Five years ago, I was supposed to be up early. I had to get out at four a.m. for an early call, and I had grand ambitions of going to bed at seven and getting a full night’s sleep. Instead, I wound up lying in bed staring at the ceiling until my alarm went off, insomnia in full effect. I came out of that night with a massive headache — and an idea.
I had spent the whole day prior looking for a book to read. That was a familiar feeling — scrolling through Libby and Goodreads, searching for a book, knowing exactly what I wanted to find but not finding it. A fantasy that was set in the real world — not portal or in a subculture set apart, but fully in our world as I recognized it, with characters dealing with not only magical problems, but also the same problems that we face on a day-to-day basis. An adult book with a mystery at its center and a steamy romance subplot, ideally enemies-to-lovers. A strong, sarcastic, funny voice, with a healthy heaping of angst, like a grown-up version of a CW show. A magic system where power didn’t come free, where each spell demanded a bloody cost.
I’d found pieces of those elements in a lot of books over the years, but I could never find a book that had all of them. And that night, I realized that there might not be one — but there could be. At that point, I had written and shelved two books and was just starting a third. This idea, though, grabbed me more than any of the others had. It was the book that I had always wanted to read, and suddenly I realized that I could write it.
The journey to getting it onto the page, though, wasn’t a quick one. When I came up with the idea, I was working as an assistant in the entertainment industry. Balancing working on the book with (tremendously fun) long hours on set and in the writers’ room was exhausting, but it was also a gift to have a day job that was such a creative inspiration. Witch Season is a much better book because of the writers and artists who I got to work with during my years of drafting.
And then, finally, after so many months of hard work, there it was — the book I’d been looking for. When I got my pass pages — my publishers’ official layout of the book’s contents as they would appear in print — I cried. It was so overwhelming to see the book that I had dreamt about (well, not dreamt, since I couldn’t sleep!) in my hands. I can’t wait for it to be in yours too.
