Changing Directions - My Publishing Journey Part 4

 Haven't read parts 1, 2 and 3? Click HERE to start reading from the beginning.

 

After finishing my first Twilight fan fiction, Perspective, I embarked decided to deviate from the wold Stephenie Meyer created and write a story with Bella and Edward both being human. 

I'd begun reading stories with BDSM elements and I was intrigued by the level of trust and communication such a lifestyle required. Also around that time there was a huge story in the news about a young woman who'd been held captive for twenty years before she was rescued. My first thought was that when she decided to enter into a relationship that it would take a great amount of trust and communication after what she'd been through.

 

The wheels in my head began turning and before long I had the idea for a new story I titled Finding Bella.

 

Around the same time I was writing Finding Bella, E.L. James, better known at the time as snowqueens icedragon, was writing her fan fiction, Master of the Universe. As both of the stories began to gain some traction in the fan fiction world, they inevitably got compared to one another.

 

Eventually, the comparisons began to create a problem. Some readers felt Finding Bella should go in a different direction and they were very vocal about it. As time wore on, I began to lose my motivation to finish the story and realized that if I wanted to see if finished, I was going to have to pull it.

 

As luck would have it, there was a small publishing house that was setting to launch their first stories at the end of 2010. They were looking for new authors and had stumbled onto Finding Bella. They wanted to know if I had anything I was interested in publishing. I still wasn't sure what I was going to do with Finding Bella. And it wasn't finished at that point regardless. 

 

However, I had written another story that had nothing to do with Twilight or even fan fiction. It was a story I'd been playing around with in my head since I was fourteen and that I'd finally written down. I sent them the manuscript and within two weeks I had a contract on my desk for my very first published novel.