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AUTHOR’S NOTE
Welcome to the first episode of ForNevermore.
This book would never have happened if I’d been popular in high school. I was painfully shy and was different from the “cool kids.” In middle school, I was picked on and bullied. In high school, I was more or less just ignored.
It was an often painful existence, outside of time spent with a handful of close friends who made things okay.
It was during this time that I retreated into my own little world — my writing.
I loved writing weird, dark stories. At first, I wrote them for myself, aping the shows I enjoyed on TV and the scary stories I liked to read. Though I wrote different kinds of things, they usually had one thing in common — they almost always ended with the words, “To be continued…”
You see, I love cliffhangers. Whether it be on shows like LOST, Carnivale, True Blood, The Walking Dead, The Wire , or even further back, comic books.
I love serialized fiction. There’s nothing better than continuing stories with characters you love, hate, or love to hate, and the constant feeling of wanting to know what will happen next. I loved to leave readers hanging, even when I was the only reader.
I’m not sure why, but at some point, other kids in my classes started taking notice that I was writing like a madman in the back of the classroom while everyone else was either reading or doing classwork. Soon, a few of them wanted to see what I was writing. I was embarrassed at first, thinking surely they’d hate the stories. Looking back, I’d say the stories were probably amazingly bad. But I had ideas, and I was working to get better. And it was these ideas that they responded to.
I loved watching people, especially people I had nothing in common with, reading my stories. The look in their eyes, the excitement when I finished a new “episode,” and the shock when I left them hanging — it was all so amazing.
I had spent so many years trying to be what other people thought I should be. But it was only when I stopped worrying what others thought of me, and learned to be myself, that I found a way to connect — through my writing.
They were enjoying words I’d written, worlds I created.
And for a young person with little self-esteem, that was a powerful thing. I’d always wanted to create worlds that people would get lost in.
FLASH FORWARD…
I kept writing, working to get better, and eventually got a job as a reporter, which lasted a few years until the newspaper I worked at folded. That’s when I met my writing partner, Sean Platt, someone who enjoyed writing as much as me, and loved serialized fiction. We love collaborating and have created some great stuff together.
We talked about how awesome it would be if we could write a serialized book like Stephen King had done with “The Green Mile” a few years back.
Of course, this was before the Kindle and eBooks started to take off, so it seemed next to impossible.
But then, last year, digital publishing took off, opening doors to writers that had always been closed. Suddenly we could write the kinds of books we wanted without worrying whether a publisher would buy them.
We could write serialized fiction. The only thing was, we weren’t sure if there were as many readers as us who REALLY LOVED the serialized format.
So we took a chance with an adult post-apocalyptic thriller called Yesterday’s Gone , and it did phenomenally well! We were thrilled. We found a group of readers who loved our stuff, and we’re still writing that series.
But now we’d like to try serialization in another format — Young