A year ago today...

I wrote the first scene of Their Tangled Fates!

But first, let's back up.

A week or so before that, I woke up from a dream of two college students falling in love, but they had very particular problem—if ya know, ya know. And because a friend of mine had recently told me she had enjoyed reading an interactive story I wrote years ago, that gave me the confidence to try turning that idea into a book.

One of the biggest changes I made from the original dream was changing the story from taking place in the real world during Part 1 to a fantasy world instead. I thought it would be too much of a jump otherwise.

But even in the original dream, the couple had a mutual friend who was helping them out. If you've read the book, I'm willing to bet he was your favorite character. He's mine, too (at least for this book). And I was so excited to explore his personality that the first scene I wrote is what you now know as the opening of Chapter 12.

Want to read it? You'll find it below. It's pretty rough, since I learned a lot about writing in the year that I've worked on these two books. There's no major spoilers, but if you want to go into the book completely blind, come back and read this later.

I'll discuss the scene following the snippet, which will be a little more spoilery, so consider yourself warned.

Spoilers ahead:

A slam of the door startled me into messing up the word I was writing. I bit my lip in frustration, then let out a deep breath. Luckily, I was only a couple sentences into this page. Professor Dewey did not accept any mistakes in our penmanship, and unfortunately, no incantation could erase mistakes made in ink. Evaporating it would still leave the pigment behind.

Reid cursed as he threw his pen onto the table. His page was almost entirely full. “Why are you slamming the door like that, huh? Now I have to start this whole page all over.” He sat back in his chair, crossed his arms, and glared at Sophie, who stood at the door, looking disheveled with her bag halfway falling out of her arms.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” she sighed, dropping her things onto the settee across from Reid and plopping down next to them. “I’m tired of being stuck in classes full of people with no skill or no desire to be here.”

“No offense,” Reid said, “but you clearly want to be here, so what does that say about you?”

“Don’t be an ass,” I said, squirting water at him from my fingertip before pulling out a fresh sheet of paper. It evaporated before it hit him without any outward sign of him doing anything.

Sophie glared at him. “I have skill. I can do everything they want me to do. I just…”

She lifted her hand as if to gesture, but let it drop as if she couldn’t think of the right words.

“I can’t do it when I need to. It’s too much pressure. I choke.”

“Well that’s easy,” Reid said. “Stop doing that.” He started to rummage through his bag for a new paper.

“Reid,” I warned.

“If it were easy, I would,” Sophie said, glaring at him.

“You just need a reason to do it that’s more than just showing that you can,” Reid said. “Maybe you’d choke if I asked you to make a fire right now, but I could probably rile you up enough that you wouldn’t have a problem setting me on fire.”

“I would never set someone on fire!”

“Really?” Reid asked. He lazily flicked his finger in her direction. A small flame ignited inches from her face and extinguished a second later.

“Stop that!” Sophie exclaimed, startling back.

“We’re. Here. To. Learn. To. Fight.” Reid said slowly, emphasizing each word with a flick of his finger that caused a tiny explosion of fire inches from Sophie’s face.

“I said stop!” she yelled.

“Quit it, Reid,” I warned.

“What?” he asked, lower his hand. “If she can’t incant well enough to make me stop, she deserves to be stuck in that class. Even if she could cast without choke—”

The front of his pants burst into flames.

“Shit!” he yelled, and within an instant he was soaking wet, as if a bucket of water was overturned on his lap. I doubled over laughing.

“What were you saying?” Sophie asked, smirking.

“I thought you were gonna go for my hair or something, you savage.” He focused on his clothing with an evaporation incantation to dry off, but I knew from experience that it would take a while.

“There you go, Sophie,” I said. “Simply focus on Reid’s stupid face next time they test you.”

“I don’t have a stupid face. I was helping,” Reid mumbled.

“Yes, well, thank you then,” Sophie said, her posture considerably perkier than it had been when she’d arrived. “I’ll let you get back to your paper.” She grabbed her stuff from the settee and headed to her room, smirking the whole way.

More spoilers:

So yeah... Back then, Sophie was friends with everyone! And the story was written in past tense! Those are probably the biggest changes the book went through over the course of writing it, so let's unpack that!

First off—the tense change. Even as I was writing the first draft, I had the thought that the problems Ellie and Caeo were dealing with made little sense when presented in past tense. It led to too many questions of "at what point are they telling us this story?" So my second draft was almost entirely dedicated to switching it to present tense, and I still had early readers calling out incorrect verb tenses in my third and fourth drafts just because I missed some of them. But overall, it wasn't as painful a process as I thought it'd be.

Now for Sophie—she and Alexis still had their spat in the first draft, but Ellie successfully resolved it and then had a fair amount of pleasant interactions with her. They even went dress shopping together!

My wonderful editor, however, suggested I cut her from the book to bring more focus back to Alexis and Reid. I saw her point, but was hesitant to do that for a couple of reasons, the main one being that one less character to interact with would make Ellie's already small world feel even smaller. So after some brainstorming, I came up with a happy medium: decrease her role, but make her few appearances more impactful on Ellie's arc. For someone whose entire goal is to connect with others and have a sense of belonging, having Ellie fail to reach her accomplished just that.

So there you have it! The birth of Their Tangled Fates! I wrote the rest of the first draft in a month, then started writing Book 2 while my earliest readers went through the first one. I'm so grateful to all of you who have enjoyed it and hope this post gave you some interesting insight into its creation.

What do you think of the changes to present tense and Sophie? Let me know in the comments!