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.)