The Next Big Thing Blog Hop

I have been tagged in “The Next Big Thing Blog Hop” by Pete Denton. His original post can be found here! He too, like I, is an author worth checking out! The Next Big Thing Blog Hop started on She Writes a while back and has spread quite rapidly.

So – What does this mean? Well I’m going to shed some light on Project 1 and then tag five people who will offer information on their work in progress. The problem is that, on top of my head, I can only think of three more writers working on novels right now and I don’t want to stress them. Therefore I won’t tag anyone but if you are reading this and feel you want to do a Big Thing Blog Hop – feel free to do so!

1. What is the working title of your book?

Project 1 [The problem is that I change the name in nearly every draft I write… I had a working title for over 6 years but it received criticism for being too childish.]

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

The bulk of the action comes from real life. I wrote a post about not too long ago. It’s basically my first relationship – which was incredibly strange and troublesome indeed. One time, when I was about 14, I relayed the whole story to a friend (which took an hour or two) and he said with a straight face “you should turn it into a novel.” That’s where I got the idea to start writing.

Now – to make the story even more interesting I needed to add one more elements to it. After working on an early draft, in Swedish, I had an epiphany of what I would add to make the story unique (and trust me, it is, I still haven’t found a novel similar to it).

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Young adult contemporary paranormal romance.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

This is a rather strange question. It really feels like I am getting ahead of myself. Well, I actually have no one in mind. I would have preferred someone like Dane DeHaan to play the protagonist if he was at least five years younger. Too bad you can’t turn back time.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

When a young boy meets the girl of his dreams – only to have unexplainable events tear them apart – he begins to wonder if supernatural forces are at play and if his increasingly vivid hallucinations are more real than he first imagined.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Agency all the way. Unless I find my-self in a real pitch I won’t self-publish. This is not because it’s bad to self-publish but rather than I want to spend as much time as possible writing and not researching business opportunities and public appearances (which I am looking forward to and will enjoy – it’s just that I don’t have the right connections to market myself).

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Project 1 is a special case because it’s been with me ever since I started writing. Considering I cut the novel in half to make it into two parts, the first draft took 2 years, but Draft 2 was almost a complete re-write and took three months.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

As I said before – I haven’t found a book like it. There are books containing certain aspects of it – but none are similar in its entirety. All beta readers have agreed so far and said my novel truly managed to mindf*** them into oblivion. Some even had recurring dreams, based on the events in the novel, after reading it. So… perhaps I invented a new genre? Should I call it Psychotic fiction, perhaps?

But if you really want to know what it’s like, picture this: A Nora Roberts novel, targeting young males, with a first person narrative, told by a protagonist who is not entirely right in the head and cannot always tell truth from fiction, dream from reality, and tells the story both as he recalls it in the future, and as it happens to him in the present.

9. Who or What inspired you to write this book?

Besides real life and the friend who urged me to do it – The initial inspiration for all the paranormal events in the novel came from many factors. Most notably Akira, .hack//Sign, and Star Ocean 3: Till the end of time, because they influenced and affected me at the time of writing the initial plan for the first novel (and the sequels I am hoping will come into existence soon). Later I found inspiration in my own writing, modern scientific theories, my own life as I grew up and changed view on what I originally wrote, and works of fiction, be it novels, movies, games, influenced by what originally inspired me.

10. What else about your book might piqué the reader’s interest?

It’s the novel I wish I had when I was young, in love, utterly depressed and fed up with the world. I needed something to comfort me – something I could relate to. When there was nothing that could accurate reflect my experience of life I had no choice but to write it myself. My novel is an eye opener, not only for me as a person, but for the reader on how differently someone can view the world.

– F H Hakansson