Posted by Kagan Tumer on February 7, 2021
“Did you really write a novel about a pandemic during a pandemic?”
Though sometimes I’m tempted to shrug or roll my eyes, those are not appropriate responses to that question. (Trust me on this.) But what are proper answers?
The short answer is no.
The technical answer is that I didn’t write about a pandemic, but about what you might face decades after a devastating pandemic (hence post-pandemic fiction).
Both those answers are correct, but not particularly informative.
The long (and appropriate) answer deals with how a book goes from an author’s mind to your hands, what challenges it faces, and how long that process may take. Let’s jump in.
I pieced this story together between December 2012 and February 2013, though what I ended up with was more character sketches and dialog than a coherent plot. As the characters became more and more real, I wrote eight chapters in two months, so I can pinpoint Spring 2013 as the starting point of this novel. These chapters weren’t in order by the way. (They weren’t any good either, but that’s what editing is for.)
About those chapters: there is this dichotomy in writing where folks are grouped into plotters and pantsers. Plotters outline and plan their books meticulously and pantsers just write (by the seat of their pants) and let the words take them where they may.
I realized early on that neither approach suited my style. I have enough deadlines and obligations in my daily routine that sticking to a structured plot wasn’t going to work for me. But you can’t write a story with this many moving parts and hope that the dots will somehow connect at some future point.
My solution to this dilemma is what I call anchor scenes. These are scenes that define the characters and the story. I write those first and then I meander from one to the next. This way, there’s a structure, but it’s not particularly rigid. And one of those anchor scenes is always the last scene of the book because I need to know where I’m going, even if I don’t know how to get there.
Now, back to how long the book took: I finished a rough draft in December 2014. It was a mess and unpublishably long. I completed the next draft—which is really the first proper draft—in the summer of 2015. Then I edited and edited and edited, which took two years.
Then I went to a couple of writers workshops where I got both useless and super-useful advice (figuring out which is which is nontrivial, by the way). Anyway, I sold Purged Souls to a publisher in 2018 and had it professionally edited. But then the publisher had an editorial shuffle and we fell out of contract, mainly because my main character no longer fit the profile of characters they wanted to market. For those of you who’ve read Purged Souls, you can appreciate that Lori is not for everyone. In retrospect, it was the best thing that happened to Purged Souls because I realized what I was willing to let go and what I wasn’t willing to compromise on.
Finally in 2019 I had another publisher interested, but by then I’d worked with an awesome artist for the cover and decided that I’d publish Purged Souls through a local publisher. So after a final round of edits, Purged Souls was released in June 2020. I mean, what are the odds that you write a book about a global pandemic and after seven years of struggle it is released in the middle of a global pandemic?
You really can’t make this stuff up.