Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Origins

 
 
Today is the #PitchWars contest and I get to be an alternate to the fabulous mentor Stacey H Lee!! We worked to polish up my Mission Impossible meets Charlie's Angels Wild West Steampunk YA Historical. So I thought, like a few other mentees, I would write a post on the origin of BAD COMPANY.
 
 
When I went to the Romantic Times Conference last April, I was brainstorming with some of my author besties Natalie Zaman, JA Souders, Liz Czukas, Zoraida Cordova, and Charlotte Bennardo on what to write next. I had two ideas already shot down and I was in a funk trying to figure out what I wanted to write.
 
While sitting in the hotel room one afternoon while one friend worked on her editorial notes, I wracked my brain and an idea kept teasing me A time travel horror story. I wanted to have the steampunk elements in the horror story and that meant focusing on Victorian England and that meant taking a look at the most gruesome horror that happened in Victorian England. (I don't want to give too much away because I still plan to write that horror story)
 
But as I wrote the opening chapters and had my beta readers take a look, I just couldn't get much further than chapter one. My heart kept telling my to write happy happy joy joy, something humorous and fun.
 
And I knew it had to be Steampunk. I wanted to move away from the popular Victorian London setting of most steampunk stories, so I went to the otherside of the United States, to California and the Wild West.
 
Since a main component of Steampunk is the "ether" that powers the gadgets and anachronistic devices that populate these stories, I began looking for ideas for my energy source. And as I wrote the first chapter of my story - which has since been pretty much scrapped in revisions - I envisioned my hero as a half-Lakota Sioux kid from Knob Hill San Francisco. And I knew that my energy source had come from a discovery on his grandfather's reservation that changed the whole perception of Native Americans in my alternate West.
 
At the same time I was writing the first draft my children were watching and rewatching the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movies along with Charlie's Angels with Drew Barrymore, and the idea stuck with me to have to competing spies/detectives with their paths crossing and falling in love.
And that's how BAD COMPANY came about.

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