Writing Casket Case
TLDR: Writing is hard. Buy Casket Case.
I think you’ve already heard this news, but my debut novel Casket Case comes out next month! Until then, you’re going to hear a lot about it. I thought I’d start from the beginning and tell you about the writing process, but it went somewhere I didn’t expect.
I had a hard time writing this newsletter. I kept putting it off, and I did the thing I used to suggest to my students and asked myself why this feels different from the other newsletters I’ve sent out. I think my writing experience with Casket Case just feels too big to describe. There’s the actual physical writing - how many drafts, how long did it take, easy or difficult parts, where I was physically while writing it, etc. There’s also my own ~journey~ with it.
Publishing Casket Case is of course fun and exciting, but everything wasn’t always fun and exciting. I loved the concept from the beginning, but I have memories of wondering if I was a good enough writer to get it right. If I could ever finish it. If it would ever be good enough to send to other people. If I would be ok if it turned out to be just another document in my Google Drive.
Of course, the optimistic people in my life (you know who you are) would want to clean it up with a celebration of completing it despite those thoughts. And when it’s going well, writing is really fun. There’s no greater feeling to me than plucking an answer you’ve been searching for out of thin air while you’re driving your car or walking your dog and scrambling to get to your laptop or phone or any substance that could act as a piece of paper to document The Solution that will fix everything. But writing is also really hard.
There were regular occurrences when I wondered if I was wasting my time and if that mattered. Then, there are the normal writing occurrences of trying to correct scenes that weren’t working or trying to figure out what I was trying to say and how exactly to say it and when, and maybe you can understand my hesitance to attempt to sweep all that under the rug to chat with you in a newsletter as if the past few years were the most fun I’ve ever had.
Thank you for allowing me to access my feelings for a moment (shoutout to my 4 wing for making this possible) as I try to write about my experiences over the past few years in a way that might be interesting to folks who aren’t me.
Let’s start at the beginning.
The idea for Casket Case started as a joke about my love life. My friend Trevor and I were in my office at work catching up, and we both enjoy a bit of dark humor. At the time, I had been sorting through a string of bad romantic decisions and had sworn off dating.
To poke fun at this, Trevor asked, “Do you have anyone coming to see you this weekend?”
I responded, “The angel of death, I hope.”
The weird little lightbulb in my brain turned on.
This is the birth of Casket Case. In the basement office suite of a college dorm.
But I was writing a whole different book at the time, so I let it lie. As I concentrated on other things, I would get sparks of inspiration for what would turn into Casket Case. For example, what do I mean by angel of death? Are we talking grim reaper? Or something else? I enjoyed thinking about the job part - what would it be like to work for Death? Who would work for Death?
Related, who would date someone who works for Death? This was bouncing around in my head for a few months before I legitimately got stopped in traffic next to this building in downtown Birmingham:
The sign says “Magic City Casket Company,” and I thought, “That would be a great book title.” I was stopped in front of the building for a minute, so I had time to wonder what type of person would work there. Maybe the type of person who would date Death?
From what I can tell, I started writing in early 2019, years after the original idea had come to me. Unrelated to Casket Case, I was depressed (the clinical version). I was querying the first book I had been working on with no luck. I was also applying for jobs and having no luck. So, naturally, this was a great time to start a book about Death.
You might remember that the world shut down in March of 2020, and I found it a little difficult to concentrate on writing along with everything else. I booked my own writing retreat in a cottage in North Georgia and wrote for two days straight to finish the first draft in September of 2020.
When I went back to read it, it was the most depressing thing I had ever read. I had written it in first person point-of-view, and the main character Nora is pretty depressed in the beginning of the book. A lot of it was me writing about my own experiences with depression, and that has its place, but the comedy part of the rom com was practically nonexistent.
Important note: My friend Sarah read so much of this garbage early stuff and is somehow still my friend. Special thank you to her.
I spent the next year or two (!) reworking the outline of the story and moving scenes around to get to a more coherent plot structure. I also switched the whole thing to third person point-of-view. Writing it in first person helped me figure out Nora. I was also working out some of my own stuff, so I don’t necessarily regret it. But for all you writers out there: NEVER DO THIS. It took so long to change every single sentence to third person, and even in our last rounds of edits, I was still finding errors. If you find any in the final version, please for the love of Saban, do not tell me.
At the end of 2022, I knew I needed to get serious in 2023. I had started to get a bit bored reworking the same stuff over and over, even though it needed it. I sent it to other friends to read it at the beginning of the year and started querying in February.
I’m going to leave our story here, so I can get more into the weeds about the process of finding an agent and a publisher next week.
Leave comments if you have thoughts or specific questions about the process.
See you next week!
P.S. Alabama folks: don’t forget to come and snack with me on August 10!
Loved this look at your process and the peek into your life over the last few years. Can’t wait to read the book!
So ready for all the writing process insights! Keep ‘em coming 😃