mastering the process from idea to novel

I was housesitting for my sister a couple hours from my home and friends. It’s a long, sad, and probably tiresome story in and of itself, but let’s just suffice to say that I had a lot of free time on my hands one winter. Dawn of Endless Night was an urban fantasy novel loosely based on a tabletop RPG campaign I’d written using the game Vampire: The Masquerade. The first element is how the book was conceived and came to be in the first place. There are a few key elements that helped inform my process for the first novel. I think it’s important to point out that ten years went by between writing these two books, so I think it’s likely that the passage of time had at least something to do with the change in my process for the second book. I started writing the first draft my second novel, a mundane science fiction, in May of 2021, and I completed it in November of 2021. It was the first novel I ever completed and the first novel I workshopped with a writing group. It was an urban fantasy and is 131 thousand words long.

I finished my first novel, Dawn of Endless Night, ten years ago. In this first part of a multipart series, I talk about the process of writing my first novel.

I’ve talked a bit here and there about these changes on my podcast, Lex Out Loud, and I thought this would make an interesting topic for the blog. Some of the changes in the process were conscious choices on my part, and some of them just came about organically as I wrote the book. My process for writing this novel was quite different from my process for writing my previous novel.

Mastering the process from idea to novel