Writing Process

(March 2015 – May 2018)

This book was quite difficult to write.  I had never written the final book in a series, and I felt a lot of pressure to wrap up all the plotlines and make the story dramatic enough.

It took a long time to finally realize how I wanted to write this book.  Because the other books in the series were single points-of-view, my options were to have a single first-person narrator (Daniel seemed like the most likely candidate, since he narrated the first book), a third-person narration, or multiple first person narrations.

My first attempt at this book was made in November 2015.  The title was Fighters and was told from Misty’s point of view.  I had thought then that the Wolf Point series would be six books long.  Misty would narrate book 4, Tucker would narrate book 5 (possible title: Traitors), and Remy would narrate the final book.  When I thoroughly failed at writing Fighters, I thought about making the series five books long, with book 5 narrated by Kayla (I could keep the title as Fighters) and the final book narrated by Daniel, making the series a mirror of itself.

I eventually settled on the third option.  I had Daniel, Kayla, and Zeke rotate their POV chapters, with each continuing their journeys of self-discovery.  I also decided to include chapters from the other members of the Wolf Point pack.  Each of these chapters had to encapsulate a bit of that character’s story arc in a complete sort of way.

I wrote the bulk of this book during Camp Nanowrimo in April 2018.  During this month, I attended a writer’s workshop on handling a large cast of characters, which was very helpful.  Because I had such a solid sense of what each character was trying to accomplish and the novel’s structure, this novel required probably the least amount of editing of any of the Wolf Point novels.

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COVER STORY

The cover design of Warriors necessitated the redesign of the entire series… which I wasn’t actually too upset about.  After five years, the original covers were starting to look dated.

My first cover redesign had the same general style as the original Wolf Point covers: title text on a black strip, cutting through an image of the characters.  Trying to find an image of three teenage-looking people one of whom looks like a girl was extremely difficult.  This image was one of the few I could find that might fit, but it was very small.

The second cover design looked weird because of how the title was broken up.  I guess I didn’t have to break the title up like this… but overall this cover had a gentle feel to it, at odds with the title being “Warriors”!

The final cover features an image from Stefan Keller on Pixabay.  Uncropped, the image looks a bit sci-fi, but with the moon explosion cropped out, it was perfect.  Three people, a moon, and a cool color scheme.