Since this is my first Insiders Club blog post, I figure that I should introduce myself and what I plan on using this blog space for.
I’m LynnErin: indie author, dog-mom, full-time nomad, and chronic daydreamer.
I’m not great at making announcements or sending out scheduled emails (or being professional, really) so I plan on letting this space be messy and completely unscripted.
I’ll probably use it for announcements and such as well, but I think it would be fun to use this space to drop some breadcrumbs and give anyone reading it some insider information about my writing process and the world that has been growing in my imagination since the early 2000’s.
So, anyhow…here we go!
When I first started writing This is The Fall in 2021, I had decided to try my hand at writing an epistolary novella. And I decided to just pants/discovery-write the whole thing. No plotting, no diving into themes and character motivations, no focus on prose…just raw, brain-to-fingertips writing.
I’d had a dream that my car broke down at a local state park and after a moment, I discovered that nobody’s cars were working. All the power was out and everyone was trying to figure out how they were going to get back home.
In the dream, I found myself walking with a small group of people that had come from Portland and didn’t know the most direct route to the interstate bridges like I did, so I had agreed to lead them because the walking path across one of the bridges was right near where I lived. We started walking and the sound of gunshots in the dream startled me so much that I woke up.
Now, My mom always told me that I should write my dreams down, so I did. And I kept thinking about that dream all day at work…wondering what it would be like to have to walk out of a situation like that. By the end of the day, I had the small seed of an idea scratching around in my head.
That night, I had another dream. I had run into a girl who called herself Amber, and she told me that she had a story to tell me. We sat down around a camp fire and she just started talking. I did my best to remember everything she said but, you know how dreams like to fade the moment you come back to consciousness, right? That’s exactly what happened.
I hopped out of bed and went straight to my laptop. The first words that I wrote are the first words that I remembered Amber telling me in my dream, “I just spent six days hiding in my car and I’m pretty sure that Dan is dead.”
That line became the first line of the first “Journal” I would write on Amber’s behalf. Over the next several months, Amber would pop up in my dreams every now and again to tell me about another thing that happened to her. I would wake and jot down everything I could remember in my Notes App (usually while sitting on the toilet lol) before running out the door to work.
It still feels crazy to think that one rogue dream and a few, random real-life events shaped an entire novel. The last edits that I made to the original journal entries were back in 2022 after I had uploaded it to *dun-dun-DUUUNNN* WATTPAD to try and get some feedback. (The image attached to this post is the first cover I made for Wattpad)
Then in 2023, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo and turn the original journal entries into a full novel. I succeeded in adding 50k+ words to the manuscript in the month of November, but even adding all those words to the manuscript, it was still only totaling just over 65k words.
Over the next couple of years, I really dove in and turned it into the 150k+ word book that is available today.
Now that I’ve said all that, I think that I’ll make that first journal entry my next blog post!
I hope folks might find it interesting!
Walk in light and truth.
~LynnErin