Welcome back friends to the blog. Glad you stopped by to see this new mini blog series. This is a little different from what I usually do. I typically do guest blogs and quarterly blogs. But my debut novel, A Forever Summer, is coming out in four weeks (Ah, a month away. Excitement squeals!) This would be a fun opportunity to share the writing journey how A Forever Summer came to be.
Because this series is going to be short and sweet, there will be three more blogs. Enough till the release day.
Now you know how this blog will go, let's begin the series.
If you really wanted to know how I got inspired to write this romance story about Katherine and Janson? Let’s roll back in 2020. Yep, two years ago when the story was born.
It was the end of February, roughly the beginning of March. A time when the entire world shut down to a virus. We, my family, and I, are stuck at home. But we are not here to hear about Covid-19. I just wanted to say it because it happened when I started writing A Forever Summer. Shortly before I began the story, my older sister’s friend, Patty, would give her Victorian magazines to borrow. These magazines are from the 90s. I don’t know if they are still making them. Let’s head back to the story. When I saw them, I asked my sister if could look at them. She nodded, and I glanced through. Ones I had were summer and fall. I can’t remember exactly. As I was looking at the pictures, there was something that caught my attention.
I looked back at a couple of pages and stared at these pictures. One was a picture of two kids playing on shore. This picture gave me some inspiration for what I could write next. Other images of flowers, one model with pretty red hair, had letters. She was reading the letters in a cozy spot. There were so many beautiful yet aesthetic photos. That’s where the story was born.
I completed the manuscript in a month and a half. It was under 30k words. A novellas they called it. The story is set in the 80s and it’s about two characters meeting on the Massachusetts coast. It started off with two characters (adults) meeting in a small town. They had met before when they both were little children. Only this time one character doesn’t remember because she went through trauma that affected her brain, which I won’t get into much, and the other does. He didn’t tell her right away because he wasn’t sure at first; she was the one until he found the letters that he sent to her. That was a brief summary I could think up at the time.
The story indeed originally set in the 80s, but the story you'll be reading set today’s time. You probably wondered why I did that. What made me to do drastic changes and how different the story was then compared to now? Don’t worry my friends, I’ll be explain and share more of that in the revision, critique, and editing in next week’s blog.