Introduction to The Changing Cloak

Well, it's a longshot that anyone will ever read this, but in case The Changing Cloak ever becomes a bestseller or something, it might be interesting for someone to look at the early days of the novel (although they are far from early). Or perhaps it will only be interesting to me to view this as a sort of journal about my daily writing problems.

I'll just start with the basics. I'm currently a sixteen year old girl from Latvia who people may know as Jane Alith Knight someday. Writing is my passion and has been ever since I can remember, even though I didn't put anything on paper until I was fifteen. Who said you can't write in your head? I don't think I've forgotten a single story I've created, dialogues and everything, and maybe someday I'll write all of them.

So, when inspiration struck me like lightning, I decided to act on it. I remember that day very clearly. It was June 11th, 2009, a Thursday and I was making dinner after a long day and a particularly brutal session at the dentist. I was working on another story that I will definitely write someday, tentatively titled Shards of Glass. I was trying to think it through as I peeled potatoes, but another idea that had come to me few days prior kept intruding my head like the Russian Army. It wouldn't let me concentrate, so I figured I could afford to waste half an hour thinking about it and then turn back to Lucy Lee (the lead of Shards of Glass). About five minutes into the half-hour I realized that I had come up with four characteristics for the character I was thinking about and that they didn't really fit well together. For example, one quality was "dead" and another "alive". You can see where I had a problem. Not that they cannot coexist peacefully in my world, but at the time I didn't know anything about that world.
So I figured I'd divide the four in half - "dead" and "stalker" becoming one person, "alive" and "depressed" the other. Thus, Carter and Blake were born. Now I'm assuming that anyone who reads this will have read the book first, so I'm not worrying about minor spoilers like the fact that Carter is supposed to be alive at the start of the book.

Two minutes after I'd realized who Blake was I was already typing. I didn't know what would come next and I didn't care. Something was pouring out of me and I couldn't let the floor flood.
I wrote three pages that evening. And three the next. And six the day after that. Three was a lot for me then, not to mention six. Imagine how surprised I was when I began to write ten pages a day!

The ideas kept flowing out of me so swiftly I should have been drained in a few days, but I lasted more than a month. I didn't think, I didn't plot, I let the story take me where it wanted to. And, surprisingly, everything clicked into place without me worrying about it. I'm thinking my subconscious had figured out where the story was going to lead long before I consciously did. All the clues were there, I just hadn't figured out what they meant yet. And every now and then I'd get a "boom!" kind of shock and realize that something was utterly right and I wondered how I had missed that before. All the signs that pointed to it were already written!

Anyway, when the novel was 4/5 finished I had to take a hiatus for personal reasons and personal disasters, as in my computer crashing several times in a month in various ways, one of which was the audio system fail. Obviously, I couldn't write without music, so I... didn't.

I don't agree with people who say that if you're passionate about your work it should always come first. There are lots of things to be passionate about, but that wasn't my point. Just think about what makes you want to work. What gives you inspiration? Would you be able to do your job without it? Some people will probably say yes. I won't. Everything I do comes from music and if I don't have it in my life there's no reason for anything. So, automatically no music equals no creativity.

Back to the story (and if you haven't stopped reading by now, huge props for you). I caught a cold and had to skip school for a week. That week may be the single most important week of my life, because it was then that I re-discovered my passion for writing and realized that I might be able to do something after all. If it hadn't been for that cold, The Changing Cloak might have waited months to be finished and turned out completely differently. But, thankfully, I went back to reading what I'd written on September 20th, 2009 and on September 24th I went back to writing. On September 26th, precisely three and a half months after I'd typed the words "Philosophy. Ugh." into my computer, I had finished the first thing I'd ever worked so hard for. The first thing I ever finished. It was a huge moment for me and I couldn't stop jumping up and down for an hour. I'll never forget it.

It's two days later now and I'm getting the manuscript ready for its first-ever full reading. Can't wait to get people's opinions on it. What if it sucks? I'll worry about it later. For now I'm editing one of the things I love the most in the whole world, thinking about what to write on my query for Agent Kristin Nelson (http://www.pubrants.blogspot.com/) who is my first choice of agents, and thinking about the next novels in the series (at the moment I have planned seven books in total, I know, ambitious, right? Keep in mind, though, the number may and probably will go up since eighteen hours ago there were only four sequels planned).

So I guess that's the very long description of how The Changing Cloak (originally Ever-patient Angel, but the angel thing and the hyphen didn't really work for a book title) came to be and will hopefully come to be published. Cross your fingers!

And, trust me, I know that it's almost impossible to get published at sixteen, let alone in this crisis and from a different country three thousand miles away. Or more. I haven't measured. But I just want to do the best job I can and hope for the best! Who knows, maybe inspiration will strike me again, I'll write a great query and Kristin, the superb agent that she is, will make my dreams happen.

Jane