Never Say Never

I had thought I would be coming to this post with a ghost story, but I postponed that because I need to talk about something really neat.

Some months ago, I released a sequel to my novel Saving Jake as a download on Smashwords. I like to think people noticed, although I doubt it. I know that I don't tend to peruse that site myself very much. But then something unusual happened.

Saving Jake was published by New Leaf books back in 2002. Good grief, it has been a while! At any event, shortly after that I started a sequel to it because I missed working with Mr. Holdridge and Mr. Corts, and I wasn't working on anything new yet (Haunted had yet to cross my mind). I stopped working on the sequel after getting about a third of the way through it, after making the acquaintance of Cassie Valentine and Michael Penfield. And they became my new friends.

But Jake and Corts were always in my head. They live in the same neighborhood, after all: right around Bridgeton Park Cemetery. So after releasing Drawing Vengeance late last summer, I took out the partially-written sequel and decided to finish it. Now, since Jake is on contract with New Leaf, I know I couldn't release Missing Persons on my own for profit, so I asked my buddy Donnie Light to format it and put it up on Smashwords for me. That happened in November, 2015.

Fast forward to early 2016. I met up with my editor from New Leaf after she had asked me how sales were for Missing Persons. I told her it was a free download at the moment, and that was fine, but we had a dinner meeting and she offered to read it. About two weeks later she told me she had finished it and wanted to publish it as an e-book only since Missing Persons is shorter than a full-length novel.

I was flabbergasted. I had told myself -and probably you, as well- ad nauseum that I would never traditionally publish again, not after launching the Bridgeton Park Cemetery series on Amazon myself. HOWEVER, my editor is a lovely woman and if she is willing to give my little sequel a shot, who am I to say 'no'?

So here is the announcement: going back completely on my proclamation to be an indie author first, last, and always, I want to tell all of you that Missing Persons will soon be available as an Amazon exclusive!!!! I will go on FaceBook and Twitter and my author page at Amazon to announce when it is available, which should be pretty soon. Hopefully, this week, if the planets align. The cover art (see above) is gorgeous as always because Carmen Elliott always does gorgeous work. 

There is a big disclaimer that I do want to add: SPOILER ALERT!!! Please, please, please do not read this story if you have not yet read Saving Jake. To do so would ruin the emotional investment in the first book as well as blunt the last message at the end. So please don't do it.

That said, I hope that those of you who made friends with both Jake and Corts will enjoy reading a follow-up story. I had fun writing it - I hope you have as much fun reading it!

Saving Jake: The Story Behind the Story

Perhaps other readers like to know the story behind the story. I am the sort of person who loves hearing writers talk about how they got the original idea for their books, or how they got to the final version of the books they release. I can't claim to have the following of the average NY Times best-seller, but for those who have read my work and felt compelled to get in touch with me about it, these musings are for you.

Saving Jake took fourteen (count 'em, 14) years to write. I kid you not. The book is very loosely autobiographical and parts of it were so difficult to set down on paper that I kept putting them off. I even wrote an entirely different novel in the middle of that whole struggle. But I kept coming back to Jake and to Corts because there was a story there that I needed to tell.

Originally, the two main characters were male and female. That's right: to Philip's dismay, he started life as a girl named Amy. Jake was originally named Mark. And the working title of the book was Portrait of An Artist Off the Wall. Mark was an extremely depressed artist, Amy was his best buddy, and believe it or not, the book ended with his suicide. Not exactly uplifting, eh? I worked on it with various plans of attack before deciding that the whole thing was untenable. Of course, I was still attracted to the story of this very depressed artist. Fortunately for me, shortly after that Jake himself came and "rang my doorbell," as I always say. And he arrived in his army-green trench coat and red high tops, with long hair that looked like it had been badly trimmed at one point, and a smirk on his face that belied all the pain in his brown eyes.

Getting Philip on board was worse than pulling teeth. He gave me his name very grudgingly. I think if he could have made me write the whole book referring to him as "Character A" he would have been fine with that. But I did eventually get his name. Then he refused to reveal anything else about himself except that he was Jake's best friend. Again, we reached a compromise by letting him tell the story in his own words. No third-person tale-spinning for Philip Corts.

I already had a story ending in mind. I need to have an ending or I don't have a book. But arriving there was like the toil of two and a half marathons without any training. It was hard work, grueling work sometimes, and the end result wasn't always pretty. Fortunately, Jake is extremely patient and knew he wanted this story told, and eventually Philip opened up. Sometimes the scenes he shared overwhelmed me and at least one of them almost caused a car accident when it popped into my head, visually, while I was driving to work. I'm glad that only happened once. Most of the time, both the guys were a little lower-key than that, and I'm grateful.

The idea of merging my depressed artist and his reticent best friend with a shipwreck on Lake Michigan came to me while waiting for a classroom door to open (I was working as a sign language interpreter at College of DuPage at the time). I have a fascination with shipwrecks on the Great Lakes and was reading obsessively on the subject while working with Jake and Corts.

The places and venues in Door County -all of which are real, although one or two of them have morphed since the time of writing- were a given. Door County has always been my favorite escape, so I shared that with Jake and the whole thing took off from there. Especially since Door County is the haven of more artists than you can shake a stick at. Door County, like Jake, is wild and natural and creative. We both love it up there. Corts probably does too, although he'll never admit it.

At any event, I couldn't let Jake kill himself the way Mark did, but he needed an escape and he and Philip gave me a climax to their story that was far better than I could ever have imagined on my own. Hard to write, but very worth it.

I have been asked by readers if I have Corts's particular ability, and the answer is definitely not. Nor would I want it, something that he reminds me of from time to time. But here's the thing: I do know people -a few of them- with some weird and startling abilities, so gifting Philip with his particular talent was not much of a stretch to me.

Saving Jake was the first book I wrote completely from the heart and so I was delighted when my editor and publisher at New Leaf first called me and said, "I love your book and I want to publish it." I made her say it twice, just to hear it. And I'm grateful that there have been readers who enjoy the company of Jake and Corts as much as I do. If you want to read more about that world, please go find Missing Persons, either directly on Smashwords or through the link to Smashwords on my website (www.opheliajulien.com). And I hope you enjoy that story, too.

By the way, for those of you who are fans of the Bridgeton Park Cemetery series, I will eventually write a post on how Haunted came about and what it first looked like (nothing like what you've read, I'll tell you that right now.)

If you have questions about my topics, my characters, or anything like that, please feel free to email me through the website or catch me on FaceBook. I'd be happy to answer!!!