I Wrote the Spider Series, Now What?
I Wrote the Spider Series, Now What?
By D.S. Mitchell
So I have spent the last three years of my life writing the three book Spider Series. Now that I have accomplished that major feat, I find out according to the experts, I will need to spend another three years marketing my little project. So, folks please suffer through the ads for the next couple months as I try to market my erotic thriller series. Available on Amazon. If you’re interested, what follows is a bit of the back story on the writing book one of the Spider Series.
It was the start of the COVID-19 lockdown. I’d just made it back to the mainland after a month at my friend’s condo in Maui, HI., when all the craziness started. I had sold my beautiful ocean view home in Surf Pines, Oregon, after I retired from 40 years as an RN and was temporarily living in an apartment in Vancouver, Washington, looking for some place new–someplace different–definitely outside the Portland-Vancouver metroplex. I wasn’t sure if it would just be me and my parakeet or if there was another person in the equation. Time would tell on that score. While all this was percolating in my personal life, I’d been writing and editing www.calamitypolitics.com since 2016; meaning that me and my passion were portable. I did know that if this pandemic lockdown lasted for any length of time I was going to be forced to come up with more than the calamity politics website to keep me busy.
I had been making up short stories from the time I could talk. Although a nurse for many years I like half the world fantasized about writing a novel. Pursuant to that goal I joined the Cannon Beach Writer’s Group which was facilitated by well known writer *Mike Burgess when I lived on Oregon’s north coast. By that time, 2005, 2006, I had been toying with the idea of writing a novel for most of my life. No plot, no characters, no locale, no story of any kind. Truly, I was pretty much in love with the idea of being an author, not actually doing the work of writing a book. What a realization. What an admission.
The Cannon Beach Writer’s Group consisted of about 20 regulars. We met year round every Tuesday. It was fun. Everyone of us was “writing” a book of some sort. OMG that’s been 20 years ago. I’ve told this story before but no reason not to tell it again. Anyway, Mike would challenge us when we left each week with a small “assignment.” The two that are of importance in the telling of this story are, (1) “Write a first chapter of a novel that will keep the reader engaged and turning the pages,” and (2) “write a chapter of a book that’s scary. But, not devils and demons, but a real life terrifying situation.”
Now that takes me back to the start of COVID-19. With nothing to do now for hours every day I decided to do some house cleaning and opened a bunch of boxes including one from my time with the writers group. The two assignments I just mentioned were on top of a pile of papers. After reading them both together I thought I had a real story, or rather I could make a story to fit between the two chapters Mike had assigned us to write. When Mike read them he said they were both “great,” not together of course, but each for its own content. So, “Chasing the Spider” (book 1) is literally the weaving of the two “assignments” together; one, became the first chapter and the second one, the scary one, a chapter late in the book, close to the end.
*Michael Burgess “Uncle Mike”
Friends describe Michael Burgess as a sage, a mentor, a teacher, a wickedly funny wit, a tireless supporter of homegrown art and artists, a man with “a heart as big as the universe and a wry, thoughtful intellect.”
Read more at: Friends and Fans Remember Writer Michael Burgess
