Monday Musings: Their Circumstances

As Scarred Souls comes out on August 1st, I thought I'd blog about this series. Originally it wasn't a series, it was all one big novel titled Scarred Souls. It centered around Josh and Damian, of course, but also two other couples; Spencer and Lesley and Chad and Dion. 

In the original, Josh, Chad and Spencer were best friends and were still in high school. Josh was still suffering abuse when he met Damian. It was quite a dark story, and it contained elements such as prostitution and cheating. Those elements are obviously not a part of the story now, especially cheating, as I detest it. 

And as for the other two couples, they're still a part of the series. You'll get to see both Spencer and Lesley and Chad and Dion with their own stories. Chad and Dion's are in planning, and I plan to write it after Josh and Damian's Kiss Me At Midnight story.

I have countless rewrites of the original story, all roughly following the same storyline as the original. Some things changed though, and new characters came to. Such as the ones in group therapy. I have plans for several of them, as I had way back when. 

The plans I had back when I wrote the novel are severly altered though. There the characters were deep in the problems of their lives, while in the new set of stories they're overcoming them. They're moving on with their lives; they're finding love. I write their love stories and their path to move on with their lives, not about their troubled pasts.

I find that I like the new format of the series; the short stories. If I wrote a novel now, it would be too many characters to keep count of in one book, with switching POVs. It would be entirely too messy. So the short stories work. I try to keep them at at least 10K each, some might be a little shorter, some might be longer. 

Right now I'm working on Silver and Kian's story. Their title still eludes me, but I'm hoping it'll come to me before I finish the story. Next is the contribution to the Kiss Me At Midnight anthology, then it's on to Measured Doses, which will be my first ever threesome.

I also need to make a timeline for this series as I get more stories written, because I'm writing them entirely out of order.