Delay
I hoped I wouldn't have to do this, but as the days and weeks have passed, it's become clear to me that it's inevitable.
I'm not going to finish Perfect Nightmare anytime soon.
Therefore, I've canceled the pre-order.
I know so many of you are looking forward to this book. Trust me, I get it. You guys are incredible, sending me messages all the time checking in on this book and I love hearing from you, but the pressure to get this one JUST RIGHT is, frankly, overwhelming.
I have ADHD and because of it, I struggle to force myself to work on something when my muse just isn't there. I'm also very easily overwhelmed.
The main problem with this book is the timeline and trying to sort out the million and one threads tying all the stories together. This may be a slight spoiler, but Tristen & Waverly's story begins at the same time Beautiful Carnage does and the timeline of Perfect Nightmare's first half takes place over the same timeline as Beautiful Carnage and Sweet Destruction before the second half continues the timeline new.
So, that means that me, with horrible time blindness, has to try and sort through three separate timelines and somehow weave them together.
It's not going well.
The good news: I *AM* making progress on it. I am continuing to work on the story and I do have a strong idea of what's going to happen in this book. I'm not giving up on it, or even stepping away from it. I'm just asking for you to be patient with me a bit longer while I sort through everything in my head.
I know some of you may be asking why I don't just change up the storyline so I can avoid these timeline issues all together and all I can tell you is it's not that simple. For me at least, when a character's story pops into my head, that's it. I can make changes to small parts of it, but the underlying skeleton is what it is.
I don't tell them what their story is, they tell me.
And because of that, I can't change it. The second I sat down and opened up my mind to let Tristen & Waverly's story come to me, I knew what it was going to be (not all the little timeline-ish details but the main, big parts).
That was it.
And so that's what it will be, even if it kills me.
Thank you for sticking with me. I appreciate it more than you'll ever know.
-H
Why is Perfect Nightmare Taking So Long?
An excellent question, and I get asked about a release date and/or the status of this book multiple times a day. I figured it was time to make a post about what’s going on with this book.
There are many, many reasons Perfect Nightmare is taking me for-freaking-ever to write. Allow me to list them:
I have chronic health stuff going on (migraines and some unfortunate undiagnosed stomach/digestive thing that makes life rough more often than not. Despite going through a bunch of testing this last year, I still don’t have answers about what it is, but it’s safe to assume on any given day I’m feeling like trash).
I also have ADHD. My brain does lots of wonderful things, but it also has a raging case of Shiny Object Syndrome. I spend more time than I should falling down internet rabbit holes of research, taking all sorts of marketing, writing, authoring, etc. courses, going to virtual conferences, trying to refine my writing process to make it faster/better/whatever new thing I think will help. Focus is a really big problem for me. I work every single day that I’m not too sick to (day off? What’s that?) and still only managed to put out two books so far this year.
This book has high expectations which means I’m overthinking every single part of it. I knew going in this story line was going to be rough. I don’t think it’s going to be what anyone expects out of Tristen and Waverly, and yet it’s the only way I could see their story going. Originally, I’d imagined starting the book with the two of them hooking up and then time jumping ahead by, like 18 months. Then, I’d cover what happened in those 18 months in flashbacks in the rest of the book. The problem with this is that I HATE flashbacks in books as a reader, so why would I do that to my readers? And when I was brainstorming and working out the plot details with my developmental editor before I started writing, I realized so much happened in that time period, it needed to be covered.
So, I covered it. And posted the chapters to Patreon. I decided to split the book into two parts. Part 1 is before the original “time jump” and part 2 is the after. Almost the entirety of part 1 was going to be told from one character’s POV where we really didn’t see the other. But my Patrons really didn’t like that. They missed the character and the impressions of them left behind were not good in a way I didn’t think I’d be able to make up for later.
Enter rewrite number one. At that point, I was at, I’d guess, about 30,000 words into the book. I had to do some major plot overhauls, rework all of part 1 of the book and add a bunch of chapters in. I (and my Patrons!) was much happier with this version.
But. Now I’m at nearly 50,000 words and one of my beta readers brought up a good point that’s hit me: She didn’t feel as connected to these characters as she did with the characters in Beautiful Carnage and Sweet Destruction. And I knew exactly what she meant when she left me that comment because I knew there was still something wrong with the book but I couldn’t put my finger on it. When I got that feedback, I’ll admit I was like WTF because this book has just been a series of someone not liking some part of it after another after another. It’s like Whack-A-Mole - every time I fix one plot or character issue, another one seems to crop up. But after a few deep breaths, I realized she was right. When I started the pre-writing stuff I do before I dive into putting words onto the page, I cut corners on the character work I normally do. I realized I didn’t know the characters as well as I usually do.
Which means I need to go back now and get to know my characters. It’s a whole process I do, learning about their wounds, flaws, lies they tell themselves. Their backstories. Their personalities. It’s a whole thing, but I’ve learned it’s essential to my process.
