seventh Chakra takes place first, chronologically, but the story doesn't spoil anything for Thousand Leaves, and vice-versa.
So yeah, there you have it. I hope that answers some questions some people might have had, and maybe intrigues a few people more.