The other day, someone asked me about how I came up with the title for Shards (urban fantasy, coming out on Dec 1) and it took me back to the early days of working on the novel, which, to be honest, I haven’t thought about in a long time.
Shards started as a dream. Occasionally I have really vivid dreams, and when I realize I’m dreaming, I start to structure the dream into a story. Shards was one of those, though more complete–and more coherent–than most when I woke up. In those days, I kept a notebook by the side of my bed, and I scribbled down everything I could remember–about the characters, the plot, the world.
And then I lost the notebook.
I’ve never seen that notebook again. It lived by the side of the bed, and I don’t remember ever moving it, but it disappeared. I searched the house high and low for months, looking everywhere that a notebook could possibly fit, and nada. And now we live in another state, so it is lost forever.
I reconstructed the plot and world as best I could from memory, did some–all right, a lot of–research, and wrote most of the first draft during Nanowrimo 2008. And I hit 50,000 words literally at the climax of a…very interesting scene. And, of course, stopped, because I’ve yet to write past 50K during Nano, which was a terrible idea, because it turns out that it’s really hard to pick back up from there when you try to go back to working on the story.
It took me eight more months to finish the draft, most of which was trying to figure out how to pick things back up.
The title itself was once much longer–Shards of Broken Wings–but we shortened it because the longer version didn’t make a huge amount of sense.
But with Shards ready to fly the nest five years after I started it, it has been interesting to stop and remember how it started, and to look at how we’ve gotten to today.
Anyway, I’m excited to see it out in the world. And I hope you guys like it too. (Less than three weeks! Eeeeee!)