Convergence’s Journey from a planted seed to a full-grown novel…

[J.D. Watts]

     As a woman of faith, I’ve always had these musings about the things that we don’t really understand in the world.  Our planet is full of mysteries that we can’t explain or are only beginning to get a grasp on.  In the same way, there are aspects of things outside of this world, which aren’t fully understood.  One of these is the concept of Angels.

     I guess the idea behind this series really begins with a story that my mother loves to tell about me when I was a toddler.  My dad was an over the road truck driver, so Mom and I were on our own a lot.  One day when we were home alone, she said I kept staring into this one corner of our living room and it was making her uneasy so she asked what I was seeing.  I pointed and said, “That man standing in the corner.”  Mom looked over and saw nothing so she asked me what he looked like.  I looked from her back into the corner and then to her again and said, “He’s got white hair and he’s dressed all in white.”

     My mom got chills up her spine and tugged me away, telling me not to be silly.  We went on an errand to get out of the house.  We still don’t know what I did or didn’t see as I don’t even remember the event, but all of my life, I’ve heard her ask God in her prayers to send Angels to watch out for the people she loved.  That story has always made me wonder if they really were around and we just never knew or saw them.  It’s that concept that planted the seed for the overall theme of Convergence. 

     Many years later, after an already failed attempt to write another story that had been in my head and a few dozen stories I posted online just for fun, I began to feel ready to try my hand at writing a novel again, spurred on by the opening of the Original Fiction Contest at The Writer’s Coffee Shop.  A dream started the ball rolling on the idea of the ‘race’ of Guardians and Nate and Dani’s story began to unfold for me.  I had so much fun laying out the ideas of the ranks and orders and finding interesting ways to tie in some of the things that occur in nature that aren’t entirely understood with events and characters in the story. 

     The climactic scene in the story came to me in yet another dream while in Schaumburg, Illinois on a long weekend trip with the family.  We had taken my son up to go to Medieval Times for his birthday and stayed on another couple of days to visit the sites and family in the area.  It was the second night we were there that I awoke at 3am with the elements of the dream so vivid in my mind that I knew I had to get up right then and capture it before I lost it.  It was a later chapter in the book that I was at least a hundred or more pages away, and I was amazed when I reached that point in the timeline how little I had to adjust for it to fit in with the final manuscript.  It remains to this day my favorite scene in the entire novel. 

     I’ve had so much fun organizing my thoughts and coming up with creative reasons for things that surround us, a theme which will continue throughout the next two novels of the series.  I hope my readers will continue to enjoy my story of forgiveness, love, and maturing into one’s own through trial, error, and a bit of invaluable guidance as I send these characters through the paces.  Induction, book 2 of the series, is scheduled to come out in September of 2011, and my third book, recently dubbed Maelstrom, will be the tumultuous completion of the series in the fall of 2012.