Hello, dear readers. All month long I’ve been posting about the books I wrote when I was much younger, which led to the creation of Our Lady of Righteous Rage. So far, I’ve covered books featuring Our Lady characters as superheroes and as campers being chased by a creature in the woods. I’ve talked about Nyda Summit’s series and Amy and company growing up in From Here to There. Now we’re coming to the end of the Our Lady Writing Roots posts, and I’m going to tell you about the original Our Lady.

Our Lady of Righteous Rage: 2013

Ten years ago, I had an idea floating around inside my head. I was listening to Green Day (I still do, btw), and I had watched Bullet in a Bible more times than I could count. In April I had gone to a Green Day show in Brooklyn (I also met and took a selfie with their drummer, Tre Cool, featured above). My brain was overloaded with a ton of inspiration and I needed a place to put it. I was working in a bookstore at the time, and trying to get as much writing done as possible. I was also contemplating new employment: there were rumors that the bookstore would be closing due to a rise in the cost of rent. I even spent more time playing my guitars. By this time I had published three books: Fortune’s Wing, Fortune’s Wing: Second Flight and Valentine, via Xlibris. I wanted to continue working on those two series, but I also wanted to write something completely different. I had created most of the characters featured in the current Our Lady books between 1994 and about 1998/1999, but none of them had ever appeared in any of my published work. From Here to There, Nyda’s series, Green Day’s music and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying gave me an idea. I started making notes.

I bought a composition notebook and began to write. Up until that moment, none of my handwritten books were ever very long, topping off at about 120 to 140 pages. But this new story was growing in length. I reached the end of the notebook, page 215, and realized I needed a second book. If I ever started a band I knew what I would call it: Our Lady of Righteous Rage. That became the name of the story that was growing between the pages of two composition notebooks I ended up taping together.

I reached Chapter 54, page 309, when I paused and thought, Why am I still writing this by hand? If I’m going to publish this, I need to start typing it. Little by little I began typing my manuscript. I decided I would not use Xlibris to publish Our Lady—negative experiences and expenses which yielded no return had taught me a valuable lesson. I came across Re.Ad Publishing in California, and they seemed promising, until I stopped hearing from them. I found out other writers were having similar experiences, and later Re.Ad went out of business. I found myself back at square one. That’s when I found Create Space, now known as Kindle Direct Publishing or KDP, a service from Amazon. I republished my first three books with brand new covers. I used KDP to publish the first edition of Our Lady two months later. This edition didn’t contain any swear words. I published Our Lady or Righteous Rage: Extended and Uncensored in September of the same year, complete with swearing, and continued the rest of the series in the same fashion.

Handwritten VS Published

So what are the differences? Honestly, just the inclusion of swear words. The handwritten version has them, the first published edition does not. I went back and re-read Our Lady and decided swearing was necessary. My characters are New Yorkers, and so am I. Let’s face it: New Yorkers swear. What you read in Extended and Uncensored is what I handwrote back in 2013.

What’s the takeaway from all of this? For one thing, never discard your old writing, no matter how old it is. All of those books I wrote in middle school and high school came in handy later on. And write notes! I relied upon notes I wrote in 2013 to help me write Our Lady in 2015. Use notebooks. Yes, it’s very analog, but its also very necessary. I don’t always have immediate access to a computer and I have to handwrite my drafts. Thankfully, I write VERY FAST.

Next time I’ll tell you about how Novocaine came to be.