Category: Dancing in the Purple Rain

Sometimes, the best ideas for world-building and our novel settings come from external sources.

But I never thought that a course on writing male voices as a female writer would lead to thoughts and ideas that play with color.

The oddest of details will find our manuscripts. And we really do draw on our personal memories.

For me, it was the pink sanitation fluid from my time at working at a dairy factory that found my novel Dancing in the Purple Rain.

A deadly internet challenge and a global pandemic were what I needed to allow the full story to form in my head. However, I wanted to distance my story from the events of 2020.

Shifting the story into the future provided challenges of its own.

It was a novel that took me many years to just get out of my head. And it wasn’t because of the inability to write, but rather I struggled to piece together the lie.

The opening scene (which you can read on my blog) was written back in 2017 (something like that). And I had a rough idea as to what I wanted the story to be. But I was stuck on the lie that my main character was being told.

Until the pandemic hit in 2020. Suddenly, the last piece of the puzzle I needed fell into place.