Every Book is Different: the Tale of a Feral Novel.

Dear humans,

Steel Heart has bitten. It will bite again. It is a feral novel, and it is doing its best to kill the female. So far, the female is holding her ground.

This is the tale of a feral novel, and the challenges the female faces forcing it to life through abuse, battery, CPR, and other story-writing methods.

It began with an easy 5,000 words. The first chapter flowed out, and everything was just dandy. The female had planned the beginning long ago, right along with the end and most of the middle. In short, she went in knowing exactly what she needed to accomplish.

Steel Heart, much like it’s older sibling Water Viper, begins in a bar with a tall, dark, and handsome tiger.

Nate, you’re so much trouble for Jesse. Silly tiger, creating problems from page one.

After those first 5,000 words, everything went right off the rails. Jesse’s character, by her nature, needed certain things. She needed them in certain ways. These certain ways express in ways that are difficult for the female to sell to readers.

But the selling must happen, because yes, this is the type of woman Jesse has become. We expect readers won’t agree with us on this.

But as she’s a feral and wild Siberian, she must make things even more difficult for the female because she can. In reality, the female set herself up for all of these feral falls, bites, and severe case of rabies.

She is writing far outside of her comfort zone, and she wants to write the book right. That’s… not easy.

As such, Steel Heart is a challenging and feral book.

So, rather than writing the book in chronological order, the female has had to address the feral beast in a much more haphazard yet planned fashion. Grab a cup of tea and join me on an adventure as I helpfully describe the process of writing this feral beast of a book.

The female began with a list of critical plot events in the book. These are the things that make it tick, and are the heart of the story.

Enter the scene she really does not want to write. Well, she wrote it. She just wrote 40,000 other words first. For the curious, that is almost half of the entire fucking book.

Yeah, good job there, female. Not.

So, the book started to look a little like this:

0 to 10,000 words: written in chronological order, like a good human female should.

Brakes hit. Terror over writing scene kicks in. Noooo, she doesn’t want to write the scene.

Okay, she’ll write this critical scene next. It is 20,000 words. That’s not a scene, female. That’s an entire arc. But, okay. You wrote it. It’s done. Go back to the trouble scene.

Like, five words written. Brakes applied. Female freaks out, jumps to another section of the book. Writes the 20,000 words that make up the conclusion of the novel. That is not directly connected to the previous 20,000 words written, which means she must write the arcs that bridge those two sections.

Okay. Female gets herself together. Writes the trouble scene.

It’s around 600 words.

She spends an entire day moaning that she procrastinated so badly over 600 words. Alcohol may have been consumed.

Upon finishing the trouble scene, which is actually just a small fraction of a larger and equally important scene, she decided she needed to move to a point somewhere between the trouble scene and the first of the 20,000 word monsters she used to procrastinate writing those 600 words.

Here’s where things get complicated.

Every time she works on a new section, she has to evaluate everything written before and after. If something goes a way she didn’t quite anticipate, she has to go through everything and make corrections.

This means that she may spend three hours writing five hundred words, as something in the five hundred words changed something a little further into the novel.

Thus Steel Heart’s state as a feral book.

The book is feral.

The book is feral.

The book is feral.

The female is rocking and crying in the corner again, so I better go break something in the kitchen to distract her. It’s hard being the parent of a writer human sometimes.

They’re a lot of work… and quite possibly feral.

Things in the Blain Household are interesting, humans. Stay tuned to find out more.

This is the feral book in its natural habitats, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, and Google Play.

Tame the beast, AKA me, by pressing the preorder button. And sooth the poor author’s battered soul by tossing a few dollars into her therapy jar. She’s going to require a lot of therapy by the time this book is finished.

The book is feral.