by Corri Lee
Wikipedia
‘Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.’
Jack Welch
Page Six
The Goonies
Santana
Superbowl
Madison Square Garden
The Matrix
‘You know it will always be me/’
From ‘Lying Is The Most Fun A Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off’
Panic! At The Disco
New York, New York
Frank Sinatra
Monopoly
Temple Of Dendur
Within The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Serena Van Der Woodsen
From ‘Gossip Girl’
Samantha Jones
From ‘Sex And The City
Baby Jane Hudson
From ‘Whatever Happened To Baby Jane’
‘You have to die a few times before you can really live.’
Charles Bukowski
It’s taken a year and a half, three laptops and two iPads to get to the point where I can write this message, and I write it exhausted, frustrated, smelly, yet elated.
When I started to write the Blazed trilogy, I didn’t know what it would become in any sense. I had a lose idea for the first book and just had to let it develop into this deep, dark, and intermittently funny story. The characters were only slightly formed and they’ve grown over time. Did I know that it would end this way when I wrote the first paragraph? No way. Would I have finished the whole trilogy had it not been for the readers? Hell no.
I’ve received more feedback for the Blazed Trilogy than any of my other books, in spite of the fact it’s sold nowhere near as many copies as the Meet Me Halfway series. I’m talking ranting phone calls at two o’clock in the morning, nagging comments left on my personal Facebook wall, and emails from strangers all the way around the world.
It was because of those emails that I included Esme and Calloway in the final instalment. You wanted closure for both of them. Esme has that. Calloway doesn’t, because he’s a cunt. Without your feedback, I might not have considered the long-term for either of them, focusing solely on Emmeline and Blaze. You helped me write a better book.
The fifteen month slog to finish The Ashes was painful, and not at all aided by one of my own self-fulfilling prophecy. I didn’t notice until about an hour ago that I left a note at the end of Blazed, expressing a desire to make it big by my twenty-sixth birthday, and to find a wonderful fairytale man like Blaze for my own.
I turned twenty-six this March. As it stands, I’ve had close to TEN THOUSAND downloads on Barnes & Noble alone, which is fucking insane, and I have found a man so parallel to Blaze it’s almost scary. In ways, it feels like I wrote this book about my own relationship—excluding, of course, the whole schizophrenia/murder thing.
And you can blame this man for it taking so long. We’ve known each other for four years, but it was New Years Eve of 2013 he stole my taxi, somehow convinced me to go back to his friends so he could pick up his car and drop me off at home, and ended up keeping me there until the next afternoon. I’d been sat on my own, avidly writing The Ashes on my phone and feeling like the loneliest person in the world, right up until that point.
I haven’t felt lonely since, and that made it incredibly difficult to write from the point of view of a very depressed, haunted young lady. I joked on many occasions that falling in love would ruin my ability to write. Who would have thunk that was true?
Thank you to Michelle and Lindsay, who proof-read Blazed and The Brides, and a bigger thank you to Dee, who took over for The Ashes and drummed me up a hell of a lot of new readers. You have no idea how much of a help you’ve been to me over the past couple of years.
A big shout of to all of my fellow writer friends, and also to anybody who’s tolerated my non-stop chatter about my books.
I feel privileged to have such a wide fan-base in a time where anybody with a computer is publishing books. I probably would have given up by now if it weren’t for all of you.
And what happens next? Well, Blaze still has some words of wisdom to share in the Meet Me Halfway series. I suppose I’ll be hearing him out.
Corri Lee – 9th September 2014-09-09
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