Alison Fox's Blog
February 3, 2021
Ask Alison
The following are some of the questions I've recently been asked by friends/family/readers. There have been several others about my writing process, and I plan to address those in a future post. For today, though, I wanted to provide a few answers about my books, especially those in the Lucky Ones series.
1. How long does it take to write a book?
I'm never quite able to decide on the right answer to this question... It took just under a year from the time I decided that The Beginning would be the first book I published to the day that it was available for purchase. At the point of that decision, though, I had already written more than half of the book.
If I calculate the time starting with the day I developed the first few ideas for the plot, it took 7-8 years (with at least two long breaks during which I didn't work on it at all) to get the novel written and published.
Even before that, the main character already existed in the form of a few paragraphs about a little girl named Sailor Vernon. For years, those paragraphs served as the prologue for The Beginning, but they do not actually appear in the book as I chose to delete the prologue a few weeks before the publication date.
2. Where do you get the ideas for your characters/stories?
Anywhere at any time.
Often, the ideas that I like best occur to me at the most inconvenient moments. I've pulled to the side of the road and written on receipt paper with an eyeliner pencil for fear that I would forget something before I got to wherever I was driving. I've typed book ideas instead of class notes during lectures in grad school. I've also forgotten ideas that I REALLY wish I could remember the details of after they appeared in my brain in the middle of a busy moment at my "day job" and there was no chance to jot anything down on paper.
The very first idea for The Beginning's storyline--the existence of the group that I eventually called the Stages--came to me as I was driving from Nashville to my hometown in Kentucky during my last year or two of pharmacy school. I still don't really know why I had the thought. I had never considered writing anything remotely sci-fi before then. It was so far from any of the other things I had ever written that I mostly ignored the idea for several months.
Years later, I had written several chapters of The Beginning then moved on to something else. I was spending a few hours at the beach by myself while visiting a friend in Florida and suddenly had an idea for a beach trip for some of the main characters and a few lines of dialogue that would occur while they're walking along the water. I knew, at the time, that there was no way that scene/chapter/idea would fit in the first book, but I typed it up on a document where I keep ideas. I still hope to use it later.
3. How many books will be in the series?
My current plan is for four. I recently had a short-lived idea about a possible spin-off involving one of the current characters, but I think I've talked myself out of that for now. So, four. Probably.
4. Are they already written?
No!!! Unfortunately, there's a lot of work left to do on all of them. However, I do have each of them very loosely outlined and I have several pages written that will eventually end up in the novels.
5. When will the next book be available?
This is the question I've been asked the most, and I wish I had a better answer! The truth is, I'm not sure. I'm hopeful that it will be available at some point this year (2021), but I expect it will not be until AT LEAST late summer. The end of the year seems more likely.
(*In possible better news, there's a slight chance that a stand-alone book I've had nearly finished for a while will be published in the first half of this year, but that's far from certain. It will all depend on how much time I feel it will take to get fully edited and published. If I decide that book will significantly delay my work on book two of the series, I will postpone the standalone until a later date.)
1. How long does it take to write a book?
I'm never quite able to decide on the right answer to this question... It took just under a year from the time I decided that The Beginning would be the first book I published to the day that it was available for purchase. At the point of that decision, though, I had already written more than half of the book.
If I calculate the time starting with the day I developed the first few ideas for the plot, it took 7-8 years (with at least two long breaks during which I didn't work on it at all) to get the novel written and published.
Even before that, the main character already existed in the form of a few paragraphs about a little girl named Sailor Vernon. For years, those paragraphs served as the prologue for The Beginning, but they do not actually appear in the book as I chose to delete the prologue a few weeks before the publication date.
2. Where do you get the ideas for your characters/stories?
Anywhere at any time.
Often, the ideas that I like best occur to me at the most inconvenient moments. I've pulled to the side of the road and written on receipt paper with an eyeliner pencil for fear that I would forget something before I got to wherever I was driving. I've typed book ideas instead of class notes during lectures in grad school. I've also forgotten ideas that I REALLY wish I could remember the details of after they appeared in my brain in the middle of a busy moment at my "day job" and there was no chance to jot anything down on paper.
The very first idea for The Beginning's storyline--the existence of the group that I eventually called the Stages--came to me as I was driving from Nashville to my hometown in Kentucky during my last year or two of pharmacy school. I still don't really know why I had the thought. I had never considered writing anything remotely sci-fi before then. It was so far from any of the other things I had ever written that I mostly ignored the idea for several months.
Years later, I had written several chapters of The Beginning then moved on to something else. I was spending a few hours at the beach by myself while visiting a friend in Florida and suddenly had an idea for a beach trip for some of the main characters and a few lines of dialogue that would occur while they're walking along the water. I knew, at the time, that there was no way that scene/chapter/idea would fit in the first book, but I typed it up on a document where I keep ideas. I still hope to use it later.
3. How many books will be in the series?
My current plan is for four. I recently had a short-lived idea about a possible spin-off involving one of the current characters, but I think I've talked myself out of that for now. So, four. Probably.
4. Are they already written?
No!!! Unfortunately, there's a lot of work left to do on all of them. However, I do have each of them very loosely outlined and I have several pages written that will eventually end up in the novels.
