Discussing my Debut Novel—Twilight Wolf
A year ago, I started writing on a writing prompt involving Little Red Riding Hood and zombies. This one to be exact:
Little Red Riding Hood, The Big Bad Wolf, and the lumberjack all have to put their differences aside when they hear the moaning of the undead outside the cabin they’re in.
You’ll find this same reference in the beginning of the novel, but I wanted to share a few additional details here. I first wrote for this prompt in September of 2022 and decided to expand it into a serial. Before this point, I had very little experience completing stories and zero with writing serials.
What I had was a history of read writing-books and an eagerness to develop my storytelling ability. But this wasn’t my first attempt at story telling. I’ve had an on-again-off-again relationship with a labor of love called Duality, which I worked on for several years prior to writing this prompt. And it wasn’t until I wrote this prompt that I realized just how wholly inadequate my writing chops were. To be frank, Duality was beyond my skill level at this point.
Initially, I called my debut novel Redux Riding Hood and my attempt at writing the serial is still on scribblehub. You can find it here if you’re interested:
But don’t feel like I’m recommending it, because I’m definitely not. While I had the pleasure of working with an editor and had each chapter polished, it was still written with some significant issues. It doesn’t have an ending either. As I wrote this, my writing skills kept leveling up and being the passionate storyteller that I am, I tried to double back and revise in every new writing-lesson learned. Needless to say, this was a tremendous burden to my overall progress.
The reason I’m sharing this is because I know there’s value in seeing the before and after of a thing. I’m blown away at the differences between these two and I think that any Twilight Wolf fans will be as well. The serial has around fifty posted chapters and I want to share a few of the changes I made moving from this draft and into the rewrite.
I wrote on the serial until I neared the final act. Here, I encountered something I couldn’t reconcile and I knew I’d have to make such a significant structural change that it wasn’t something I could revise in. One of the two details was an event that happened around chapter fifty. The group discovered a destroyed city and I realized this needed to happen at the end of Act one, not leading into the final act. In the rewrite, this became chapter nine! Just try to imagine moving a significant story event fifty-thousand words across your narrative. This was a huge shift, but a vital one.
The other detail that required change happened immediately after the first. My protagonist started studying her portal ability and was developing new moves. As interesting as this was, you don’t want your character learning something like this leading into the final act. This is supposed to be the payoff, the reward for trekking the rest of the story. And these things were too technical. If I had continued, the reader would not have been able to enjoy the fight because they would have been too busy trying to process what was happening with the portals.
So I tossed the papers into the air and danced around like a madman...or that’s the way it happened in my head at least. In case you’re wondering, ‘dancing like a madman’ is anytime I elect to dance. I am mad after all!
I dropped progressing the serial in January 2023 and attended Chattacon—Writer Con in Chattanooga, TN—where I learned about a writing contest. The guest of honor was Ms. Jody Nye and she was the lead judge for the Writer’s of the Future Contest. I hesitate to include Scientology alongside this contest, but I want to be transparent. It should be said that this contest is funded by Scientology. Whatever your feelings on that, I’ve been told by multiple sources that this contest is kept separate from the religion. Be that as it may, I’m not recommending the contest; I’m recommending the free workshop attached to it!
This workshop is taught by David Farland, Orson Scott Card, and Tim Powers. You may have heard of them. There’s a few books written between them and Card was Brandon Sanderson’s instructor.
Anywho, I took this course when I returned from Chattacon. The workshop is intended to help you submit a stronger story for the contest and you can do that. It’s what I did. But you can also just take the workshop for the knowledge. It has some great material and you can skip to the parts you want to focus on, move back and forth between lessons, and rewatch videos as much as you like. The workshop claims to be an intermediate level and if that’s something you’re interested in, have at it!
I did submit for this contest. I didn’t place, but that’s alright. I walked away with more value from the workshop and the process of completing the story that I submitted in March 2023.
Now, this part I can’t recommend. I adapted my draft/serial into a 45,000 word novella. And that was something. Essentially, I had to dull a lot of the portal’s technical details, drop a ton of character development, and boil the plot down to a try-fail cycle, which in my case was failing twice and succeeding on a third attempt.
Obviously, the major downside to this 45,000 word extra step in writing a novel is a bit excessive. But I can’t deny that it improved my final story. A key shift I made from the serial to this novella was that I changed tense from present to past. Again, I had zero experience with serials when I started it, and at the time, I thought I knew how I wanted to tell my story. I selected present-tense because of how active my imagination can be. I thought that this tense would allow me to do more in choreographing my action sequences. And of course, I was wrong. I had an equal amount of experience with third person—again, zero.
I’ll share more detailed lessons-learned over in ‘JT’s Writing Experience,’ but I want to share an important sentence structure that I learned between working on the serial and this novella. I’m not certain if this sentence has a specific name, but here’s an example of it:
I was making it up as I went, learning along the way.
[--------------------Past tense][Present tense----------]
This sentence is grammatically accurate and communicates something in a ‘did, doing’ manner. And this absolutely bridged the gap between what I was doing and what I wanted to do. This may be a common sentence, but it never stood out to me before I did it intentionally. But we all see it regularly in speech tags if nowhere else. Check out these:
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” she said, panting.
“I can’t believe she just did that,” he said, shaking his head.
Both sentences indicate that someone spoke while doing something at the same time. I was beyond excited to discover and make use of this silly little sentence. I’m sure you’ll see it a time or two if you decide to check out my book—Twilight Wolf. As with all techniques, you don’t want to overuse a thing and I do limit where and when I use it. I just find it satisfying when I do.
If you’re interested in learning more about Twilight Wolf, you can expect it to be something like Little Red Riding Hood meets Norse Mythology. I’ve posted the first act on scribblehub. You are welcome to read that first twenty-thousand words to see if it’s a story you would be interested in. Here’s the link for that:
Or if you’d rather just have the novel from the start, here’s the link for that:
Regardless of how much you read on the story, I genuinely hope you find it entertaining or rewarding in some way. And if you do finish the book, I’d be delighted to have you post a review. I’m not even expecting a set number of stars! Truly, share your honest thoughts. I’m just pleased I had your attention for a time.
Until next time,
Happy reading,
JT
