You may have noticed that I pulled the first chapter of Celebrity Skin. I didn’t like it at all. So it’s been radically altered. 50,000 words written and six more chapters until completion.
The new version is Zedd’s POV short prologue and Eva’s short first chapter which sets up the ‘Sam and Dianne’ dynamic. Then switches to Ezra’s POV in the next chapter. I don’t change POV’s during a chapter, it switches off, and not always one after another. I try not to be redundant in doing so. It’s pushing the plot forward, these two are far too different to go about it any other way.
Here’s the thing that is hard to explain about Celebrity Skin. The premise is that Evangeline Thorne, aka Eva, writes a fictional novel about the supernatural called ‘The Veil,’ her manuscript is published, and she sells the rights to be made into a movie (or a series in this case.) It’s a great example of what people think it’s like to have your writing optioned, totally unrealistic, a real fairy tale.
This is necessary because, at first, it is all about the author who hates the actor but hate to turns to heat and then love. You have the three best friends, toss in celebrities, unexpected pregnancies, unstable, despicable parents, and former boyfriends, fistfights, the paparazzi, and voila, it’s a romance novel.
Almost.
I have messed around with the new adult romance trope. I don’t know if it will be appreciated if the same old formula is the only thing that works. Evangeline Thorne is nearing 25 at the start of the story, she’s one hundred percent jaded because of awful things that happened to her as a child and with a former husband. (There isn’t any molestation or anything of that nature. We are the product of our past, and that’s character development 101.)
Evangeline is not someone who doubts her worth based on looks. She is beautiful, but she is different, she has tattoos and interests outside of writing and falling in love. Ezra Ryan is the actor, pretty on the outside, with the false persona of jerk extraordinaire he adopted in taking this first role. Ezra is also a product of his past, and there are reasons for this. There is a lot more to him, he’s a good person who needs to grow up. He has had to go through a lot in his life, different problems where the result is having close relationships with his family but Ezra has no friends. Whereas Eva considers her family to be, Kylie, Eva’s biological sister, and her life long besties Zedd, Samara, and Catalina. Eva has an uneasy relationship with most of the rest of her family. Ezra is younger (albeit 22,) still virginal, innocent, at times bumbling, and, naive, having lacked many of the experiences most of us have on our way to maturity. So it’s a journey for them both. I really love the friends and family as I have written them to be. In the end, it’s a giant HEA, after ginormous amounts of drama and romance.
Plot point discussions about the movie or book, in Celebrity Skin are, from characters I created, and I am still forming as I continue to write The Veil. There are also passages from it. The Veil is an original work of fiction, mine.
It took JK Rowling six years to world-build for Harry Potter and that’s what I am doing with The Veil, although I have written a few chapters and outlined the entire thing.
I am such a perfectionist, Celebrity Skin may kill me. Still, I keep writing, and I have sixteen chapters that are written with six to go. My copy editor is going over what I have now. My grammar sucks, I’ve accepted that, and that is why it is vital to have an editor before you publish.
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Erin Oliver 