OFs and the Stress!
Writing Olivion’s Favorites (OFs) was a stressful hell. It was not that I did not like the story– I actually love the story and characters. I guess it had to be because Louis Proof and Cyndi were in a traumatic situation for the majority of the novel. My stress came from the fact that I had to make everything up. Seriously, nothing on Midlandia had a reference to anything that I had personally experienced before nor was it based on my life. The Marvelous Effect was a total retelling of my actual life and was influenced by people that I grew up with and actually still know. It takes massive creative energy to make up an entire world, especially when it is one that is supposed to be the incomprehensible blueprint of everything that we know. I hear Olivion saying “Your world is a muted echo if Midlandia.” When you think about it that was a massive undertaking and those of you who have read both books need to tell me how I did.
If you compare both books you will notice that they are written in totally different styles. The Marvelous Effect is much more rhythmic while OFs is much more conversational and straight forward. That was because I did not listen to any music while I wrote OF and was in a totally different space and mindset. It took MASSIVE creative energy to finish OFs and that was compounded by the fact that I had a few things going on in my personal like that had my in a totally unique space.
What I now realize was that although I was not basing OFs on my life it seemed that what I was writing about was coming into fruition in my real life. For example, I had no real life basis for Perilynn and I soon realized that there was someone in my life that was doing the same thing that he did to Louis to me. SHM. Oh well. They always say that when you focus on certain things you bring them into your life. OFs was one hell of a ride and I am so happy that it is in the can. In fact, it has been out for months.
I will be returning to my original style for Marvelous World 3: Horribly Marvelous, which is also Horribly Marvelous: Book 1. I will get more into that later…