Send Me A Sign By Tiffany Schmidt Blog Tour

The story I usually tell about the origins of Send Me A Sign is that I started writing it in the middle of a date with my husband (St.Matt). That this idea of a super-superstitious character jumped in my head and I was captivated and needed to stop everything and write it down.

This is true, but…

Stories don’t typically come from just one place. At least my stories don’t. So I’ve gone back into my writer’s notebooks and found the first two pieces of SEND ME A SIGN that I wrote.

[Sidenote: um, I just want to say that the fact that I’m sharing my roughest of rough, very first flash drafts is TERRIFYING]

 

 

 

This goes on for another couple of pages. Those of you who have read SEND ME A SIGN will recognize the bones of chapter two in there. This is Mia and Gyver before they were named Mia and Gyver. Before I knew what the song would be, before I knew what Mia’s secret would be.

Which isn’t to say that I hadn’t already created Mia…

 

 

This is a page from another notebook. This one’s dated 6/29 – six months before the Distracted Date Night above. It’s a writing exercise I completed in a few minutes while meeting with my writing group. (Um, again, totally unrevised roughest of first draft disclaimers… excuse me as I cringe at the typos… Really, Tiffany? Passed vs. past?)

At the top it says: “Teenage girl who discovers she has a disease—1^st day of school” – this was the prompt Jonathan Maberry had challenged me with… little did he or I know the end result!

You’ll notice that BOTH these notebook scenes are written in third person. I was shocked to see this – I very rarely play with third and I don’t remember a time when Send Me A Sign wasn’t written from inside Mia’s head.

 

The other thing that surprised me was that after all of the revisions and re-writes ANY of these lines made the final novel. Yet, look at this piece from page eight:

 

 Or compare this date-night scrawl

 

 

 

….with the final version on page ten.

 

When I wrote in each of these notebooks I had no idea that I would connect the two ideas.  I couldn’t have imagined that a few years and more than a few revisions later, I’d be holding a book that started with those pen strokes.

Just like I had no idea that the first scene of my second book, BRIGHT BEFORE SURISE, would be scrawled in a notebook on a train back from a day trip to New York.

Each novel has a different starting place… this one is Mia’s. The rest of her story can be found in the 384 pages between those pretty blue covers. I hope you enjoy them!

 

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