Sarah Michelle Lynch

How do I start this? It’s really difficult because I didn’t sit down with a plan, nor did I write this book from beginning to end. I just had a few foundations and worked from there.

A few years ago, I had a dream… Oh that old cliché, yes… But it’s true. I dreamt a man and a woman in the future who loved one another (desperately) would have so many barriers between them that it simply wouldn’t happen. I had to find out what those barriers were. That dream, unlike so many others that fizzle and fade away, never left me. I soon joined this notion to another…

So, it was during a long period of maternity leave I was sat cogitating, brewing ideas… I was trying to harness a way of making something of an idea I’d had in my mind for a while… a bridal shop acting as a cover for something else. As a former journalist, I always keep my beady eye on developments around the world… Anyway, for some reason, I’d decided this bridal shop was one of a few and it stood for more than just marriage. It was outwardly obscure and eccentric, but inwardly much more purposeful and covert. I wanted to turn the whole ideal of a fairytale upside down and kind of just mangle it up a bit. Stick with me here…

In real life, I love to read a romance, a bit of chick-lit now and again, plus a load of other stuff in between. When I started out on this journey, I thought I was heading down the path of being more whimsical than anything. However, I quickly learnt that my talent lay in suspense, thriller, action and intrigue. If I showed you some of the early drafts, you would not believe how some of my stuff evolved. The development of Beneath the Veil was quite incredible. I’ll try to explain as best I can…   

At first, my debut novel was called The Dressmaker. This is the codename of a character who exists in the background of my book, but I thought if it caught on, it would be catchy (but some Booker winner had already written a book called this, lol). I had codenames for other characters and decided I could possibly write other books under their guises. But… stuff happened. As my book grew and sprawled out into some vast expanse of viral mess, I knew this title would not do. So, back to the drawing board. The world I was creating was hiding in the shadow of an event that took place some decades before and I needed a name for this catastrophe. From seemingly nowhere, out popped The Ravage. My editor husband suggested it and at first I said, “God, that’s terrible. Ugh, no.” I really hated it. But then, I grew to see how it could become effective. It’s not a word used invariably in everyday language. It’s a bit uncouth and sticks on the end of your tongue. It’s dislikeable and unattractive. But that is exactly how this terrible event needs to be portrayed; as something a little bit irritating, lingering, frightening and misunderstood – but totally feasible.        

The Ravage it was. But then, something else happened. I realised I had all this imagery, all this psychology, all these layers of meaning – and the title became something else again. I remember the day… I was wracking my brain. Nothing seemed to work. I was about to hop into the shower when I shouted downstairs to my husband, “Beneath the Veil!”

“Yes,” came the response. We knew. When you read the book, you’ll know why too. This title has a quadruple meaning. My main character Seraph/Seraphina wears a veil of fearsomeness everyday to get her job done. Meanwhile, there is a veil of fear cloaked over the world. There is also a literal meaning… from the very origin of the virus that spawned three volumes of work. A canopy to smoke out creatures undiscovered… Plus, of course, it also very much refers to the bridal shop…

The Veil. The wedding veil. Umm… conjure the images…? Why do brides wear a veil? Tradition? Ceremony? Pleasing aesthetics? What does it represent? Femininity, modesty and coming of age? Or… that on her wedding day, she becomes someone totally different after finally having that veil pulled back? Or is the veil really hiding something else? Is all the pomp and ceremony artificial and shallow in comparison to the symbolism of that small, relatively minor detail? It’s a discussion…

With my writing, I aimed to get discussions going. It’s why I vied away from pages and pages and oh so many pages of boring description that many authors add to their work(s) sometimes to clarify or justify themselves. I really empathise with that need, I really do. As an author, you’re often sat there thinking, “Jeez, people will see straight through me. God. This is shit.” But I had to just stick with it and believe in what I was doing, and hope that others could imagine what the future might be like alongside me. I just had to hope that people could see beyond their expectations and give themselves to something totally new and provocative – and BELIEVE. Throw away all your preconceptions and simply believe that anything is impossible. The mind can achieve anything. I wanted my audience to question things and think for themselves. I wanted families and friends and colleagues and spouses to be asking each other over their dinners, “Which bit are you at…? Oh my god, I can’t believe this happened. Why did they do that? How did they get here…?” I didn’t want everything to be straightforward and manifest itself easily.

