This whole story started out with a set of dialogue, a song, and a scene. The dialogue was simple:
“Why are you smiling at me, Grady Sinclair?”
“Because you’re fun to smile at, Page Townsend.”
The song was Flaws by Bastille and the scene was their first meeting, again, at college. When this story came to me, I wasn't sure I was going to write it. I was busy with Dead Lines and editing Thorns & Oranges. But there was something about Page and Grady that kept whispering Write me. Write me. So I set out to scribble down what is now the prologue and I got to thinking, ok. This could be good. I wrote two more chapters and that's when I knew I had to write this story. Thankfully, NaNoWriMo was fast approaching and I was able to set all my other projects aside for a month and focus on Never Always. By the end of the month, I'd reached the 50,000 words needed to complete the challange. But the story wasn't finished. All of the present was written but for me, something was still missing.
So was the birth of the past chapters.
I've discovered something my friends, my readers, my darlings. I discovered I'd poured so much of myself into this story that I was afraid to share it. What if it wasn't received well, what if people laughed and told me the characters' reactions weren't relatable or realistic? People can be harsh, I can't tell you enough, and this story-it was dear to my heart. I needed to write this as much as I needed to share it.
I made a dare with myself: share the prologue, chapter one, chapter two, and chapter three. See how it goes from there. If anything, your diehard readers, aka Mama_G and Amanda and Francesca and Sascha and a few others, will read it. No matter what.
I posted.
I've never been so afraid to post a story in my life. But I needed to do it. There are bits and pieces of my own past in this story I needed to let go of and Never Always helped me do that.
Thank you, everyone, who read Never Always. Thank you for your comments, your votes, your tears, for reading. Thank you for loving this story and if you hated it, thank you anyway.
Until next time,
Sarah
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Never Always (NaNoWriMo 2014)
Romance"Why are you smiling at me, Grady Sinclair?" "Because you're fun to smile at, Page Townsend." ~*~ Romances run their course. This is a truth Page Townsend is all too familiar with. She never imagined it would happen to her twice. After some rather d...