Once that’s done, I’ll have to go through everything I’ve written so far and tweak/edit/rewrite things to make sure the characters come through strong and unique like I want them to. THEN I’ll have to go through what I have plotted coming up and get that all ready to go. I’d show you what it look like for another book I’m working on when I do this, but I don’t want to spoil the plot. Maybe in a future post :)
So, there you have it. That’s why this book is taking so long to write. In the meantime, I’m working on my dark hockey romance (with lots of breeding kink!), Dirty Hit. Right now it’s about 26,000 words but I’ve got it ready to go and will finish it before I go back to work on Perfect Nightmare. I honestly just need a break from that book and I’m hoping Hayden Vaughn can snap me out of it.
Questions? Leave ‘em in the comments.
Tristen & Waverly: An Update
Ever since Sweet Destruction came out, I get asked at least 5 times a day about Tristen & Waverly and when their story is coming. I thought I could answer a little bit about my writing process with this book and give you an update on what’s happening with it at the same time.
The Process:
I get an idea. Sometimes it’s a scene, a character, or an entire storyline. For Tristen & Waverly, I had no idea where I was going with their story when I wrote the first two. I figured something would come to me, and thankfully it did. Even better, some of the scenes I wrote in Beautiful Carnage and Sweet Destruction played right into where their story’s going to go, and when you read it you’ll look back and be like WHOAAA. Or, at least, I hope you will.
I stew on it for a little bit. Write down everything that comes to me in notes all over the place. Some are on my iPad, some on Google Keep at random, and some on random sticky notes that I’ll definitely lose and have to try and hunt down. I basically write on whatever’s closest, and I’ll be honest, it’s a bit of a mess. But, once I feel like I’ve gone as far as I can on my own, I gather everything in one place and organize it somewhere, usually in Trello or a Word doc.
I get to know the characters. I have a character exercises sheet I made in Word that’s filled with open-ended questions I’ve pulled from different places. It’s 6 pages long before I ever write a word in it, and by the time I’m done, it’s usually anywhere from 15,000-25,000 words in the character’s voice. When I’m done, I know all about their backstory, their hopes and dreams, how they feel about a whole bunch of different things, and then basic stuff like their birthday and favorite food. It ends up being about a 35 to 50-page file on every single main character I write. I also find that as I go through this process, some plot ideas will inadvertently pop out and I’ll end up sticking them in my notes.
I call my developmental editor. At this point, I usually have some basic idea of the things I want to have happen in the plot (usually bigger picture stuff, but sometimes just that one REALLY IMPORTANT scene), but I need help fleshing out the more minor details or putting things into order. Sometimes she plays devil’s advocate and tells me my character is going to come across as TSTL (too stupid to live) if I write something a certain way. I’ve learned that I get too in my head with my stories and I have a hard time spotting that stuff for myself. In my head, a story makes perfect sense playing out a certain way, but without knowing all the things I have in my head, it doesn’t come across the right way. I do four calls with her per book and each one lasts an hour where we hammer out the details. There’s lots of between calls work, too. She sends me notes after each call with all the questions we’ve come up with and I spend time between calls figuring out answers to those questions. This is the point I’m at with Tristen & Waverly’s book at the moment. I’ve got one more call with her tomorrow and then I’ll put everything into a timeline/outline and at that point…
I start writing. I have no idea how long this is going to take when I start. It can take me 6 weeks or 8 months. Just depends on the couple and how I’m feeling about them. How their story feels in my gut. If something doesn’t feel right, I get stuck and it’s a whole thing. I’m trying to avoid that this time by just hammering out everything as I go. I’m a clean writer which means by the time I’m done writing, there’s not a lot to change. I write in a linear way which means I start writing at the beginning of the story and finish at the end.
I review alpha/beta notes. I prefer to have alpha readers (even though I call them beta readers) because I like them to read along as I write. So, when I finish a chapter, it goes into a Google Doc that’s assigned to each alpha reader and they leave me notes and comments as I go. I don’t usually review these until I’m done writing because I don’t want them to affect my process or the way the story’s coming out of my head the first time, but when I’m done I review every comment carefully and adjust what needs adjusting in my draft.
I send the manuscript to my editor. When all the notes have been adjusted and I’ve made all the changes, I send off the manuscript to my copy/line editor. She’s different than the developmental editor because she checks spelling, grammar, consistencies (like if a heroine’s hands are tied behind her back but then she has her hands tangled in the hero’s hair, which was definitely a thing that happened in the early versions of Sweet Destruction). She also checks timeline consistencies (which I can tell you right now are going to be an issue in Perfect Nightmare… ).
We go through rounds of edits. She sends the book back to me, I make changes, send it back to her, rinse and repeat.
The final version of the manuscript goes to the formatter and my job is (mostly) done… for a while. Once the manuscript is polished, I format the Word doc as if getting it ready for paperback, and then I send it off to my formatter. She takes a couple of weeks and formats the eBook and paperback files for me. Once these are back (in an ideal world where I’m not running up against a deadline…) they go to ARC readers and get uploaded to the ‘Zon for release.
And that’s it! On to the next book.
There you have it! Phew, I’m exhausted just writing it all out, but as you can see, a lot goes into writing a book. This doesn’t even include all the research along the way. But, I love it and wouldn’t want to do anything else. I’ll update more when I actually start writing Perfect Nightmare with how far into the manuscript I am and as I get closer to being done, with an estimated release date.