Later on today I’m going to be posting a short story for the forest theme, but, right now, I’m going to give you a preview of next month’s theme, villains. This link is for the first chapter of my book Getting Thin and it does start off in a forest. I’ll be working on getting the sequel, Bone Deep, up for pre-sale later on today, so I thought it only fitting to give Eva a small corner of the spotlight. It does start in a forest, so I suppose it doesn’t really deviate from my theme, lol.
We’ve all seen or heard of it. This fascination with people who do terribly wrong things. I, personally, have a sort of dark interest in Serial Killers. Eva, the main character in my first book, was just that. But she is so much more. I wanted to take on the challenge of writing a character that, despite her many psychological flaws, was lovable. She began as a short story long, long before Dexter premiered, one that was posted to an online writing group back before e-books were even a glimmer of a thing. It was a constant ebb and flow of present tense to past; I wanted to capture that eerie and frightening sense of a true haunting, where reality and imagination get tangled and start tripping all over each other. I do believe in ghosts, of course, but I wanted the story to read almost as though the ghost could be a figment of Eva’s imagination. Like the thing that is haunting her is her own nature, which she’s spent a lifetime chaining up in the basement.
Years later, I decided to use it to prove to my cousin that this whole e-book and self publishing thing did not work. I knew no traditional publisher would touch it with a twenty foot pole, coming from a new writer. It was too weird and the premise, when written as a synopsis, came off like I was fangirling on Dexter (afraid not; I wrote it way before he started wrapping people up like Thanksgiving leftovers 😀 ) and outright saying ‘this is not Dexter’ only made it sound worse. I knew Getting Thin was decent, knew that Eva was, in some weird way, likable, so it seemed like a safe bet. I was wrong about indie publishing, of course, and I happily sat down to that particular crow. Eva remains, to this day, the character most people bring up first when talking to me about my books. Later today I will be posting a complete short story that is more in keeping with the forest theme, so keep your ears on 😉
Here’s the wattpad link, read and enjoy! Oh, and random weird fact: Getting Thin began as a short story about an unpopular, overweight, bullied girl finding herself through her attempts to change what and who she was. The original story very quickly took this dark turn and just kept getting more aggressive with every page. There was no ghost, there was no sense of the supernatural, but it was very much the heart of what the book became. It was not the first time I sat down to a story thinking it was one thing then realizing it was completely different, but it was certainly the strangest and biggest leap I’ve ever made.
Darkwood 