I’m often asked, where do you get your ideas? My usual response is from a bit of this and a bit of that. This time I’m going to show you one way ideas can turn into books in a series of blog posts using examples from the Fellowship Dystopia series, from the first book to the soon to be published third book.
Trigger Warning
This post includes references to incest, assassination, rebellion, and resistance.
The Journey to a Trilogy through Log Lines
My Soul to Keep, Book One
When I began writing My Soul to Keep, I thought I was writing a stand-alone book. I had a “controlling idea” A victim of abuse can survive and thrive after abuse if she faces the truth and takes control of her life. I wasn’t happy with that. It didn’t seem to be very interesting. So I experimented with it and came up with a logline that I could work with:
In a religious tyranny, a woman haunted by family secrets must join a rebellion against the government controlled by her own family while angel-assassins stalk the land. It took me a long while to figure out an outline and write the story of Miranda. Lo-and-behold, in writing the final chapters my brain decided there were two more books to Miranda’s story.
I’ve always thought about the question “Is violence ever justified?” In my youth, I thought it couldn’t ever be justified. With more maturity, I saw the question had two sides. Then, as a first-time mom, I became fiercely protective. I figure if anyone ever threatened my baby, I could harm another human being. The idea shocked me. I considered the question more deeply.
So when it came time to figure out what came next in Miranda’s life, I began exploring if there was a circumstance when she would decide that violence solved her problem.
If I Should Die, Book Two
In early 2019, when I started writing If I Should Die, book two, my controlling concept, though wordy, captured my ideas: Miranda risks her life to save refugees from America’s Civil War. However, when a wreck destroys her ship, a dying passenger tells her that the Azrael are still alive and plan to finish the war. She cannot convince the rebels she loves. She risks everything to find proof and learns that the Angels of Death plan to eliminate all leaders on both sides. Failing again to convince the rebels of the threat, she goes to the leaders of the Fellowship, her sister- and brother-in-law. Will she convince them to stop the Azrael? Or are they the force behind it?
I had developed a log line: A peace-seeking woman caught in a civil war cannot convince either side that a new plot to clone thousands of Azrael is underway so she must use violence to save lives or stick to her principles and sacrifice many.
It took time to develop that book. The pandemic slowed my writing, but I finished it and published If I Should Die, Book Two of the Fellowship Dystopia series in 2022.
And When I Wake, Book Three
I felt I hadn’t quite answered my question about Miranda and violence. After noodling a few choices, my log line for And When I Wake was: What if a woman believes she owes a so enormous a debt to her fallen comrades that the only way she can repay it is by allowing her rage to turn her into everything she fears?
The log line became:
In a chilling alternate America, betrayals and injustices have forged Miranda into a relentless force for justice, but her ultimate test isn’t defeating tyranny—it’s the darkness growing within her own soul.
That story is on my editor’s desk and (granted no catastrophe) I will publish the ebook in December 2025. (Both the paperback and the hardback will be available in early January 2026.) If you’d like the e-book, pre-order on Amazon now.
Many of my newsletter subscribers have read the first four chapters. If you want the link to that sample, sign up for my mailing list, Reading Rebels. In exchange for your email address, get a copy of the companion novel, Fellowship, my weekly blog posts, and my monthly newsletter (where future sneak peeks are first offered). You can join Reading Rebels here. After you receive the first welcome email, you’ll get a link so you can download those chapters.
Don’t want to join a newsletter? I get it. My inbox is overflowing too. So here is the first thousand words of And When I Wake. (for those of you who have already read this, skip to end.)
Sneak Peek
And When I Wake, Book Three of the Fellowship Dystopia.
It should have been easy to find her murderous sister.
Miranda Clarke glowered at the diner’s grumbling newfangled mechanical dishwasher. She had plenty of motivation to find her younger sister, but finding Irene Earnshaw, formerly the wife of the Prophet and the Lady of the Fellowship in the USA, wasn’t as easy as Miranda had hoped.
Steam belched out between the rubber strips that hung over the end of the machine, and draining water gurgled. Miranda angled her face away from the extra heat of the steam. The steam condensed, gathered on the tendrils of hair that had escaped her hairnet, and made those hairs cling to her forehead. She swiped her forehead with the back of her hand. Got a whiff of the kitchen’s ever-present stink of hot grease and cooked meats that seeped into her clothes and skin.
She smirked at the idea of Irene doing dishes in a diner. Unlike Miranda, her younger sister had chatted for hours about luxury clothes and cars and fancy things with her rich and powerful friends. Friends who might help her even when disgraced.
The word friends landed like a mountain of rock on Miranda’s chest, stealing her breath.
A drainer of clean dishes pushed out from under the dishwasher’s rubber strips and rolled onto the stainless-steel counter.
She pushed aside memories of falling rocks, steadied her breathing, and focused on the latest load of dishes. Stacked the clean ones and carried them to the cooks. Placed one stack at the front-line cook’s station and the other at the back-line cook’s station. Their spatulas danced over the sizzling cooktop, flipping eggs and hash browns and burgers and plating meals.
Keith, the Blue Coffee Pot diner’s front-line cook, was round from his wire-framed eyeglasses to his bushy mustache and his beefy hands. He nodded at her, picked up a clean plate and filled it. Hot plate of steaming food in hand, he turned and placed the plate under the heat lamp and pushed the buzzer to alert the staff in the dining room. Then he pulled the next order slip from the clothes-line-like system that connected to the dining room. “Cuppa Joe and one houseboat.” Even his end-of-the-shift-tired voice had a kindness to it.
