February 1, 2021
Lost World Post One
Week 5, Day 1 – Lost World
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
Release Date: April 28, 2015
Cover Design: Jimmy Gibbs
Formats: ebook, audiobook, and paperback – grab the ebook for just $0.99 for a limited time!
Amazon US
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With their shelter destroyed and their sense of security shattered, Vivian, Axl and the group set off in search of a safe place. But the group’s morale is at an all-time low, and they now know it’s not just the dead they have to fear. Weeks of wandering brings sickness, death and loss to the survivors, and Vivian soon finds herself losing hope of ever discovering a safe place to live.
What can you tell us about the writing of Lost World?
This is the first book I wrote that is told from the POV of two women: Vivian and Hadley. Believe it or not, it was a lot harder than writing from dual perspectives of Vivian and Axl. The reason is simple: voice. Axl’s voice was very unique, both because of his character and because of his dialect, which made it easier to jump back and forth between Axl and Vivian. With Vivian and Hadley, though, the difference was more subtle.
I’ve read books in first person POV that jumped back and forth between characters whose voices were too similar. It was harder to get lost in the story because I kept forgetting whose perspective I was reading, which constantly forced me to flip back to the beginning of the chapter so I could check. It’s frustrating, and that was something I didn’t want to do to my readers. To fix this issue, I first wrote one perspective from beginning to end and then went back and wrote the other one from beginning. When I was done with both, I wove the two stories together to create one complete book.
Which did I write first? Honestly, I can’t be 100% certain since it was so long ago, but I would guess Vivian. The reason was simple: I was already familiar with her voice. After four books, she almost seemed real to me, and by this point it was easy to predict what she would do. Hadley, however, wasn’t just new to me, she was going through a major crisis, which resulted in a huge change in her.
I loved, loved, loved, writing Hadley/Ginny’s story. She has so much baggage and pain in this book, and is going through so much turmoil. She’s angry and hurt and terrified, and half the time she’s pissed off for no reason – even she knows there’s no reason – and it made writing her very challenging and fun. But more on that in another post!
The other unique thing about this book is when I wrote it. Lost World came out only a little over four months after Mad World, but I wrote it more than a year later. If you’ve read my other posts, you know that I started writing in 2012, which is when I wrote Broken World. I wrote Shattered World and Mad World in the beginning of 2013, but I didn’t start writing Lost World until summer of 2014. The first three books I wrote in about seven months time, but I didn’t continue the series right away because I moved on to other projects. Once I saw how well the series was doing though, I started writing the fourth book.
Another thing to note about this book, which may seem small to some, but is big to me: this was the last cover that I did not design myself!
