The Last Rite

Where This Book Came From (with a little help from a dream...)

Just over the halfway point, I thought I'd give you a little bit about how I came to write The Last Rite, about where the idea came from, and just how darned long it took me to finish it!

Writing is DEFINITELY not about speed of execution. If you're working on something yourself, especially a novel, make sure you remind yourself that a lot of ideas take months if not years to develop. You are learning and growing yourself, and some things you imagine are still beyond your ability to capture on the page at the time you sit down.

Just keep persevering, and you'll get there!

THE LAST RITE goes a long, long way back for me. It was the first novel I began, when I was about thirteen years old, the age of Maggie Stuart in the book.

I had a dream around that time, or a couple actually, that gave me images I wanted to explore. I have a kind of theory about writing, that if you get an idea or image, or a scene in your mind, there HAS to be a way of fleshing it out. The very fact you got the idea means there's something stirring in your subconscious; you just have to be diligent about pulling it out!

So the initial dream. I'd started keeping a dream journal that year and was working toward a better understanding of why I dreamed certain things and to improve my ability to dream "lucidly," ie to be able to control some of the action in the dreams themselves.

My amazing grade six teacher, Dr. Hewitt (she told us on the first day of school that she had a double Ph.D. in English and discipline: boy, were we intimidated!) said that dreams seem to be a side effect of the cataloguing the brain does after a day's living, filtering memories and deciding which to add to the long term repository and which to discard.

With that in mind, I was tracking the images that repeated, the weird things that got mashed together, and coming to my own conclusions about the use I could make of them. And in particular, I wanted to hold onto them! I LOVE dreaming: most of the time, I think the things my subconscious comes up with are better than anything I could watch on TV or in the movies. :)

It took me a LONG time to get a first draft finished. I wrote about 200 pages when I was 16, then ran out of steam (and time to write: had to spend SOME time on school work...) When I was 23 I got the chance to live in a cabin about halfway between Peggys Cove and Halifax on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia, and wrote another 400 pages in a month to finish the first draft. Phew!

In total though, it was about 20 years before I had a draft I loved and felt I could start to distribute. I published for the first time primarily because photocopies were more expensive than using a print-on-demand platform like Lulu or Createspace! And now I'm done the sequel and well into the third book of the series that I now call "Blood & Magic." Which sums up the underlying viscera pretty well.

Hope you enjoy The Last Rite and come back to read the next chapter!