When It’s Good to Have a Nightmare

Continuing my “blog posts you may have missed” series for October (with an emphasis on thriller suspense!), here’s a “why I wrote post” from 2013!

Sometimes I’ll read a book or see a movie and wish I’d written it.

It is part of the fun (for me) of being a reader and a writer. Some writers can only bring their writer brain to a book, but for me it is a two-part process.

My reader arrives first. I read the book and either enjoy it or don’t finish (I used to finish everything, but I’m running out of time for that).

If I loved it, my reader brain is happy and it mulls why. Sometimes I’ll go back and browse the book.

Then my writer brain shows up.

It’s not envy. It’s curiosity.

I look at the craft and the way the plot unfolds. Sometimes I wonder why this book or this story, or I think about what I would have done differently.

I will be honest, when I began the process of re-releasing my own backlist in August, I was a little uneasy. What if I didn’t like them as much this time around? I haven’t had time to revisit done books. I’ve been busy writing new ones and coping with my real life.

The Last Enemy is my third completed novel, but it was my second published novel.

When I typed The End on Pig in a Park aka The Spy Who Kissed Me I thought writing the next book would be a piece of cake. Okay, maybe not a piece of cake, but not as hard. I’d finished. I knew how to write a whole book now. Because, you know, once you have one baby, then delivering the next baby is easy.

So while I’m wrestling with book two (Do Wah Diddy Die), I have a dream.

It was a woman and a bad guy on a ledge and he was “helping” her get over her fear of heights. I woke with my heart pumping with fear.

It was just a snippet, but it was so vivid, I couldn’t get it out of my head. And since it bumped book two out of my brain, I started asking myself questions. Who was the woman? Who was the bad guy? Why did he want to “help” her?

I wrote The Last Enemy to answer those questions. And to get that snippet out of my head.

Some other things you might not know about The Last Enemy:

1. It was the first, digital-only novel to win a Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Award (now called RT Book Reviews).
2. Research for this book almost got the hubs arrested. (You can read more about that in my Behind the Book Interview)
3. It was not meant to be a three-book-and-one-short-story series.
4. I still love this book.
5. I hiked partway up Long’s Peak in sandals, in snow for this book. And slept in a pop-up camper.
6. In the original edition of this book, my bad guy uses the f-word once because he is a really bad guy. I edited it out when I moved the book to L&L because it bothered my mom. And me. I figured him killing people right and left showed he was a bad guy. Hmmm…maybe I need to write a villain who thinks swearing is bad…
7. It is grittier than most of my books, but it also has lots of humor in there.

So now you know why I wrote The Last Enemy. To read more about what went into writing this book, you can read my Behind the Book interview on my website. There’s even some stuff I’d forgotten. O.O

Do you ever get curious about why an author wrote a particular book? Or do you just read and move on? I’m always curious about how and why readers pick books, about how they find the books they pick, so if you have any tips to share, please do!

And don’t forget to check out the Thriller Event here!

Perilously yours,

Pauline