T.R. Wolf's Blog

When I first started writing The Auctor Trilogy, I was between jobs, and, I’ll just go ahead and admit it, I handled this very poorly. I ended up with some pretty bad anxiety which resulted in me not sleeping for 2 to 3 days at a time.  I can only write about this time in my life because it’s been over five and a half years and I have a career now that I really like.

However, in June of 2011, I was unable to sleep and extremely stressed out. I had always loved to read and had decided to try writing a novel.  This was especially helpful when I couldn’t sleep at night because it gave me something productive to occupy my time for many, many hours on end.  This is actually the reason that I was able to write the first draft of The Auctor Trilogy in three weeks – it was three weeks of sleepless nights.

I’ve always been a night owl, and have quickly discovered that writing at night is my preferred time. And when I say at night, what I mean is the middle of the night – midnight or later.  This worked while I was between jobs, but hasn’t worked for over five years now.

Now, I leave for work at 7:15 a.m. and don’t get home until after 5 every day, so the idea of writing until 3 in the morning isn’t even an option. Except on the weekends.

It’s one of the many reasons that I love the weekends – it not only means a lot of free time to write and edit; it also means that I can write and edit until all hours of the night.

I have to admit, before I started writing, I genuinely believed that an author simply sat down and began writing a book and simply kept writing until it was finished. I couldn’t fathom the true process of writing a book.

The first draft that I convinced myself was sufficient… until I read through it and realized that it was all complete garbage and that it must be deleted almost in its entirety. The second draft that I knew would be better, but by then was realistic enough to know that it wasn’t going to be the last draft by any measure.  And all of the multitude of drafts that followed.

But this wasn’t the most surprising thing about writing. The most surprising thing was the sheer number of times that I had an entire scene laid out in my head.  Every. Last. Detail.  But as I wrote the scene, I could not get the characters to do what I wanted them to do.   Character A that was supposed to have a crush on Character B… but clearly hated Character B.  And not in a Maddox-being-told-to-hate-Addie kind of way.  In a visceral, absolutely-despise-this-other –character-to-the-core-of-their-being kind of way.  Where a connection between Character A and Character B simply refused to exist.

Or an entire scene where I wanted the characters to decide one thing, but somehow, as the dialogue progressed, the decision was the opposite.

This sounds crazy. Really crazy.  Believe me, when I was writing The Auctor Trilogy and was fighting with my characters through the dialogue to get them to do what I wanted, and it just wasn’t working… I felt as though I was losing my mind.  (This might have been partially because I wouldn’t sleep for two days at a time while I was writing, but that’s a whole other blog post.)

The more that I interact with other authors, though, the more I realize that I’m not crazy. This is something all authors go through.  For whatever reason, the dialogue that we like simply doesn’t line up with the way the scene we had planned should go.  Or the way that we write the scenery that makes everything feel right simply doesn’t respond to the way that we want the characters to do something.  After several years of writing, I try really hard to just let the book go the way that it wants to go.  It seems to work out better.  Of course, this isn’t always the case.  I am incredibly stubborn, even with my own writing, so sometimes I fight until I get what I want.

I have a tendency to overanalyze and ruminate about almost anything, and that is never more true than when I’m writing. This bleeds into choosing names for characters, which I probably spent an absurd amount of time doing, even for very minor characters.

I began my research on the first name for each character by searching things like, “Celtic Names for Females.” I also utilized various baby book names in order to find names that I liked.  I tried to find names that fit with the character, or that would detail out something very specific for that character.  For example, “Fallon” means “leader” and was simply so spot-on that I couldn’t help myself.

What was most important to me was that the names weren’t overly utilized, either in the media or in other books. Which meant that I spent a fair amount of time writing a character with one name, then realizing that it was absurdly popular in another context, and changing the name to something less used or at least more appropriate for the character’s personality.

Adelaide “Addie” Auctor was originally not going to be the main character’s name. In fact, the first several drafts of the first book had a completely different name.  However, after a period of time, I changed my mind because I didn’t like how frequently the original name was used in other books and because I discovered the name Adelaide and fell in love with it.