5. When will the next book be available?
This is the question I've been asked the most, and I wish I had a better answer! The truth is, I'm not sure. I'm hopeful that it will be available at some point this year (2021), but I expect it will not be until AT LEAST late summer. The end of the year seems more likely.
(*In possible better news, there's a slight chance that a stand-alone book I've had nearly finished for a while will be published in the first half of this year, but that's far from certain. It will all depend on how much time I feel it will take to get fully edited and published. If I decide that book will significantly delay my work on book two of the series, I will postpone the standalone until a later date.)
January 10, 2021
To Start at The Beginning?
Where should I begin the story?
It’s not a question I have to ask myself very often when I’m writing. Even when I write a book out of order—which is almost always—there usually comes a point at which I think of an idea for a chapter (or a paragraph, or a single sentence) and immediately know that’s how the book should start. So, I’m a little surprised at how hard it’s been to decide on the topic for my first blog post.
For a while, I planned to write something about my debut novel—if only for the fact that its title (The Beginning) seemed apt. While it’s the first book I’ve published, though, it’s far from the first I started writing. If you ignore the necessity of extensive editing, it’s not even the first book I finished. Nor is it the second. I’m not even sure it’s the third. (Maybe the fourth? Fifth? I lose track.)
So, instead, I decided to go back to the first words I can ever recall writing “for fun” as I described all non-school-related writing back then (though there were plenty of times at which the word “fun” probably could have been replaced by “necessity” or “near-compulsion”).
“Sometimes, a person just does not want to read a sad book.”
That’s what I wrote.
There was more. Even on that first day, I think I wrote several paragraphs, but those first few words are all I remember clearly. They were scrawled across the top of a page in a notebook that was probably otherwise filled with calculus formulas or chemistry equations.
It was spring semester of my third year of college. Back then, I had no time set aside for outlining, writing, and revising. I had no journals dedicated to jotting down my own thoughts or plotting fictional worlds. I did have books, though. Lots of them. Written by other people. Purchased at the now-closed bookstore in the mall in my college town, or at the Barnes and Noble across the street, or at the tiny shop on the other side of town where I exchanged the ones I’d already read for other used books.
The night before the multi-paragraph rant about sad books, I had fallen asleep reading what was, to the best of my recollection, a beautifully written but horrifically sad novel, and awakened teary-eyed from crying in my sleep. I was determined (for a few minutes, at least) that I would start writing my own books so I would never again risk stumbling upon one so unexpectedly heartbreaking.
That plan didn’t last long. Knowing how obsessively I was reading back then, I had probably bought and read something new by the end of that week, but the idea of writing what I wanted to write instead of just reading other people’s words seems to have planted itself in my mind that day.
That single sentence at the top of one page of a school notebook became about ten chapters of a novel and a loose outline of what someday might still become a completed story. I abandoned my work on that book (temporarily, perhaps) in favor of another idea, then another, then about a dozen more in the ten-plus years between that first sentence and publishing my first novel.
There will be more on those ten-plus in-between years in future posts, I’m sure.
It’s not a question I have to ask myself very often when I’m writing. Even when I write a book out of order—which is almost always—there usually comes a point at which I think of an idea for a chapter (or a paragraph, or a single sentence) and immediately know that’s how the book should start. So, I’m a little surprised at how hard it’s been to decide on the topic for my first blog post.
For a while, I planned to write something about my debut novel—if only for the fact that its title (The Beginning) seemed apt. While it’s the first book I’ve published, though, it’s far from the first I started writing. If you ignore the necessity of extensive editing, it’s not even the first book I finished. Nor is it the second. I’m not even sure it’s the third. (Maybe the fourth? Fifth? I lose track.)
So, instead, I decided to go back to the first words I can ever recall writing “for fun” as I described all non-school-related writing back then (though there were plenty of times at which the word “fun” probably could have been replaced by “necessity” or “near-compulsion”).
“Sometimes, a person just does not want to read a sad book.”
That’s what I wrote.
There was more. Even on that first day, I think I wrote several paragraphs, but those first few words are all I remember clearly. They were scrawled across the top of a page in a notebook that was probably otherwise filled with calculus formulas or chemistry equations.
It was spring semester of my third year of college. Back then, I had no time set aside for outlining, writing, and revising. I had no journals dedicated to jotting down my own thoughts or plotting fictional worlds. I did have books, though. Lots of them. Written by other people. Purchased at the now-closed bookstore in the mall in my college town, or at the Barnes and Noble across the street, or at the tiny shop on the other side of town where I exchanged the ones I’d already read for other used books.
The night before the multi-paragraph rant about sad books, I had fallen asleep reading what was, to the best of my recollection, a beautifully written but horrifically sad novel, and awakened teary-eyed from crying in my sleep. I was determined (for a few minutes, at least) that I would start writing my own books so I would never again risk stumbling upon one so unexpectedly heartbreaking.
That plan didn’t last long. Knowing how obsessively I was reading back then, I had probably bought and read something new by the end of that week, but the idea of writing what I wanted to write instead of just reading other people’s words seems to have planted itself in my mind that day.
That single sentence at the top of one page of a school notebook became about ten chapters of a novel and a loose outline of what someday might still become a completed story. I abandoned my work on that book (temporarily, perhaps) in favor of another idea, then another, then about a dozen more in the ten-plus years between that first sentence and publishing my first novel.
There will be more on those ten-plus in-between years in future posts, I’m sure.
