Haunt of the Wilds is live!
The Wilds Duology: Book I
gay romance/adventure fantasy

It’s been a fun month leading up to today and I’ve published a lot of free fiction, but now it’s time for a few non-fiction facts about the book! These are more about the writing-of the novel rather than content :)

1. I wrote the beginning of Haunt back in 2012 and never meant to finish it.

About two days before NaNo that year my plan was to use Nov to finish up another novel I’d been stalled on for a few weeks. In order to jumpstart my creativity and get me back into writing order, I decided to just mess around with some free writing those two days prior to Nov 1st. So, I wrote what ended up being the first draft of De’vii’s part in chapter one.

Nov 1st came around and I just kept going on the new story. Fun fact: that other novel is still unfinished…

2. The Wilds Duology started as a single book.

While both novels have their own conflicts and resolutions, neither Haunt nor Song are meant to be read alone, but were far too long to remain in a single story. I got caught up for a few weeks trying to figure out how to either cut my plot threads into a standalone or extend them into a trilogy, until I had an epiphany one morning and realized that just because every spellcheck in the world hates the word duology doesn’t mean I couldn’t use it.

3. I made most everything up as I went along. Then went back and folded the information in for consistency’s sake.

And I can’t tell you how many things I mentioned in the beginning of the novel that I had no idea what they were until muuuch later. Then I had to tweak scenes so the novel read smoothly rather than like I didn’t know what I was talking about.

4. I wrote one of the ending scenes in Song before I’d even finished Haunt. In fact, it’s still one of my favorite scenes because it describes what each of the dogs’ names mean to De’vii. But you have to wait for Dec 24th to read it :)

5. Caliebb changed his name like, oh, five times or so. Cal. Cali. Caleb. Calieb. I might even be missing one in there. The worst was when I stupidly did a find and replace to change his name to Cal and then decided I wanted that to be a nickname and thought I could do a simple find and replace again. I hit the replace all button, realized a LOT of words have the letters “cal” in them and ended up manually going through each of his “names” one at a time to fix it.

That was not a good day. Not a good day at all. I stopped messing with his name after that since I figured he was trying to tell me to leave his damn name alone and get on with the story.

6. De’vii is my favorite character, though if you saw how many of my AtoZ Challenge snippets had to do with him you probably already knew that :)

And that’s it! Thank you for joining me on this crazy adventure!

Haunt and Song will remain only .99c for the duration of December, after which they will both go up to 3.99. You can also read them for free through Kindle Unlimited.