Catharsis (Book 2): Catalyst (25 page)

But I didn’t see Cat as being a “loner” long term, so I decided to start Catalyst with her already having found that friend.  I could have added in more of the backstory about them finding each other, but it would have added too much length to the book.  Plus, that is exposition that wasn’t really needed for this part of Cat’s transformation.  Instead, I started this story with Ren already being a part of her life and just dropped hints as to how their friendship originated.

As Cat becomes more ensconced in the Darkness, I wanted to have a moral light to help guide her.  That’s where Ren comes in.  He is her connection back to who she is supposed to be.  Who she
wants
to be.  He helps balance her as a character.  And he will play a pivotal role in Cat’s life in the next book.  More so than in this one, I believe.  The stories don’t always go where I plan, but I think I can at least control the part Ren plays.
Plus, from a writing standpoint, I didn’t want to just have Cat on her own.  It is more fun bringing in new characters and having them interact.  I can only do so much, creatively at least, with Cat as a secluded hermit.  She needs other personalities to bounce off of so that she can develop.  Lazzy did that a little bit in Catharsis, but he wasn’t a fully fleshed out character.  Ren’s existence allowed Cat to become a stronger person.

And, more importantly, he was just fun to write and bring to life.  Once I had the idea for Ren and started bringing him in, he took off on his own.  I could foresee doing a future story just about him.  I think his history, and future, could be worthy of their own arc.

Will Ren and Cat ever be a romantic item?  Wouldn’t that make sense since they are a boy and a girl on their own together in a young adult novel?

Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening at all.  I didn’t want Cat to be guided by “love” or “boys”.  That happens enough in young adult novels, and I wanted Cat to be a strong-willed girl who wasn’t swayed by her heart.  She loves Ren as a friend, but I don’t think she would ever see him as more than that.  Also, Cat isn’t Ren’s type.  At all.  But that is a plot point for another day.

You’ve mentioned that the story doesn’t always go where you want.  Are there plot ideas you wanted to put in that didn’t make it?

Aside from Cat having a mentor/teacher in Catharsis that never came to fruition?  Yes, actually.  Several.  The biggest one was the original bad guy I had planned out for Cat to encounter in Catalyst and the next book before Chadwick became such a force.  When Chadwick had only been a bit player, I had planned on introducing the idea of Cat encountering another person who had been infected with the same disease as her.  It stemmed from the idea of my not being able to find an appropriate foe for her to battle.  She’s too strong and fast for most humans to be a worry for her, so I started looking for another way to create conflict.  I wanted her to battle somebody even faster, stronger and crueler than herself.  I had even mapped out the character and what he would do.

I hadn’t named him yet, but it was going to be a young boy who had been infected decades ago, and we would get to see what the long-term effects of this disease would do to someone’s mental stability.  He had been infected when he was around eight years old and spent the ensuing years getting faster and smarter and more ruthless than any other living person.  He was going to discover Cat while she was out hunting one night and just follow her.  He would have spent the majority of Catalyst being a background character that she noticed often, but couldn’t figure out why he was always around.  Then at the end of the book he would have started attacking her indirectly.
He killed whenever he fed, and he always fed on young women.  He would use the fact that he looked like a lost little boy to pull the girls in and get pity and then he would reveal his true self and feast.  He delighted in destroying people.  And he had discovered how to infect others.  He would routinely infect two strong males and then force them to battle to the death in order for them to prove which of them was more powerful.  This process would be repeated with new guys until he had developed one that was completely insane and yet absolutely loyal to him.  He would then use the survivor as an apprentice and send him out after Cat to kill her.  This would be how he entertained himself after years of being infected. 

I had planned on him being the major bad guy in the next book as she sought him out, but Chadwick usurped him as the villain.  Chadwick showed me that I didn’t need a superhuman character to beat Cat.  I just needed someone who was smarter and wasn’t bound by morals.  Chadwick ended up cannibalizing some of the kid’s character traits, but that was all that came from it.  Chadwick became the center of her struggle instead.  I still think it would have been a fun story to write, but it wasn’t destined to be. 

Don’t you control what happens in the book?  As the author, don’t you know what will happen to the characters before you begin writing?

Well, that’s a tough question.  Actually yes and no.  I generally have an idea of what I
think
will happen when I sit down to write, but it doesn’t always go that way.  I’m sure every writer views the process differently, but for me it is more like I am “channeling” the words rather than “writing” them.  As a scene unfolds on the page, I am putting words into the mouths of the characters, but I’m not always conscious of the act.  It is almost like I am sitting back and watching it happen.  The characters take shape on their own and make choices I don’t always agree with.  Even though I am doing the physical writing, it feels as if it is coming from somewhere deep in my brain that I don’t have conscious control over.  It is hard to explain at times, but it is fun to witness.

As an example, I might want Cat to get angry and kill Chadwick in the opening scene of the book.  Just kill him off and move on.  I can even write out that scene and leave it on the page.  But it won’t
feel
right.  It will feel
forced
because somewhere inside of me it isn’t what I think she would do as a character.  So I will go back and delete it and start over.  This time I don’t
think
about what I’m making her do.  I just type and let the scene happen.  Something deep in my weird, little writer’s brain then kicks in and guides the action.  It isn’t really at the forefront of my thinking.  It’s what makes the writing process fun for me.

What I feel I get to do as an “active author” is create situations and scenarios to put the characters in and then see how they will react to them.  For those of you with tabletop gaming or Dungeon & Dragons backgrounds, it feels like I am a Gamemaster/Dungeonmaster and the characters are people playing the game.  I get to create the adventure they’ll go on, but they ultimately make the decisions themselves.  I can “guide” the story, but I don’t fully “control” it.

