How Do I Begin

For those of you who weren't around way back when I first wrote Black & Gold, I thought I would share with you how I came up with the idea.

I feel like that's a question people want to ask me. Where do you get your ideas? How did you pick such a good one?

Well, first, I picked a lot of really bad ideas. Like, a lot. I don't think saying I picked a thousand bad ideas is hyperbole. As in, an actual 1,000. I'm not kidding. And 98% of those ideas were absolute shit.

I know. I still have them on my computer. On days when I really need to feel good about myself, I open up something I wrote in 7th/8th/9th grade and revel at how far I've come. 

But yeah, I had a lot of bad ideas. I could say I knew from the beginning that this story was going to turn into this massive saga. But I'd be lying through my teeth.

The simple answer is that every summer while I was in high school, I wrote a book in a series (that shall never see the light of day) that ended the summer before my freshman year of college. So I wanted a new story to write the summer after freshman year. This was right after I started watching Game of Thrones and I thought to myself, Why don't I write a non-cliched story with dragons in it? Then I wrote to explore the characters I came up with and three months later, I had a book.

The truth is that it's a little more complicated than that. Because I realized a few months later that this wasn't the first time I'd told Elian's story. When I was in seventh grade, I wrote a 40,000 word story about a girl who could turn into a *black* dragon. And my favorite movie when I was very young was Sleeping Beauty which features a witch who can turn into a--wait for it--black dragon.

So the seeds of the story were sown long before I watched Game of Thrones.

What about Elana then? She's the medieval love story I've tried to write for years and with her, I think I got it right. If I had to guess, I'd say I've tried to write her story four times. 

Complicated? Yes. But it makes sense. I kept writing these different characters or bits of this story until it finally came together in a way that made sense, in a way that works as a whole instead of just pieces. 

I don't know what my next idea will be after this. I have a few floating around but it's too early for me to give them serious thought. I'm still in this world, with these characters, and I'm not ready to leave yet.