Originally, the first half of BTV was whimsy; the second full-on action. I had to cut the entire front half of my book. I chopped it out and started again. How I would write is like this… I’d spend a whole day mulling. Whether I was nursing my daughter, washing the dishes, walking down the street, at the cinema or eating… I’d be seeing an action sequence in the back of my mind, twisting it and mutilating it until I knew I could squeeze no more out of it. I’d take the impossible and somehow make it possible. I’d reach for seemingly ridiculous and absurd ideas and make them believable. Then once my baby daughter was in bed at night, I’d furiously type it out with the energy burning out of my fingers. If I didn’t get it out, I’d not sleep that night. That was how it was. I saw everything in my mind, and then I relayed that. I sometimes wrote the dialogue first, then added the location description, then layered up further and further to add action, emotion and suspense in there. I always saw everything before my eyes but I had to drill it into myself, “The reader needs to see everything you can. They can’t without your help. You have to tell them every bit.” The adrenalin often took over and you’d forget that sometimes. And so, I’d go back over chapters again and again and again to ensure I had squeezed every ounce of my vision out onto those pages.       

Sometimes, I’d throw an idea in somewhere and have to go back through the whole book and ensure everything matched up. This was not an easy way of working. I had to have a photographic path through the maze in my mind, mental markers if you like, reminding me where everything was. But I was learning and developing and setting the foundations for something much bigger.

My first book was the hardest I will ever write, I know that for sure. Simply because, I was pretty much experimenting with what I could do. I was determining what kind of author I was going to be. I was evolving just as much as my characters and their fates were. I was living their journey and breathing it along with them. I soon knew I couldn’t leave it at one book. In my mind, these people had other stories, and so The Ravage became the trilogy title. It had to have some place in the whole thing. I saw the path that lay before me and had to take a deep breath and give myself to it. I felt like a medium telling a story that was not my own, that I was not in control of, and that would take me.   

I was a fledgling writer who started out with the notion that I simply wanted to write a book. I knew I could write, I always knew that. However, I never knew what it took until I gave it a bash. I never knew how sometimes, you can feel so sure of something, only to have all your ideals and beliefs blown to smithereens. That in the blink of an eye, a small idea can spawn a thousand others, and lead you to write a novel that has been described to me as “the first thing that has got a true sci-fi fan excited in ten years.” The learning of how to interpret the images came to me eventually and I realised not to force it. I would simply wait for the pieces to slot into place and then write what I saw. I did get writer’s block but I jumped over those bridges and told them, “I’m going to break you down.” I really pushed myself and never allowed myself to write something for writing’s sake. Everything in my books has to have a place and a purpose. My head hurt, and only then, did I realise I was doing something right. No pain, no gain.

It was a true labour of love, in more ways than one, but you need to read it to believe it. If I could ask one thing of my readers it would be this, “What do you see in the future? Really? Be honest and truthful and realistic.”

We all have our ideas, but I try to paint a realistic version, not some techno-world of androids and such like. I wanted it to be so believable, that it would be frightening, but not overtly so. I wanted to show the power of words. I wanted ultimately – to write a damn good rollicking ride that would provoke, challenge, endear, enamour and allow escapism.

More insights into my writing processes to follow soon…

Why not? Amazon have made it very easy to do so. Perhaps I decided to do it because I simply could. Or perhaps, because everyone else seems to be doing it. Lots of people have had success with it. I think whenever I sit down to ask myself the question, the overriding answer is that I did it because of the freedom it has offered me. The freedom to write what I want, how I want and when I want. Call it vanity, arrogance, or ignorance even, but I simply love writing. I love, love, love it. And I love when people enjoy it – and I know there are some out there whose happiness does pivot on what happens to my characters! I never thought my words could do that, but they can it seems!        

Maybe I did it because I did not believe I would be able to land a literary agent because I was crossing genres. Maybe because I am an unknown author who is literally emerging and I want to simply see how my stuff gets received, rather than wait around for ages. If I was honestly bothered about the dosh, I would have been banging on the doors of agents until I was blue in the face and had finally got a mega publishing deal. I was never after that, however. I have an 18-month-old and I have priorities.

I made the decision. Whether it will prove to be the right one in the long-term, who knows? But I thought long and hard about it. I made it and decided not to regret it. I love writing. I love it when people enjoy it. First and foremost, I’m a mother. But I also happen to be able to spin a good yarn. Traditional publishing is obviously going to help you produce the best product you can because you have so many editors and seasoned pros on hand (but that’s only if you can find the right people for the right product – and my product is shall we say, unique and complex). I’m not sure what I’ve written could even be classed as a product. It is sprawling and eccentric, perhaps even barmy and pushing the boundaries just a little too far. It is raw and untameable even, a bit like me. However, I’m testing the waters. I’m developing all the time. If these books are a precursor to something bigger and better, so be it. I feel as though I have a few more novels in me yet.

