My Origins Journey

The idea behind Lamont’s Origin story comes from my love of back story.

To put it simply, I’m the person who will go onto various wikis and read up on characters and plots and concepts. I want to know all of the details I can. It consumes me.
When I’m writing, I write this way. I used to just plunk all of the exposition and back story in the main story with no care or regard, but I learned over the years to change that.

The concept for Origins began in 2010/2011, when I was going crazy writing various scenes between different Target characters. It was part of my If-I-have-an-idea-I’ll-write-it stage, and I loved it. I credit this with helping me create characters that fans told me were realistic and in some cases, felt like people I knew.

For Origins, I had written some scenes where Lamont was younger, which were based from scenes that I’d put in the draft of target at the time. The early scenes were simply called scribbles. There was no set plot or structure to them.

In 2014, I became excited about the thought of giving Lamont an origin story and making it fit in. I worked hard on an outline, and had an ending written before I’d even planned the beginning. By 2014 though, many things about Target had changed. I had gutted much of the initial story, and it wasn’t first-person anymore.

I think the biggest challenge when it came to crafting Origins was devolving Lamont. In Target, Lamont is composed, respected, rich, and he is afforded a certain level of leeway. His enemies are wary of him and his mind and the way he runs things.
Origins was initially about a slightly spoilt boy who starts selling drugs to make money. It was flat and my mentor hammered me about it. There was no substance to it, no reason to turn the pages.

So, I made him a loser.

He was still smart. When he spoke and was confident, people still listened, but he had been raised in poverty after his parents died, and there was a family member who didn’t like him. He was trying to go to school and resist the lure of the streets, dodge bullies and look after his little sister. It had more legs to it now, and then I wrote in scenes that made Lamont the man he is today. Teflon, so to speak.

I wrote those scenes and then I wrote the birth of Lamont the criminal, and the steps he grew to build his empire. His road to power, so to speak. I added in some of the other characters from Target, added bad guys and compelling supporting characters, and focused more on Lamont’s struggle to balance a normal life along with this impulsive idea he had to become a drug dealer, and everything that came with it. Ultimately, the goal was to have a completely differently Lamont in the first chapter, where he’s sixteen years old and it’s 1997, to the Teflon-prototype character he is at the end in 2002.

I knew straight away that I was going to draw heavily from both Martina Cole and Mario Puzo on this. They both wrote books that covered sagas of a crime family, and would move the story forward by years and sometimes decades if it was necessary. I wanted to cover a five-year portion of Lamont’s life, but not make it boring. I wanted everything to keep moving at a nice pace, and still get the development of Lamont and Shorty and the other characters. I wanted to show both a different side to Lamont, and the side that people recognised from Target, and I think I achieved that goal.

Initially though, it was hard. I wrote a few key scenes that I loved, but I wrote them so far apart that there were no connectors. As is always the case with me, I began writing other projects, but over the years, I would go back and read what I had, sometimes adding some more or taking some away.

In 2016, I had a rough first draft but I knew even as I finished it that it had massive plot holes. I was just relieved to have it done though.
Because of the way I write, with some of the other pieces I was working on, new characters were created and because Origins was the beginning, I wanted some of them included, which meant going back and rewriting certain parts of Origins to make these characters fit. I basically made the whole process harder for myself, but the struggle builds character and as my mentor is forever telling me, I have to suffer for my art. So, that’s what I did.

I reached 2018, and I desperately wanted to get Origins finished. I was looking over some of the scenes while simultaneously wanting to finish the sequel to Target. I bounced between the two projects before finally focusing on Origins. I adopted a process that had worked for me with other projects. I wrote each scene on a document card so I could see how it connected to the next one. I wrote the final draft exclusively on Vellum, breaking the book down into two sections: Lamont, and Teflon.

Lamont dealt with his early life, giving an insight into how hard Lamont had it, and giving him some motivations and goals to work towards. I left Lamont on a cliff-hanger, and then moved onto Teflon, which dealt with Lamont’s reasons for moving into the drugs game, how he started, and how he grew.
I enjoyed writing this immensely. It was a new challenge for me and knowing that I already had books around it made the process both harder and better at the same time. Alongside a new erotic project I was working on, I prioritised Origins and soon had a finished draft. I sent it out to my advanced readers and they loved it. It had achieved everything I wanted it to achieve.

I guess the point of my rambling is to establish that whilst I often berate myself for just how long it takes me to finish some pieces of work, I’m rarely if ever unsatisfied with the end result.
Whether you read this before Origins, or after, I hope you appreciate the journey.

Origins: The Road to Power is currently available for pre-order on Amazon. Click here to order a copy!