Making it up as you go

Sometimes, the book writes you

Sometimes, I swear that writing is half accident.

By now, you’ve almost certainly read Hell Spawn. If you haven’t, I wonder why you’re following me. While I wrote the outline for that one (at my publisher’s insistence), my father had suggested a throwaway scene, an attack on Detective Nolan’s police station. My father really just wanted another miracle or two he had an idea for.

While I wrote the book itself, while talking with an informant, during an outlined event, Nolan ended up arresting someone trying to kill his informant. I figured, “Huh. That was weird.” But it was a way to close the scene, so I kept it.

Without any conscious decision on my own, the random encounter arrest turned out to be an MS-13 shot-caller … which led to a reason for my other random encounter, the attack on the police station. Happy accidents … right next to the happy trees, and the happy happy machinegun nest.

Anyway…

The MS-13 shot-caller ended up being a miniboss during the Grand Finale of Hell Spawn. Isn’t that all nice and neat and wrapped up? That’s the end of him…

No, wait, he’s in a loony bin in book two, Death Cult, a source of information and a possible vector for the people trying to kill our hero. A nice little cameo…

Wait, now he’s in book three? Infernal Affairs? Dafuq? Okay, I’ve had it with this guy. Now, he is truly and sincerely out of play.

Then, while writing Blue Saint … he’s back. And I think he’s Nemesis from Resident Evil. Dang it.

What does this have to do with my latest book, Fae’d to Black (Honeymoon from Hell #5)?

Funny story…

You may have noted, but the opening of The Neck Romancer (Honeymoon from Hell #1) basically consists of two short stories slammed together. These were written a few years before I even considered writing Honeymoon from Hell as a continuation of Marco and Amanda’s story.

One was written for an anthology that never happened. The second short was for an anthology based specifically around one location.

In short, these two short stories became throwaways. They were unconnected to anything. Random events, tied to nothing at all.

When I started writing The Neck Romancer, I figured, “Eh, okay, I’m going to throw them in.” To me, they were cannon events … but if you, my general readership, have NO IDEA WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT, well, that would a problem.

So, they became the opening to The Neck Romancer.

When I got around to the end of The Neck Romancer, I tied them all together via a villain who wanted to stay in the background, and had been pulling the strings behind both short stories, and the main plot of the novel.

Now, that part is easy. It happens. Tie two events together, and we’re done.

What I didn’t realize when I started Fae’d To Black, however, was that one of those throwaway stories were going to be UTTER ESSENTIAL TO THE PRIMARY SHOOTOUT AT THE END OF THE BOOK.

The heck…?

No, seriously, what?

Now, if you’ve been around a while, you remember that I don’t outline Marco and Amanda. They don’t like being stuck into outlines. They fight against it. They have their own wants and their own desires, and if I don’t like it, that’s my problem.

So when I’m going along, typing out Fae’d To Black, and I get to around chapter fourteen, I found myself jammed into one pathway with an inevitable outcome. Heck, there was only one pathway that made sense…

And it all led back to a “throwaway” short story that I had debated even making a cannon event.

How’s that for insanity? There’s a reason I call writing legalized schizophrenia. Because somehow, random crap I jot down on paper ends up tying into everything else. How? I don’t know. It just happens.