Where did I get the idea for Your Life Will Have You Back?
I’m forever locked in day dreams, and it’s my favorite place to be.
So how did this book come to be what it is? And how has it changed from the first draft?
I was mentally exhausted…
Back in 2014, I had the worst year. I drove from Nevada to Minnesota, got stuck in snow storms, rain storms, mud, got in a disagreement with my best friend and lost that relationship, then I lost my dad who was my absolute best friend. What was worse was I lost him emotionally before he died—all due to his poor choices. After that, it was funeral arrangements, delayed flights, and heartbreak that I didn’t know how to emotionally process. Weeks later, I suffered my second miscarriage, but got pregnant again a few months later and spent the duration so sick I couldn’t get out of bed. Going into 2015, in February, I had a stillborn. After all that, I was mentally exhausted…
In September of 2015, still exhausted with life, I laid down to go to bed, and started thinking about a day at a friends house back from my teenage years. It was a memory recall from a time where I’d felt just as depleted with life, but had stopped to look at the scenery around me. This friends house was in the middle of now-where in the Black Hills of South Dakota with a gorgeous view. As I was thinking about the beauty of the trees, and the quietness of the back-country road, my imagination took over…
A girl with a French braid, worn down Converse sneakers, a flannel shirt, and a satchel walked right by me on the road. She was gorgeous, but out of place on that road. (Understand that when my imagination takes over I’m fully immersed in it. I can see everything as if it were right in front of me. I can speak to my characters like a person, or be a fly on the wall, or see life through their eyes.) I ran up to walk beside her and asked her if she was okay, and where she was going. She told me she was just walking. I asked her where she was headed, and she told me to follow her. From there, the scenery around us morphed. We were on a different road, with different trees, a different house off the the right of us. From that point, my perspective was dropped into Holly’s, but she was still in control of all the information. It wasn’t until the diner that I knew she was hiding from someone.
The initial draft of Your Life Will Have You back was completed it two weeks time, all while working a high-paced, full-time job. This book was the fasted I’d ever completed a piece of work, and I was madly in love with the works. My only hang up was the ending, which is entirely different from the ending you know. In fact, the only Chapters that remained from the original works were the first ten. I spent 7 years rewriting the ending over and over to make it fit, and I was never happy with it. I felt like it didn’t fit the point of Holly’s story. In one of the 17 alternate endings, I had over 3,000 typed, full-size pages! In doing all this, I learned the backstory of nearly every character, solidified each personality, and finally figured out the message that Holly and Noah wanted to put out to the world.
The book was never about Greg coming back, it was about Holly growing as a person and finding her worth. There comes a point where being humble, thoughtful of others, and kind is harmful to our own self. Holly had grown up in an environment where she didn’t have to worry about who might abuse her good nature. Greg had to come back in the book for her to fully realize it was time to advocate for herself; also realizing she needed to do a better job about what she was willing to tolerate from those she loved. It was my message to my readers of why we sometimes keep ourselves in unhealthy situations, and it breaks down to fear of the unknown, but ultimately love for the good parts of another person. We don’t throw out the whole plant just because a few leaves are dead, we trim, add nutrients, and make sure it’s getting the right amounts of light and water. The other point I wanted to make is how much help is promised to victims of abuse, but when the tides swell because it’s the way of nature and outside forces, it’s the victim that’s blamed. They didn’t do enough, didn’t know enough, didn’t think about the ten-thousand things on top of the hundred-thousand things already piled on their plate. The reality is, some things are logical to foresee, but no one ever knows for sure; and for victims, the hammer comes down hard when they don’t know.
I loved writing all the intricacies of this book. There’s little “golden nuggets” of insight all over, and I created this book on the premise of, “the first read is for entertainment, the second and beyond is for knowledge and understanding”. So, whether you’ve read the book once, twice, or more times than you can count, you’ll always find something new and a different perspective.
~Bye for now!
DETAILS
When — March 2023
Where — Las Vegas, NV
