How it started...

A few people have asked me how I came up with the idea for Transformation and the The Gemini Chronicles series and I have never really seriously thought about putting the process down on paper until last night. So, I'm going to dedicate this blog post to explaining how this story came to be.

About seven years ago in 2005, I started my job as an high school English teacher at a local high school in my area. I was extremely excited to teach. It didn't matter what I was going to teach, as long as I was able to do something that would allow me to give back to my community. Even though I know it sounds like an after school special, it's totally true. I was very grateful that I was able to go to school and earn my degree at the University level because I would be the first in my family to do so. And thanks to all kinds of scholarships and grants, I was able to graduate debt free. Not many of my friends could say the same.

At this time, I had two things I wanted to do with my life: 1) Have a career in teaching and love it; 2) Become a writer with moderate success with my stories. I had already achieved the first, but had no idea how to do the second. So, I enrolled in graduate classes as soon as I could, in hopes of learning everything I could to get to my second goal.

So, going back to my first year of teaching in 2005, I had to go through what all first year teachers have to go through. I had to earn my spot in the workplace. And for anyone who has been a teacher, I was given some pretty tough customers to deal with. While everyone else on campus was moving to eight different periods a day, I only had three; two two-hour blocks, and one one-hour block with a group of freshman that had been promoted by committee from their junior highs the year before. Not a single kid in my classes all day that year had ever passed the state standardized test. Not EVER. So here they were, in my classes, hating me because I represented English to them, and hating the fact that they had to sit in my class for not just one hour, but two. To say that that year was tough is an understatement. Talk about a trial by fire. Anyway, I couldn't get them to read anything. At all. But I pushed them. We read short stories, Harry Potter, Romeo and Juliet, and other things. Some they hated, some they liked, and the whole time I wished I could find something they would WANT to read.

I had Madi and Tristan's characters rolling around in my head for a while, but I never wrote them down. That is, I never thought about it until I started to write my thesis project in late 2006, early 2007. I had decided to go the Rhetoric and Composition route for a Master's degree with a focus in professional writing, which was the closest thing I could find to my second goal. And I learned a lot from those classes. A lot of the way my writing sounds in Transformation is a direct reflection of my classes at the university. Anyway, I chose to write a creative non-fiction thesis on an event that happened locally. The thesis read like a novel, but required a lot of research and transcribing, and interviews and more transcribing so, to get my mind off it, I started to write out Madi, Tannen, and Tristan's story for the first time. So my process was, write a chapter for my thesis, then write one for Madi and the boys. This process stayed the same until I was finally finished with my thesis and defended it to my committee and graduated. Then, I went back and finished off the first book to The Gemini Chronicles.

These are the things I considered as I wrote book one. I wanted to make it interesting for anyone at any age, but I wanted it to be particularly interesting for readers like my tough customers in my first year of teaching. I wanted them to feel accomplished when they were done with it so I didn't want to make it so long that they were frustrated with it, but I didn't want to make it so short that it was novella length. I wanted to roll in adventure, mystery, mythology, and romance so there was a little something for everyone, and I wanted the story to be told mostly through character interaction, which means, not a lot of description and a whole lot of dialogue.

I found that a lot of kids get stuck in the descriptions of things when they're written in long paragraphs, but for some reason, if a character described the exact same thing, it was easier for them to picture it. And I wanted it to be easy for them.  Book one is exactly what I wanted it to be as it has all of these elements all wrapped up in one.

Anyway, I learned a lot from writing book one and as I write book two, I'm taking everything I picked up into consideration. I'm about half way done with book two now and it has a little more description in it but still has a lot of character interaction and plenty of dialogue to move the plot along. There's a lot more going on in book two, a lot more explanation of the mythology, more of the mystery revealed, lots more romance, and I hope that when it's released, you'll want to read it. With book one out, my second goal is met and I'm feeling more and more self-actualized.

So that's how it came to be, my little book. The inspiration of it and the process of writing it down. I'm going to finish this series and see how it goes. I'm proud of my work and I hope others grow to like it. I know not everyone is going to like it, but if even one person finds something they like about it or is inspired by it, then I think I've done my part. Happy reading all!