Name of Author: Angela Merlo

Title of Book: Devil's Lake

http://www.wattpad.com/story/24170993-devil%27s-lake-wattys2015

Favorite Authors: JK Rowling, LJ Smith, Sharon Shinn Suzzanne, CS Lewis, Flannery O'Conner, JRR Tolkien, GK Chesterton, and Peter Kreeft for his "Socrates Meets . . ." series. They're sort of creative non-fiction which makes learning philosophy fun.

Bio:

I'm from Wisconsin, earned my BA in English in 2006, am married and have a 4-year-old daughter. Currently, I work part-time on weekends captioning phone calls for the hearing impaired, but I also consider myself a part-time homemaker. I also do some informal homeschooling with my daughter. Things will get more formal when she's older. Right now we have dance parties where we sing about letters and practice writing them. We're also members of a parent preschool coop, so I volunteer there occasionally.

What's your book about?

A sucidial young woman who meets a young man who has the power to compel her emotional turmoil away.

Who is your target audience and why?

I would say the story borders between Young Adult and New Adult. Alison is an 18-year-old who doesn't feel ready to enter the adult world. That said, Alison is still pretty innocent and inexperienced. So she might feel a bit younger than 18 to some readers. I have found that other readers who struggle with anxiety disorders really identify with her struggles, but I have found more extroverted readers to like her as well.

What is paranormal about your story?I leave a lot of ambiguity when it comes to the nature of Philip, the lake, the animals, and the Indian Effigy Mounds surrounding the region. I think part of the fun for readers is trying to figure out what's going on. So without spoiling things, I'll say that there is definitely something paranomal/supernatural happening around Devil's Lake. And since the lake is a real place, I've pulled a number of ideas from Ho-chunk mythology and local ghost stories.

 Does it contain other genre elements? Why?

A lot of people have described it as paranormal romance, but I like to think it's a little literary as it explores the "human condition" rather than mere entertainment. This is a story I had to write. It's been a way to reflect on my own past. In some ways, the story is a letter to my younger self. It reflects a lot on my own struggles with an anxiety disorder and I hope offers a type of hope. Maybe my hopes for it are too ambitious though.

Tell us about your writing process. From story idea to published WP tale.

Well, I really wrote from the seat of my pants when I was young. I'd go on walks, enjoy scenic views, or sometimes even sit on the bus and just allow myself to daydream. Tiny ideas would spring from there and then I'd write.

With this book, I took a project I'd started developing in high school and then pondered over for about two decades. The writing process for this version began with a sloppy freewritten outline. Then I focused on a specific portion of the story and fleshed my notes out further. And then I'd narrow in on what I'd expect to be 3 chapters and flesh that out even further.

 That happened quickly. Then I wrote 5 extremely lengthy chapters in about 3 months. For the next two years, I've added chaptered, deleted chaptered, redivided chapters, rewritten chapters, etc. And I've done research on the Devil's Lake, it's history, lore, generic Wisconsin history. I took more notes, jotted down ideas and continued to do so as I write. The story does evolve.

All and all, it took 2 years to write the first 13 chapters. I partially came to wattpad to motivate myself to write after. I had 9 chapters polished and four more that were in older forms that wouldn't make sense without work. I committed to posting a chapter a week and figured my buffer of chapters would keep me from taking a break, but I did get to a point in December where I had to stop.

I resumed posting chapters in Feburary and decided on a biweekly schedule. This was too slow though. So I've made other goals. Now my goal is one chapter written a week. I still keep a 4 chapter buffer, but I am more accountable to myself. As I've been nearing the end, though, writing faster has gotten a lot easier.

Did you encounter any challenges when writing? How did you overcome them?

In college, I was told by one of my professors almost constantly that my characters weren't interesting . . . especially Alison. I had brought in a copy of a scene from my high school version of the story. I did this as a test because I felt like the quality of my writing had gone down hill. Indeed, my professor thought Philip was interesting but not Alison.

I obsessed over my inability to characterize well. I'd do writing exercises. I'd write out descriptions of my favorite characters from books. Then I'd highlight in those books how what had led me to those impressions. It didn't help.

The breakthrough came the day I connected Alison's traumatic past with my own. I was upset about my past and in a place of self-pity. I found myself thinking of Alison's past instead, and I realized the character wasn't realistically effected by it. I realized it'd probably make more sense if she had some anxiety disorders like me.

It was scary to consider the idea. How could I write a character who suffered from something so deeply personal for me? That got too close. If people read it . . . *shivers* But I realized all my interesting characters were ones who struggled with emotional control. Usually there was something paranormal going on. Their emotions caused dangerous storms. Their vampire side awoke at night and murdered people they'd been mad at during the day without their awareness. Some character were such extremes of me that they were downright crazy.

Everything I'd written when I was young danced around this unconscious theme of anxiety. My character's paranormal features were metaphores for my issues. Now Alison was going to take off the veil of that metaphore and become more real. It was really really nerve racking to do, and I still didn't know if I could write characters who weren't like me in that way.

For this reason I experimented with writing other characters first exclusively from Alison's perspective. I thought of people in situations I'd been in, made some adjustments, wrote the scenes and then stepped back and said "Ok I know how Alison is interpreting this, but what's actually happening here? What are these characters motivations?"

It's been a very healing process to do. It's made me more aware that I'm not as different from people as I suspected I was. People just deal with their issues differently than I do. And since then it's gotten easier to just develop characters who are different than me without writing the scene first from Alison's perspective. Granted, sometimes I still go back to ensure the first person perspective is not getting too objective.

 What does "writing well" mean to you?

I'm really big on writing clearly, and effectively. Poorly written stuff confuses readers, involves logical leaps that break the flow and ruin the suspension of disbelief.

But recognize this is a craft you develop over time. Give yourself permission to be a novice. There are great books on writing, and studying literature can help, but don't let them discourage you. Don't let other authors make you believe that their method of writing is the one you should use. Whatever method you come up with will be one you got to through experience. There's nothing that can actually replace that experience.

I certainly don't regret all the unfinished projects I began or the fact it took me 2 years to write 13 chapters. If I were to write a new book, I would do more research first and plan a bit better. But I have known what to plan or what to research without that experience, and I certainly think it would have been a greater waist of time had I written an entire first draft when I knew it was going in a direction that needed drastic change.

  So don't lament the process, and enjoy not only what you write but the process of learning to write better.