Love Creating Art
Right now, I’m living on a bus for The Wizard of Oz national tour. It’s not as glamourous as you might think. It’s not a sleeper bus with big screen TVs and a mini-fridge. It’s a regular coach bus, and I sleep on the floor under my seat on long bus days.
What makes squeezing under my seat in a sleeping bag worth it? I mean, besides making my living performing?
I get to travel with my husband. We work together, we live together, I make him help me on all my book-related things. He is my ultimate partner in crime.
Take Girl of Glass. We were performing up in Alaska where there is amazing hiking. Our favorite hike is a 9.5-mile trail that takes you up and along a ridge line. Hiking is the best time for me to brainstorm new story ideas. When you don’t want to think about how much your legs or lungs hurt, you distract yourself with brainstorming. No phones, no distractions, just scenery and ideas. And, of course, my husband.
I was on the hiking struggle bus and we started bouncing around ideas for what kind of story I should work on next. I love writing fantasy, but I needed to push myself away from wizards. I wanted to work on a sci-fi, but not really anything space-ish. Dystopian sounded like a ton of fun, but on the heels of Hunger Games I didn’t really want to add to the pile of stories with hungry protagonists.
The idea became to write a fantasy/dystopian/sci-fi. That’s how we arrived at Girl of Glass: a sci-fi with chemically-induced vampires in a dystopian world.
That’s not the only time that my husband has been the one to say, “Write this.” We spent the night in a floating hut in Thailand. He demanded I write that lake into a story. The rock cairns in Ireland made it into another.
He’s also my soundboard once the actual writing process begins. Does this chapter read right? Do we hate this name? He’s my preliminary editor, because the amount of commas I try to shove into sentences is terrifying. Once a manuscript is almost ready to send, I make him read the whole thing out loud to make sure everything flows and to root out any more errors that we can find.
Why am I telling you all this? Not to sound like a horrible wife who puts way too much pressure on her husband. Or because I’m just plain old obsessed with him.
Writing can feel extraordinarily lonely. It’s literally you and your characters playing pretend for hours on end. Sure, you communicate with other authors, bloggers, and readers online. Yeah, you can email your editor if you’re having a problem. But the day to day is solitary. And I’m not the solitary type.
If I had to do all the authorly things all on my own, I would have bailed long ago.
So, in this month of love, I want to give a shoutout to all the people we author types love and depend on. The partners who proof things. The best friends who listen to us ramble about imaginary characters on coffee dates. The parents who tell you how wonderful they think your book is even though you know full well they can’t stand blood, let alone vampires.
Those people are the ones who make writing possible. Who make the grind of writing worth it. Who commiserate over every rejection letter and celebrate every book release.
With all the love my characters and I can muster, love and thanks to my husband, my friends, my editors, all the people who make writing possible.
Boy of Blood
by Megan O’Russell
Series: Girl of Glass
YA Dystopia
Fiery Seas Publishing
Publishing Date: April 10, 2018
After Nightland’s vicious attack on the domes, the safety and perfection of the world within the glass has been contaminated. Desperate to rebuild, outsiders are allowed into the domes to help, breaking the cardinal rule: outsiders and Domers must always be separated. But the city is in shambles, crumbling into chaos without the Vampers of Nightland to keep order, and one name is carried on the wind: Nola.
Clinging to Jeremy, Nola struggles to find a way to exist in the domes, turning her back on all she learned in the city. But when one of the outsiders brings the dark secrets of the domes to light, the line between survival and murder blurs against the spectre of the dying world.
Can Nola follow the dark path laid out by the Domes? Will the dangers of the night become her new sanctuary?
About the Author:
Megan O’Russell is the author of the young adult fantasy series The Tethering, and Nuttycracker Sweet, a Christmas novella. Megan’s short stories can also be found in several anthologies, including Athena’s Daughters 2, featuring women in speculative fiction. Megan is a professional performer who has spent time on stages across the country and is the lyrist for Second Chances: The Thrift Shop Musical, which received it’s world premier in 2015. When not on stage or behind a computer, Megan can usually be found playing her ukulele or climbing a mountain with her fantastic husband.
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