Today it occurred to me that in all my posts about how and where my novel was, I never took you back to the very beginning. When did I start Touch of Fate? How did I get the idea? How many drafts did I go through and how long did it take to write?
Before there was Touch of Fate, there was a short story called “Signs.” In fact, my novel is actually the sequel to that short story, but I had no real intention of turning “Signs” into a novel when I wrote it. I was just looking for a compelling character dilemma and a good answer to the question, “What is the cost of magic?”
Good fantasy doesn’t just let you have infinite cosmic powers. It’s just not interesting that way. You need limits – and not limits driven by the plot. In both “Signs” and Touch of Fate, it is the character and the limits to her magic that drive the story, not the other way around. The core idea in both of these stories was that Marianne could predict the future but could not change the future she predicted.
I halfheartedly sent “Signs” to a few magazines during the winter of 2003/2004. Then, in April of 2004, I took an online course on writing mystery novels. I did it because I wanted to try something new, because the science fantasy trilogy I’ve been working on for 18 years (yes, still) had once again hit a dead end, and because I was hoping that taking a class would help motivate me to finish. As I searched for mystery ideas, “Signs” came back to me from a magazine editor with a rejection note and I decided to try to turn it into something bigger and better.
The first version of Touch of Fate was a mystery, not a suspense. I did not unmask the killer until the end and I tried to leave clues and red herrings to encourage the reader to play along. Many of the leads Derek follows in the current version are a direct by-product of the mystery version.
I wrote and rewrote the mystery version before I sent it to my dad, the only person to critique that early draft. In the end, he told me that it was good but that it wasn’t really a mystery. There was not nearly enough time spent on police work and investigation for it to be a mystery. He also came to the end and had no real understanding of who the killer was or why she had done what she did.
I sat on that draft for four months, trying to decide what to do with it. The real trouble with making a mystery out of a fantasy such as this is that the killer’s motivations were so strange and counter-intuitive that the only way an astute reader would figure out “whodunit” was if I left some too-obvious clues or otherwise let the *writing* give away the mystery rather than the *story*. This is a fundamental mistake in mystery writing and I was not about to let it happen to me.
I also had not forgotten my dad’s observation that for a mystery, my novel spent a lot of time on character and not as much time on clues and red herrings. Truthfully, I did not have as much fun writing those scenes and did not want them to overwhelm the story. Finally, the solution came to me – turning the novel into a suspense/thriller would kill two birds with one stone.
In February and March of 2005 I pounded out the final version of the novel. I went so quickly because I was determined to have one novel finished and ready to try to sell before I had my first child. (I found out I was pregnant in March.) So, from start to finish, it took me one year to write Touch of Fate.
The final version flew from my finger. I knew my characters, I knew my situation, I had a couple of pieces from previous version that I could copy and paste (such as all of chapter 9). As I crawled inside the killer’s head and let her rationalize murder, I knew my book had finally become what it was meant to be.
So, the final tally: It took me one year from concept to completion, it went through three full rewrites and several more revision/editing stages. It then went to two publishers before finding its home with Twilight Times Books.