Angel of death – Behind the scenes part 1 How did it happened

Hi, it's nice to have you here. In this blog, I would like to share some anecdotes that occurred during the writing of book one of the Angel of Death series.

Maybe I should start from the beginning and answer how this book happened. Well, that's a story that isn’t so easy to explain. Honestly, I'm not quite sure how this book happened. At first, I never dreamed of becoming a book author or had such aspirations. So, the book came about out of boredom. I was working on some ideas for a game modification, and I made some notes and such. I had an idea in my head, but it was something completely different.

Step by step, that idea turned into a question: how would that be in another setting, with different characters? And my brain works in a way that I must know the answer. One night, I was lying in bed, and couldn’t sleep. There was nothing interesting for me on Prime and Netflix. What did I do? I started to think, and at some point, I don't know how, I came up with the idea about the Angel of Death. With that seemingly silly idea, I started searching Wikipedia. And surprise, surprise, I found Azrael, and that was fuel for my imaginative mind.

From then on, I somehow got the idea to make Azrael a woman, and then, love came into play. Now I needed a male character, and he had to be a soldier. In short, I had that too, and as the days went by, scenes started to develop in my imagination, complete conversations emerged.

Then I had a two-week vacation, but my vacation plans went down the drain, so I played games for a few days, the story still developing in my head. So, I got bored of playing games, and didn’t know what to do with myself. One day, I sat in front of the PC and started to write. In three days, I had some thirty pages written. And when I read it, it wasn’t all that bad. So, what did I do? I continued writing.

The next absurd thought that crossed my mind was, 'What if I tried to publish it?' Yeah, that wasn't so simple. I had never written more than ten sentences in a piece in my life, and now we're talking about a whole book. So, I was already over seventy pages in, I read it, and I was devastated. It was disastrous. The dialogues, in all possible forms, lacked body language, and every second line and word repeated. The beginning of the book was a pile of garbage. It made me feel sick in my stomach when I read it.

So, I reached a point where I started a new document, took the parts that were okay, and completely rewrote the first few pages. I did all of that during one weekend, and when I read it, I was surprised. This version actually looked like something. Not a book, but something.

That gave me the courage to continue writing. From that point on, I would just put on my headphones, turn the volume up to the max, and sit in front of my PC for hours. Most of the time, I was completely surprised by the results. Well, the document was all red and blue in Word. But as the story developed, characters gained shaped personalities. I liked it. I wasn't satisfied, well book is coming out and I´m still not satisfied, but I liked it.

At around ninety pages of bearable material, I started all over again. This time, I redid the whole formatting to get the draft into something that made some sense. So, that was the point from where I had version three of the book. In this version, I finally made it to the end.

This part of the problem was solved, but one still remained: to publish the book or not. If I publish it, how? Finding a publisher or going for self-publishing? At some point, I was sure that the book was coming out. Then I started to do research on how to publish it. A new disappointment wasn't long in waiting for me. Doing the research, I realized that I had absolutely zero chances to publish my book through a traditional publisher. So, okay, I thought, I can still go for self-publishing. Yeah, not so fast. The book had to be edited, grammar checked, proofread, and plagiarism checked. My head started to spin. There was no way I could do something like that. I was terrible at Croatian grammar in school, had summer school for English, and the idea of doing book editing was not fun.

Despite all the problems that emerged along the way, I just kept writing. The characters and the story sucked me in, and I simply enjoyed the process. Publishing was still somewhere in my mind, but writing was my main focus. The further I got, the easier it became to write. The whole world came to life, the characters came to life. They weren't just characters in the book; they lived with me every moment. I had no idea how I was going to bring this book out, but at that moment, I didn't care. All I cared about was writing. I could spend the whole weekend just writing. Well, I can't say that my wife was particularly delighted with that.

During the week, I just can't write. I work long hours, come home beaten up, and just want to eat, shower, and go to sleep. So, I spend those few hours a day that I have doing research about publishing. Step by step, I acquired software that can help me edit and format the book. Grammarly did a great job cleaning up the grammar and checking for plagiarism. At first, I used Scrivener to format the book, but I didn't quite get into the core of it, and I eventually abandoned it.

Still, writing over the weekends, at some point I had about three hundred pages written and partially edited. That was the turning point where I was sure I was going to publish that book, and that I was going to do it by myself.

Bringing the book to an end was the hardest part. I even delayed writing, just so I could savor the process. I needed more than two weeks to finish the last twenty pages. But eventually, I wrote 'the end,' and then came the hardest part for me. Although I did the editing with the help of Grammarly to clear the text grammatically, avoid extreme repetition, and check for plagiarism, it was still the worst part of the writing process. When I laid my hands on Atticus, everything went like a charm. Formatting the manuscript into a book was like child's play.

It took some time to set everything up on KDP, but there was still a lot to do. I needed a cover, but I had no idea what it should look like. That's when I turned to AI image generating programs, and I got some usable results. With some editing, I managed to create something that I could use as a cover page. Then I went through the book and still found mistakes here and there. After a while, I had almost everything set up - about ninety-five percent of it. With every step closer to publishing, I became even more insecure about whether this was the right thing to do. Is my work worth reading? Will anyone actually read it?

I'm not entirely satisfied with it. I see room for improvement all around the book, but you have to start somewhere. To be honest, every single step in writing this book was nothing but a learning process. But, well, you know, now it's just a few days before publishing; it's going out into the world. The reviews I get, the criticisms I receive, I'll have to bear with all of that. And I'll use it to make the second book even better.

And I learned a lot, now writing second book in series I taking different approach, and clearing the mistakes right at the beginning.

And most important I´ll rather get bad critics about my book, that asking myself what it would be if I published it. Because you know, every piece of feedback is an opportunity for growth and improvement!