I can create a character and throw them into the story, but once they are in there they get to make their own choices.  The more a character starts to “come alive” for me on the page, the more they get to control their own destiny.

So there are no scenes in the book that are pre-planned or thought out ahead of time?  The whole story is just spontaneous?

Most
of it is created that way, yes.  But there are a few scenes I get to plan out.  It’s just rare for me to plan them out a certain way
and
have them actually occur like that.  Usually I have an idea for how something is going to happen in the book, but by the time we get there some other event has changed the plot line and it no longer works.  But there are exceptions.  I foresaw the ending scenes of both Catalyst and Catharsis, and they never wavered throughout the writing process.

Cat standing over Mr. Black in the dark bedroom in Catharsis as she makes her fateful decision struck me as powerful and something I wanted to see happen.  And that scene didn’t really change from how I originally envisioned it.  But, and here is where my previous caveats come in, I had no idea who the man in the bed was going to be.  He wasn’t named Mr. Black at the time, and he wasn’t a drug kingpin.  And I didn’t know why she was there.  That all came about over the course of the story.  I just knew how I wanted it to end.  I left it up to Cat to figure out all the in-between stuff.

And same with Catalyst.  One day while I was showering, I saw the vision of Cat being trapped in a hallway with her sister while the girl bleeds out.  To make the situation even worse, Cat was exhausted and weak and doing her best to resist the temptation to give in to her Darkness and feed on the one person she truly loved.  That scene was devastating to me and yet compelling.  I thought it would be a great way to end the book.  Unfortunately, I had no idea where that hallway was, why her sister was there or who had made all the events come together.  Those details were all created by the characters throughout the course of the story.

What do the book titles mean?  Aren’t books supposed to have titles that connect to what happens in them?  I never once heard Cat say the word “catharsis” or “catalyst”.  What’s up with that?

Correct.  Books should have a connection to their titles, and both Catharsis and Catalyst have that.  But it is a connection that I don’t expressly state throughout the course of the story.  If you know what the words in the titles mean, and you follow Cat’s journey then you should see a connection.

The word catharsis roughly means “the physical act of relieving pent up emotions”, and that is what Cat does in the first book.  She becomes infected with a horrible disease that ruins her life and she deals with it by acting out and trying to accomplish something good.  Her hunting down drug dealers is a “cathartic” journey for her that keeps her from going insane.

Catalyst, in turn, means “something that causes or creates change”.  Chadwick plays the role of a catalyst in Cat’s life.  He causes her to go from a disturbed but well-intentioned hunter of street scum to a macabre, death-loving terror.  This book was about Cat’s change from one type of person into another, and Chadwick’s involvement in that.

Finally, how does your editing and writing process work?  How long does it to go from idea to finished book?

It has taken me a year each to write, edit and release both of my books so far, and I foresee that being a doable schedule for the future.  If I was writing full time and had no other commitments, then I imagine I could get a book finished every 4-6 months.  But that isn’t how life works right now.  Most of my time is spent teaching or with my family, so writing comes in a distant third.

I typically get a chance to start writing around the time school begins in August, and I continue writing at night or on weekends throughout the school year.  In order to get enough free time to write effectively (I do better with long stretches at a time where I can really commit mentally to the characters and let them run.), I have given up most other hobbies.  I no longer watch television shows except when I’m with my wife, and I don’t read as much as I used to.  Fortunately, that is where audiobooks have been a lifesaver for me. 

Often “writing” is what I do during my down time at night once my daughters have gone to bed.  But the problem is that when I write I have to be secluded so as to avoid distractions, and that means I can’t be around anyone when I do it.  I try to strike a balance in the evenings of spending time with them AND spending time writing.

At my house, I converted one of our spare bedrooms into an office so I can cut back on distractions while I write.  My biggest obstacle when I sit down to write is not letting myself become distracted by all the fun things that
aren’t
writing.   Internet newsfeeds, email and social media are killers.  They can eat up time that I should be spending writing.  To help counter that, I don’t write using my office desktop computer.  Instead I use a simple tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard, and I set it up in a small closet in the back of my office on a folding table with a chair.  I turn on a box fan to create white noise so I can’t hear the kids playing, and I focus on just creating.  The tablet makes it a little tougher on me to distract myself as I write, since I turn off all “pop up” notifications.  If I want to check social media, then I have to consciously switch to an app to do that.  Mentally, that makes it easier for me to focus and not come up with ways to distract myself.

I also have gotten better about trusting my own editing process as I write.  With Catharsis, I would spend an hour sitting and staring at the screen trying to find the right way to word a certain sentence so it would sound good to me.  But it wouldn’t always come quickly, and I would get frustrated.  It was a tremendous waste of time.  Now when I come to a passage that doesn’t sound right in my head after writing it, I just highlight it so I’ll remember to pay special attention to it later and then I move in.  That one small step drastically changed my writing process for the better.  I am faster and more efficient, and it made my editing skills stronger.

The actual writing of a book takes me most of a school year, but it’s been my goal to always have a manuscript completed within a week of classes ending for the summer.  That schedule has worked for me so far.  After that, I spend the summer months re-reading the story, editing it, re-reading it again, working on the cover, having other people proofread and critique it and then editing it again.  Then before school starts, I send it off to be finalized and published so that the paper edition is ready for when my new students enter my room.