The One Year Anniversary of When I Started Writing Consequence.

On this day, last year, I started writing a book.

I had no idea where the story was going. I had two characters, two settings, and a few basic storylines ideas.

I had gotten the idea the previous night, and started writing it in the first person. I failed after three or four pages.

So I started again that morning, though it was slightly different.

My original Persephone was tall with dark hair and green eyes. She was very different in personality from my actual Persephone, too.

Then I was talking to my sister about fictional characters, and she said that all female main characters these days tend to have brown hair.

So I changed how Persephone looked. She shifted in my mind, and starting looking like the actress Molly Quinn. (So red hair, blue eyes, blah blah blah)

And with the change of look, Persephone somehow changed personality. I’m not sure why, but it’s a good job that she did. Because my original Persephone would not have been stupid enough to do half the things my actual Persephone does ~ therefore, I wouldn’t have a story.

And I had another character. I was never that keen on the name Hades, so I knew right from the beginning that I would change his name to Haden. I knew how he would look right from the beginning. But I wasn’t quite sure what his personality would be.

I had Haden and Persephone, all I needed was a setting, a place for them to meet.

The vineyard had already came into mind the previous night, and I remembered something I’d heard somewhere about in China people only being allowed one child (I’m not sure if this is actually true, I just heard it on the radio or something). Obviously in China, they wouldn’t send kids to vineyards, but that was where I got the idea for the vineyard scheme.

So I had Persephone, who lived on a vineyard in Greece, and I had Haden, who I had no idea where he was from.

I’ve always had a fascination with Russia. (Not just cos my mum said on many occasions that it was a country she never wanted to go to.) And I decided that Moscow would be the “Underworld” that Persephone was taken to.

And in the original myth, the reason Persephone stays in the Underworld, is because she eats a pomegranate, and when you eat in the Underworld, you can never properly leave. That’s where the sci-fi element came in. I needed a way for fruit to control her.

Originally, it was going to be a retelling of the myth, rather than parallels between Persephone’s story and the myth, but most of my original ideas changed.

Here are some prime examples of things that were meant to happen that I thought better of:

Persephone was going to get together with Sol.

The Tsar was going to be gay.

Phoenix was meant to be a minor character. (Yeah, she’s in my head right now, laughing at me.)

Phoenix was meant to be a nice happy person without a past.

Phoenix’s only purpose was to be a friend for Persephone.

Persephone was meant to stay with the Tsar.

Phoenix was meant to die. (She put an end to this quickly. She never lets me kill her. Believe me; I have tried so many times.)

Melinoe wasn’t going to exist.

Melinoe was going to have a brother.

The reason Phoenix went to the settlements (the time she set them on fire) was because she had a boyfriend there that she wanted to check up on.

Phoenix wasn’t meant to be the settlement president’s daughter.

Persephone and Drew weren’t meant to SPOILER ALERT die.

So that would have been a very…different book. (And if you look carefully, you can see hints of storylines that never happened. I.e. when the Tsar’s talking to his father in the library, some of the things he says. Or how he reacts the first time Persephone kisses him. Or with Sol catching Persephone when she jumps out the window)

But my characters didn’t want it that way; they wanted me to write their stories, so I did.

I think the book started changing when I got my next two characters.

They popped into my head either the day I started writing, or the day after.

There was a boy. He was tall, with dark hair. He looked like a younger version of the guy who played Tom Riddle in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. This boy was Sol.

And there was a girl. She was short, with dark hair and blue-green eyes. She looked a lot like the actress Isabelle Fuhrman, but with a different hairstyle, and a different eye colour.

This was the character that changed the book.

The character that won’t leave my head, even after a year.

This character was Phoenix (who is trying to control what I’m writing, yet again).

Phoenix was so different from any character I’d written prior to that point.

She was so…energetic. She was practically bouncing off the walls in my head. She was so full of life, so…real.

That’s what I love/hate about her: that realness. Phoenix is the one character who always manages to get the storylines she wants. She gets the dramatic ones, the horrible disturbing ones. And she gets the occasional happy one, too.

When I combined Phoenix and Persephone, I didn’t realize that those characters would form such a strong bond.

When I was writing CONSEQUENCE, I didn’t realize quite what it was about. I once decided that when I’d finished it, I’d write a book about friendship. Not about good friendship, but about why the hell do people stay friends even when one person doesn’t communicate, when one person isn’t being an ideal friend.

I didn’t realize then that I had actually done that. Because CONSEQUENCE is about friendship. And love, and science, and loss. It’s about so much more than I ever thought it would be.

Before I wrote CONSEQUENCE, I was really miserable. And I think that perhaps that book cured me. It worked as a kind of therapy. And I think I learned a lot from my characters. Yes, the voices in my head/figments of my imagination actually taught me a lot about life.

And they still do, I guess. Though in the book I’m currently working on, there seem to be a few parallels with real life. I guess my subconscious mind likes to slip things into my books that aren’t actually meant to be there. I guess my subconscious mind has a lot in common with Phoenix.