For the last three years I’ve been working at a corporate job in finance while working on my novel. This initially was a mystery that I wrote four years ago; now, after a major re-write, it’s coming out as a horror. Very little was preserved from the first version: only the setting and the name of the heroine. Everything else is new.
I am extremely excited about this book. It was a long, arduous meander to get to this point. I was living in Costa Rica when I wrote the first version. I pitched it and got my first read by an agent, who rejected it but gave me great feedback. I was actually encouraged by the rejection, and even relieved. I wasn’t “feeling” this book, as so much of it was made up for the sake of writing a mystery. It felt too make-believe, which is the most ridiculous thing a writer of fiction could say. I was not emotionally invested, mainly because I couldn’t relate to most of the story. Very little of it came from my own life.
I gave the book a temporary rest as I had bigger things to deal with. It was 2023, and I was moving back to Vancouver, Canada, bringing my newly immigrated husband, dog, and three cats. It was a big adjustment for everyone who was coming from a hot, humid, Spanish-speaking part of the world. It took a while before we were all settled in and I was comfortable enough to write again.
My first step was trying to decide whether to re-write the novel or start something completely new. Before that mystery, I had written a draft of a totally wild story. I finished the draft in a couple of months, and even though it was fun to write, I never wanted to see it ever again because it was chock full of plot holes and conveniences. Still, it was interesting as the story was based on when I was once, in real life, possessed by a ghost while living in Japan. For a long time, I lived in denial of the incident and only talked about it every few years, whenever the memory surfaced. As more of my friends agreed that I was possessed, I felt the best way for me to unpack what happened was to write about it through fiction. That wild draft that I wrote was more like a long, journal entry, never to be published. But I didn’t want all that work to go to waste either. So I thought about merging that plot line with this mystery novel I was trying to refurbish. I sat with it for a while, then I started to cook up the plot.
Working in finance, with all the red tape and compliance, has forced me to go underground with my fiction writing. I can’t do much with social media, which is why I’ve deactivated most of my accounts. Since writing is more of a behind-the-scenes process, it didn’t matter too much. I could still write, and I was never going to let my day job stop me from doing that part. More than half of this book was written and edited on my phone when I was riding public transit to and from work or sitting in waiting rooms. The other half I worked on from my desk at home on weekends and holidays.
I’m now in the stage of completing the final edits and then a final read before I start the tough job of pitching agents. In the meantime, I’ll just keep trying to survive the at times hostile environment of finance just to pay the bills, which has been another type of horror story.