The same is true for the vast majority of the first names of the main characters of the books. There are very few names that have stayed the same from first draft to the present.  The rest of the names have been changed, either because I suddenly became disenchanted with a particular name or came across a name that I thought was more apropos for the character.

I’m certain that I’m one of about 1,000 people doing a blog post about resolutions today, but… I can’t help myself.

While the reality is that each and every day is a new opportunity and a new chance to change something, there is something almost magical about the New Year. I know some people start planning their New Year’s Resolutions months in advance.  I know some people who plan them the night of.  And I know some people, like myself, who decide on their New Year’s Resolutions on New Year’s Day.

Here are my resolutions. Not necessarily in order of importance, but… well kind of.

The first one is to publish the second book in The Auctor Trilogy series, The Wicked Cabal. As I’ve stated in a previous blog post, I’ve been working on The Wicked Cabal for nearly as long as I’ve been working on The Auctor Trilogy, but it is still insanely difficult to finalize a publishable draft.  When people tell me that they liked The Auctor Trilogy and are excited for the second book in the series, my brain does two things at the exact same time – it celebrates and it panics.  I’m thrilled that people like The Auctor Trilogy and genuinely want to read the second book.  And I’m absolutely terrified that The Wicked Cabal will not live up to The Auctor Trilogy.  This means that the next two months will be a very intense level of writing and editing to ensure that The Wicked Cabal lives up to people’s expectations.

The second resolution is to blog every day. I haven’t done a great job of this in 2016, and I know that blogging is both a good way for me to really think certain ideas all of the way through and to reach a wider audience.

The third is to read 100 books during 2017. I’ve fallen into a bit of a lull and I’ve struggled immensely with finishing a lot of highly anticipated books.  However, there are some fantastic books out there, and I’m eager to see what 2017 brings with it.

I’m hoping to reach each and every one of these goals. I hope you reach your goals, too.  Happy New Year’s everyone!

“Delayed Gratification is the ability to resist the temptation for an immediate reward and wait for a later reward.”  When I first heard this term in Psych 101 Freshman year of college, all I could think was, “That should be my middle name.”  This is literally my personality type:  I ALWAYS complete the unpleasant thing first to get to the fun thing later.

In high school, I HAD to have all of my homework and extracurricular activities completed before I would let myself enjoy a good book or spend time with friends. In college, same thing – but with the added unfortunate twist of working at least full time.  Graduate school – basically just a very amped up version of college.  In fact, during finals, I would remove the television entirely from my apartment to remove any temptation of enjoying myself before all of the studying and final exams were done.

I feel like this is how I approach writing the books as well. I need to complete the parts that are incredibly hard before I allow myself to work on the easy scenes, the fun scenes.  If I try to work on the scenes that are easy or already 98% finished, my brain gets itchy, as though it is saying, “Why haven’t you worked on that scene where that one character dies?  Why aren’t you doing the thing you need to do rather than the thing that you want to do?”  And then I am forced to finish and perfect the scene where the character dies before I can write the scene where the main character gets kissed.

I’m hoping that this hard work shows in the books.

The Wicked Cabal, the second book in The Auctor Trilogy series, is due out February 2017.

One of the hardest parts of writing for me was making sure that each of my characters was multi-dimensional. I didn’t want people to read the book and think of Liam as just another jock.  I mean, he totally is, but there is so much more to him than that.  But the problem was always, how do I explain Liam to the audience without just saying, “Liam is an athletic guy who cares deeply about his best friend, Maddox, and his cousin, Declan, who feels like he can’t live up to the standards set by his grandmother Magdalen and has some deep history with Tempe that they won’t talk about?”

And, honestly, a large part of that was discovering all of Liam’s different sides myself before I could properly explain him to anyone else.

