Do you remember when this blog had structure? Yeah, me neither. I’m quickly nearing the end of Book 3 in the Scarlet Cherie: Vampire Series, making us exactly halfway through the 5-book series. It’s got me ruminating about the direction of the series and how we got to where we are with it…
This blog post is going to be vulnerable and honest, exposing the chaos from which my book series was borne.
When I started writing The Fire Within My Heart, I never expected it to become what it is now. I was nineteen, working full-time and entering a period of great change in my life. At the time, I was in a long-term relationship with a man (I know, I can't even begin to imagine that now), living with him, working 9-to-5, and was about to become heavily unwell with a manic episode (I was undiagnosed bipolar at the time). This resulted in me ending my relationship and embarking on a six-month journey of sickness and debauchery. I remember sitting at my desk at work, hungover and unhinged, tapping away at a tale of a girl one year older than me, also on her own journey of darkness and light. It became an obsession to me, though at the time I didn’t have a working laptop at home, so I’d spend every free minute at work furiously typing away—admittedly, I also spent many not-free minutes writing as well. Even when the world around me was chaotic and uncertain, there was this world in which I was safe, around people I grew to adore. Back then, the characters were just that to me, but even then they were my safety net. If I only knew what they would come to mean to me.
I wrote The Fire Within My Heart in three months, and then did the most ghastly thing imaginable—self-published it. No editing, no formatting, not even a proofread. I just uploaded the document, which at the time was only 40,000 words, half the length of the version out now, and was done with it. I didn’t have Twitter then, knew nothing about publishing or proofing. It was wild and reckless, but so was I during that time.
I think this all happened around August of 2019. I basically forgot about the book then, a fleeting moment in my life… until I checked Goodreads in November of the same year. The Fire Within My Heart had its first and only review. Two stars. My heart sank—though, looking back now, how it even made it to a two-star was beyond me. The woman who reviewed my, at the time, novella, saw potential in my work but gave me some very valid and appreciated criticism. It’s amazing how much this woman, this stranger, changed my life. After reading her review of the story, I quickly removed The Fire Within My Heart from Amazon and decided to finally give it a reread.
It was around March 2020, when I started my Twitter account, that the second draft was complete. By this point, I’d moved to Glasgow (another fleeting moment, another manic decision) and back and the first lockdown had just been announced. I was well for the first time in six months, and I used all of that newfound mental stability to throw myself into the novel. Flat, two-dimensional characters grew into lovingly crafted visions, with their foibles and eccentricities. They all found their voice, and along with them so did I.
By August 2020, my tumultuous tale had bloomed into something I could be proud of. It was also a peek into my own mind like no other. The ebbs and flows of the unedited story reflected the mercurial highs and lows of my unwell brain. I understood myself more after reading back my work than I ever had before. You might sometimes see me talking on Twitter about the terror of reading The Fire Within My Heart. If I’m being honest, I’m not proud of it. Even now, I can recognise twenty-year-old me had so much to learn, so much growing to do. If I wrote it now, the story would be vastly better, but I also never would have gotten to this point if it weren’t for laying those foundations. The characters as they are now, in all of their glory, how much I love and understand them, could never have happened if I’d not crafted The Fire Within My Heart as it was then. By the time it was published that August, I had fallen in love with my characters, the way you fall in love with friends, tremulous at first, and then with reckless abandon. During lockdown, all I did was write. Every minute of every day was spent crafting and creating. My walls were lined with huge sheets of paper planning the series, and if I wasn’t plotting new books in the series, then I was writing up histories of the characters. At first, they wouldn’t tell me their lives, and then they began to write themselves, and it all fell into place. They all fell into place.
I began writing Scalding Waters the second The Fire Within My Heart was republished, fueled by adoration and understanding for the characters and lores I had crafted. I don’t think I have ever felt achievement or pride in my life, but writing Scalding Waters, I suddenly knew what it meant to feel proud of something. I was also establishing myself more on Twitter at this point, making friends who inspired me, made me feel like part of a community. Even to this day, I cherish many of the people I have “met” through Twitter. One of them proofed and beta read Scalding Waters, and though we don’t talk much (I’m terrible at keeping up with communication) I always feel blessed to see his demonic posts on my timeline. Someone who has become one of my dearest, most cherished friends also came into my life around this point, and she now will appear as a character, however minor, in Book 3. Then there’s Dewi, with whom I’ve collaborated on a blog post; Han, my favourite Witch; all of the people at Quill and Crow, who made me love my poetry for the first time and discover a newfound respect for the art of it. This is just to name a few of many, and there really are so many, many more. To think that I’d never have had the pleasure of meeting any of these wonderful humans without opening Goodreads on a whim that one winter day is shocking. To think I wouldn’t have the companionship of my characters is heartbreaking.
I grow with my characters. Who I was at nineteen is not who I was at twenty, or twenty-one, when Scalding Waters came out, or now at twenty-two when (hopefully) Book 3 will be released. I learnt resilience through writing, and my love for the characters of the Scarlet Cherie series has been forged from the fires of pain and suffering and insomnia. They’ve always been there for me, when I was at my highest, when I fell to my lowest.
I never imagined all that they would become to me, or the people they would bring into my life, or who I would become through them. I literally would never have gotten into university to do my dream course at the best uni in Brighton if it weren’t for the merit of publishing two novels.
The thing is, I’m struggling with the ending of Book 3. I know what needs to happen, even know how it needs to happen, but each new page is a page closer to the end of the series, and that terrifies me. I’ve established a mental block now, but that’s just another obstacle to overcome. We’ll get there, we always do.
Hannah once said to me she can't write when she's stressed, that she needed to be in the right mindset for writing and editing, and that made no sense to me. Over the past three years, it was like I relearned how to breathe, and each breath was fueled by ink and paper. The world makes no sense to me, it never has, I don't think it ever will, but when I write, it all falls into place. Writing is my life, my world, my saviour. Everything is clearer when it can be put into poetry or prose.
I know this blog post is quite different from my usual, but I’m feeling sentimental, and I think to really understand my characters’ stories, you also need to understand mine. They’re no longer just a fantasy to me. They’re the light in the darkness, the reason to keep going, they’re tangible and frustrating and deeply wonderful to me. I might have started the series on a senseless whim, but now I write with purpose, and a big part of that purpose is to share this passion with all of you, whether you be the ones who read my blog or read my books.