The idea for the Black King happened when I was trying desperately to finish my playwriting final, a one-once play that had to be a minimum of 25 pages. Let's just say that I'm horrible at plays (which I suppose extends to scripts as well) and I had zero idea of what to write. So I got clever. I wrote my own situation (final due next day, no idea what to write) and low and behold, magic! Action figures started talking to me, characters from stories past started offering advice, etc. It was very trippy. I still have no idea how I passed that course, but I did. THAT was how I randomly (snirk) got the idea, I guess. So, that lovely piece was written December 22, 2009.
Cue winter break and me just being a bump on a log and doing absolutely nothing whatsoever. Well. Actually, I think I sat down (
I forget what the assignment was, but I had to produce a short story in a couple of weeks. There was a 15 page limit, if I remember correctly, but nothing more than that. So on March 9, 2010 I started to write. I'd had a scene in mind for a while -- Dean pinning an angry Medic to a slimy wall and taunting him. Dean was very much originally just a superhero gone bad who wanted nothing more than to make the world burn. It grew so much from there. That first short story was...11 or 12 pages, single spaced, abused italics, and was non-linear so it skipped around every scene all over time and space and confused the hell out of my classmates. Ultimately they (and my professor) liked it, but not as a short story. So, I worked on it some more. My final version of it was...hell. 15 pages, single spaced, tighter, more linear, but also not enough.
So I spent all of 2010 working on fleshing out my boy and his cast and it grew, and grew, and grew. And I decided that, hey, you know what? Let's do National Novel Writing Month with Dean! And, lo and behold, I won. I got 50,200 words. I was all happy and special feeling. And up until that point I'd thought of my special project as a a nonlinear adult novel. And then I won. And realized it might be better to write it as a young adult novel instead. Alter my style to make it a little less...yeah.
So now it's been years since I started this whole thing and it's gone through so many permutations that it's not even close to the original idea or story anymore. Which, honestly, is a good thing. The old story was absolute crap. This is fantastic. This one I'm writing I am proud of and want everyone to know about it. :) So here's the history of my book and idea. I have kept every single scrap of Dean's evolution. Most of it will make me cringe some day when I look back on it but it's worth it. I am a proud mama and keep it safe and close. And I do want to share. Eventually. When it's ready. :)
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