In order to flesh out Liam, I needed a lot of different scenes. This is true for each of the characters.  I wrote so many drafts of The Auctor Trilogy, as well as the three books that followed, and deleted literally thousands of pages.  This meant that I deleted scenes where I got to know my characters.  A LOT of scenes where I got to know my characters.  Some of the scenes were deleted because I felt like they didn’t add a lot to the story after another draft.  Other scenes were deleted because I felt like they revealed TOO much about the character or about some other secret that wasn’t ready to come out yet.

After spending over five years with these characters, I feel like I know them ridiculously well.

I’m hopeful that other people are attached to Addie, Maddox, Liam, Tempe, Fallon, and Augustus the same way that I am. More secrets are revealed in The Wicked Cabal, due out February 2017!

Have you seen the movie, “Up”? It’s great.  Especially the part where the dogs see a squirrel and completely lose track of everything else as they yell, “SQUIRREL”?  That’s how I feel.  Every time I start writing.

The puppies cry and I let them out and then I check Facebook and Twitter or start watching an episode on Netflix. Then the puppies make a noise and I try to figure out what else they need and then I check Facebook or Twitter or start watching an episode on Netflix.   And then I grab something to drink and then I check Facebook or Twitter or watch an episode on Netflix.

It is so incredibly easy to think, “I’ll just glance at Facebook for a few minutes” and an hour goes by. Or, “I’ll just watch one episode of (name show here)” and half a day goes by before I realize that I haven’t actually worked on the one thing that I desperately want to work on – the next book in the series.

Every time this happens, I wonder to myself why I do this. And I think it is more than just a procrastination issue.  I think it is a genuine fear that I won’t be able to make the next scene exactly the way that I want it or that I won’t be able to find the right words to describe something to the reader.  Or, even worse, I’ll realize that I’ve written myself into a corner and will have to delete half of a book… again.

I’m trying desperately to find ways to not allow myself to be distracted like this because I love writing and I’m so excited to keep publishing The Auctor Trilogy series. But that means abiding by some hard and fast rules for Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix.

Wish me luck!

We’ll know if this worked or not by when the next book in the series get published.

The Wicked Cabal – due out February 2017.

I think a fairly constant refrain when it comes to Fantasy is that Fantasy is amazing because there are no rules.

I couldn’t disagree with this statement more.

While Fantasy absolutely allows both the writer and the reader to escape certain harsh realities, such as gravity, in writing a Fantasy, there are an absurd number of rules that the author must abide in order to make the storyline coherent and consistent.

For example, Augustus is telepathic, as are his uncles. A simple rule in the books is that the men in the Auctor family can hear each other, and the women in the Auctor family can hear each other, but no one else.  How, then, can Augustus hear Addie?  The simple answer is fairly clear – they’re twins.  Of course this transcends the standard rules.  However, why, then, can’t Addie hear Augustus or her mother?  This was something that I struggled with for a period of time, but finally realized the real reason while writing the fourth book.

However, because I didn’t discover the rationale for this rule until the fourth book, it involved going back and re-drafting the first, second, and third books in order to ensure that the rules were the same for each book. This is where the challenge lies – in order for the rules of the Fantasy world to work, it must run consistently throughout every book. For more on my writing process when dealing with a series, please see the December 5, 2016 Blog Post, “The Truth about Writing a Series.”

The same is true about which gift each family is predisposed to being adept at. If I say in the first book that a gift must be developed rather than just inherited, that must hold true for that character as well as all of the other characters within that family.  If I say that Raleigh Medicus’ gift is something that must be developed through hard work, and then have Keegan Medicus capable of great spells within that same framework without any additional training, this violates the very carefully crafted world that I’m trying to develop for the reader.  This means that each book must be done with a keen eye towards each and every rule created in the Fantasy world that is being set up.  If there is a deviation, it tends to shatter the reader’s enjoyment, which defeats the entire purpose for writing the books.

Thus, while I think that Fantasy allows a lot of freedom in writing, it has its own inherent difficulties for the writer. But I wouldn’t pick any other genre.  Fantasy allows my imagination to run free and I couldn’t ask for a better way to spend my time.

