Why I Love Serialized Fiction by Melissa de la Cruz

Today's guest is Melissa de la Cruz, author of the Blue Bloods series.  Her new release is WOLF PACT, a serialized novel of which the last part comes out next week, on December 4th.  I reviewed the first part earlier today.  The action in WOLF PACT leads up to GATES OF PARADISE (Jan 15, 2013), the final book in the Blue Bloods series.  Read on to find out why Melissa decided to publish WOLF PACT as an eBook original serial.

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I'm a huge fan of serialized fiction.  To me they're like little TV episodes for a book -- tune in next week for the next installment! I actually started my fiction career by writing serial fiction. I wrote "Cat's Meow" which became my first novel as a weekly column for a fashion website called www.hintmag.com my friends and I started. I collected them into a proposal and then Simon and Schuster bought it as my first novel. After the book was published, Gotham magazine asked if I wanted to write a weekly serial for them, so I wrote "The Fortune Hunters" for a year. I sold it as a novel to Random House but I actually got too busy and wasn't able to publish it. (Maybe I still will one day, who knows!)  

So to me, going back to serial fiction is like coming home. Wolf Pact was not originally intended to be a serial or an e-book, but as I began to write it, I knew how IMPORTANT it was to publish it before the final Blue Bloods book came out, and how much of a richer reading experience Gates of Paradise would be with the wolves' back story. We decided to go the e-book route in order to bring Wolf Pact to the fans first. I wrote the novel as a novel, and when we made this decision, I had to figure out how to restructure it so it would fit the serial format. It worked out pretty well, because I'd laid out the book in four parts anyway, and from two POVs—Lawson and Bliss. 

Wolf Pact was years in the making, but writing isn't a machine-like process, it took a long time for the story to gel and to discover how the wolves' story related to the vampires. Once you unearth it though, it always amazes me how well it fits, as if it was there all along. I always forget a writer's job is to hunt for the gem of the story in the idea. You have to keep chiseling away to find it. When you do, your work is done, and you turn it in. :)