On the other side of the cooktop, Chester, the back-line cook, was tall and as skinny as Keith was round. He had a long, straight nose, a youthful face, and an always-electrified head of warm brown hair.
“There’s been so many houseboats today, you’d think Baltimore was flooded,” Chester muttered so the front of the house wouldn’t hear. He set his spatula down and went to the ice cream freezer.
Keith adjusted the jaunty angle of his soda-fountain-style cap, then crossed over to the double-decker coffee pots. Despite the diner’s name, the coffeepots back here, like in any other diner, were stainless steel and glass. “Hang in there, Chester,” Keith said with a little more energy. “It’s almost six-thirty, the—”
“The best hour of the day,” Chester chimed in. The buzzer buzzed under his index finger. He placed a dollop of whipped cream on top of the banana split and placed the confection on the counter for the waiter. “One houseboat up.”
“Hey, Miranda,” Keith called. “Don’t you think it’s the best hour of the day?”
“This is our weekend for extended hours.” Miranda cringed at her flat tone. But she wouldn’t—couldn’t join in their banter, be their friend. It would put them in too much danger.
“Yes, it is. But tonight we get to leave at regular time.” Keith could find something good to say about everything, probably even Irene.
“What would you do if you didn’t have to work?” Chester asked cheerfully.
Have more time to stop Irene and the Fellowship from hurting people. Even if it’s too late for Beryl…for Nick. The mountain of painful memories shifted back so fast, Miranda gasped. She retreated to the noisy dishwasher.
“Pretty girl like her?” Keith put a plate mounded with gravy-coated chipped beef and mashed potatoes under the heat lamp and tapped the buzzer. “Bet she’d have a date.”
Nick and I never had an actual date. It hurt to breathe. She masked her pain with her old daughter-of-the-Counselor smile.
“She has a date?” Chester’s spatula stopped clattering against the cooktop. “Who’s the lucky guy?”
Keith gave a playful chuckle and shot Miranda a mischievous look. “I’ll bet it’s Sam.”
Miranda rolled her eyes. Pushed the next tray of dirty dishes onto the track and pushed the button. The machine’s swish and grumble filled the space. She liked the noise. It protected her from chit-chat. From fake words. Fake smile. And fake submission. From making friends. Friends who would die.
Nick is under that damn mountain. Beryl, too. Because of me. Ten months and I still haven’t found Irene. So how do I spend my time? She scowled at the steam leaking from the dishwasher’s rubber strips. Washing dishes—
Bang.
Miranda’s heart rocketed. She swallowed her gasp and kept from ducking, but her muscles twitched. Don’t look. Her fingers gripped the cold stainless-steel counter in front of her, knuckles straining against her skin. Don’t look. She couldn’t help it.
The server backed through the swinging door with a tray stacked high with dirty dishes. “Make way,” he shouted.
Sam. Miranda grit her teeth to avoid shouting at him and getting her pay docked. Again.
She forced her muscles to relax. When she’d started here, she flinched and ducked with every bang of the door. Sam had laughed himself silly over it.
Dressed in white slacks and a white shirt with the blue graniteware coffee pot logo on his left shoulder, Sam took his time. Every step, every action, every word intentional, a chance to remind the non-Fellowship kitchen staff they weren’t good enough to enter the dining room.
Behind him, the symphony of clatter and chatter from the customers at the lunch counter swelled. The door swung on its hinges, back and forth, turning the dining room noises up and down like a conductor drawing the last notes to a whisper before the door closed.
“The place is hopping today,” he said. “Rush shoulda been over hours ago.” Sam slammed his tray full of dirty dishes down on the counter beside Miranda. “Scrub-a-dub-a-ding-dong, girlie.” He didn’t even look at her.
After I find Irene, he’s next. She dredged up her daughter-of-the-Counselor’s smile again and loaded dirty dishes into the dishwasher’s rack.
Help an Indie Author
Most independently published authors (in fact, about 50% of all authors) do not make a living on their published work. They rely on other income. Many authors never sell 200 books. Their books just kind of “disappear” and never get enough attention to make it worth the costs of publishing. The economics of this often force writers to work slower than they want or make them give up on the book business entirely.
You can help even if you don’t have the money to buy books. Below is a list of the things you can do to support your favorite authors.
- Purchase their books at full price.
- Pre-order their books.
- FREE! Review their books. (Yes, I’d love it if you’d review mine, but all authors need your reviews.) Don’t know what to say? Just write what you would tell a friend: what you loved about the book and what you didn’t love. All published reviews help. The more reviews a book gets, the more the online browsers and bookstores will push it to readers who might like it.
- Where do you put your reviews? The best place to put your review is on the site where you got the book. If that’s not possible, choose a review site like Goodreads, BookBub, the LibraryThing, etc.
- FREE! Tell your friends who read similar books what you like about the book.
- FREE! Click on the author’s links in their emails, comment on emails that you enjoy,
- FREE! Comment on the author’s posts on social media and their websites.
- FREE! Visit the author’s page on social media and their website and tell them what you liked or what their book did for you.
- FREE! Join their email list.
- FREE! Put a request in for the author’s books at your local bookstore and public library.
- If the author has an account on Ko-fi or Patreon, or a similar site, put a little money in their account. Every dollar helps.
Most of us (authors) do what we do for love of stories more than for money. Though we have the same bills, you do with the addition of having to pay for covers, editors, and advertising. But I also have to say that whenever I get an email from a reader, it makes my day, my month, my year.
Thank you, dear reader. Without you, I wouldn’t be able to continue doing what I love.
Let’s be reading rebels together!
Image credits
Book covers owned by Lynette M. Burrows
All other images purchased from DepositPhoto by Vistaprint.