This is probably one of the hardest decisions that I’ve had to make throughout writing the series so far – when is a good time to end each book? What is a good breaking point?  What will make the reader be inclined to read the next book but not leave them feeling unfulfilled or frustrated?

Originally, I thought that the first book had a fairly clear ending – when Initiation was finished. However, the challenge with that was that I kept coming up with new tasks and new challenges for them to complete, thus adding a significant amount of length to the book.  I had to remove many, many different scenes and even entire chapters because it kept becoming too long.  That, and there were so many ideas that I had written into the first book that I felt would be more fitting in the second, third, or fourth books, and I didn’t want to utilize all of my favorite ideas in the first book.

But what made me feel it was too long? I know there are books that are significantly longer than mine, and I was tempted to just keep going, but I always felt like around 120,000 words was where I wanted to end the book. Of course, it ended up being more like 130,000 words, but I felt like that was close enough, all things considered.  The truth is, when I went through each draft, if I felt like my attention was beginning to wander during a particular scene or felt like there was too much going on, I would either edit it down or delete it entirely, sometimes to be saved for later, sometimes to be gone forever.

The second, third, and fourth books were significantly more difficult to decide on the ending, but for entirely different reasons for each.

The most important thing for me in deciding where to end the book was whether it would feel natural to the reader. While I understand and respect the complete cliffhanger ending, I tend to think it is a little unfair to the reader for them to wonder if someone lives or dies for several months or years until the next book is published.   The opportunity came with the first book where that was certainly a possibility, but I just simply felt it wasn’t in keeping with how I wanted the series to go.  Honestly, unless I intend upon publishing the next book within a couple of weeks, I would rather end each book where the reader is left with plenty of questions and a desire to keep reading, without the pain of a complete cliffhanger.

I saw this sign on the side of a road that I drove past every day for months. Every time I would see it, I would tell myself that I would do the one thing that scared me more than anything else: Telling people that I was writing The Auctor Trilogy series and then publishing it.  By the time I got home, my bravery would disappear, and I would quickly return to my fear.

I started writing The Auctor Trilogy in June of 2011. I finished the first draft by July of 2011. I told my husband what I was doing a few months later.  And then proceeded to spend the next five years writing the first four books without speaking a word of it to anyone.

If you know me, you know how insane this is that I kept this to myself for over five years. I’m an over-sharer of my own secrets.  I do not know how to keep my own secrets.  I love to tell stories, confess to mistakes that I have made, and engage in some self-deprecating humor.  These traits mean that I basically spill my secrets the second that I see a family member or friend.

But this I kept to myself. When I finally told my family and friends, it was November of 2016.  And I only told everyone because I was publishing The Auctor Trilogy on November 28, 2016 and didn’t want them to find out via an invite to “like” the page on Facebook.

I think a few people genuinely felt like I didn’t tell them because I didn’t want to tell them.  This couldn’t be further from the truth.  Every time I saw a family member or friend, I wanted to blurt it out, to tell them I was writing a young adult fantasy series that I was SO EXCITED about.  But every time I opened my mouth to finally say the words, everything would shut down and I would talk about literally anything else.  I kept trying to figure out how to say the words without having to worry that people would judge me.

I worried my parents would think that I wasn’t as devoted to my career as I should be because I was writing books at night and on the weekends. I worried my siblings would think that I was being silly.  I worried that my friends would think that I was full of myself, thinking that I could write a book at all.

Their reactions were all wonderful and way better than I deserve. My family and friends told me they were proud of me.  Proud. Of. Me.  These were not the words that I was expecting them to say.  But they did.  All of them.  And they’ve been so incredibly supportive that I can’t help but smile every time I get one of their texts or Tweets or Facebook messages.

If I had known how wonderful it feels to tell people, I would have told them years ago. That sign couldn’t have been more accurate.  Happiness is on the other side of fear.  And I want happiness more than I am willing to let myself be afraid anymore.