I’ve made mistakes along the way. Many. When you self-publish, you have nobody to fall back on. But that’s what makes you stronger, after all. It is a tricky game but it is probably one that is going to make me hardier. Get it…? Little ‘in-joke’ there.

These books have been begging to be written for ages and I won’t be able to stop until they are done! It has been just over a year now since I really knuckled down to this task and it’s still ongoing. It’s been an intense period of furious writing, then editing, then re-writing and proofing and re-reading and re-writing. Sometimes having hundreds of thousands of words swimming in your mind can cause slight insanity! A strange way of working but it is how I do it. It works for me. We have Beneath the Veil and Beneath the Betrayal already out there. I’m probably 90% done with the first draft of Beneath the Exile, which is going to prove just how much I’ve learnt. I hope the writing of that will do the talking for me. Anyway, we’ll see!

Seeing as though I’m currently writing my third novel this year (the last in a trilogy), I thought I might start this blog as a kind of therapy or something, some escape from the other writing I do perhaps!

I thought maybe I might start with the topic of how I came to write in the first place. I suppose it all started when I was about eight years old. I immersed myself in books from then on and have since read a whole bunch of genres, from classics to romance, chicklit to YA fiction, sci-fi and fantasy, thrillers and biographies. I don’t much like horror or detective novels. I don’t know why, but they are not really my taste.

For my English degree I wrote a dissertation on the Brontë sisters’ novels, focusing on the use of the supernatural in them. It is where my literary education started really, in Yorkshire, that is. I’m using a quote from WutheringHeights to head my third novel and it kind of sums up the whole trilogy really (even though in my books I weave quite a few genres together). I am trying to explore the question of whether romance ever really mirrors real life, or whether it is always going to be a genre that ultimately glamorises love in one way or another. Does romance simply gain audiences because it appeals to women/men’s notions of imperfect perfection? Of a love lost but a journey well-travelled? Of a love found amongst the most unlikely circumstances? Stories themselves can be whatever they want to be, fiction can take us into realms we never thought possible and force us to ask the questions we often don’t like to but which we secretly need to. Sometimes we race to the end of the book hoping for one ending, and get given another. That can be terribly frustrating. Sometimes we don’t like that ending (mentally rail against it even) and curse the author for days afterwards for killing off our favourite character or concluding a love story in a way we never expected. Surely if we are thinking about a book for days afterwards, that means the author did their job properly. I love the debate. It’s why I read books within a day sometimes. It’s why I’m writing my third novel this year.

So much is down to taste, so much is in the art of the storytelling, and a lot else is in pure talent. After all, how many people in their lifetimes actually turn an idea into a novel, and from there, make it a success? Few. But it is the writing of it to me, that seems to make it all the more worthwhile – book deal or no book deal. The experience can take you to places you never expected.

It was when I had a child some 18 months ago, I was figuring out a story in my mind while I was busy breastfeeding. I was sat watching the Royal Wedding and it seemed so much like a fairytale. Everyone wants to believe in that. I am inspired by everything and everyone around me. I remember tiny details from childhood sometimes rather unexpectedly, out of the blue, and it can sometimes lead me to pursuing an idea for a plot or something. You have to relate to your characters/stories/locations, otherwise, it wouldn’t be tangible.

I started writing when my daughter was off the boob and sleeping through the night. I knew first and foremost I wanted to set my book in the future. I also started with the vague idea of a bridal house being the cover for a resistance group fighting against a terrifying organisation that seem to have been responsible for a terrible catastrophe some decades before. Before long, I was spending nights tapping away at the keyboard like a madwoman. The creative process for me was organic. I never had a notepad by my side. I kept mental notes of all ideas, and sometimes if necessary, I wrote a bunch of bullet points in a word document to remind me to add bits in or take bits out. I showed the finished product to my husband and he could not believe what I had managed to turn out. I am a woman who has done little creative writing in the past (too scared to see where my mind might take me), never did creative writing while at university (was too busy examining feminist fiction) and now I was suddenly tackling a full-blown 100,000-word novel. But that’s the person I am. All or nothing. And I’ve since had a few people tell me they also really like what I write.

So, there we have it. I’m a fledgling writer with a desire to write something new and dynamic. Maybe I’ll talk about how I weaved so many genres together at some point. But I think next time I might tell you why I chose to self-publish, and explain the effort involved in that.