Reviving the Dead: Journey to Publishing
Sometimes, ideas that don’t get off the ground just die. But sometimes…they can be reborn. (It’s alive… it’s aliiiiiive!)
Tomorrow, my Gothic horror novel, Come One, Come All, will claw its way out into the world. To honor its book birthday, I wanted to take a look back on what brought it into being and how it ended up being published in 2022 after a long and tumultuous journey.
It’s hard to say entirely what inspired Come One, Come All. I can point my finger at a few key influences, but it’s hard to say exactly where the original kernel of the story began. I know I was in my first year of grad school at LSU and gorging my way through The Vampire Diaries as a coping mechanism for all of my stress. The Vampire Diaries has several Byronic heroes, but the most compelling for me was Klaus — an intriguing mixture of selfish, romantic, honorable, and sadistic.
I realized that at that point in my writing, I’d always shied away from the “bad boy” trope because of the (in my opinion) unrealistic reformation that inevitably happens under the influence of true love. Don’t get me wrong — a reformed bad boy can make a great story, and it’s obviously a popular plot line that continues to generate fantastic fiction. I just couldn’t see myself committing to writing about a grizzly bear who gets transformed into a teddy bear by “the right girl.”
I instead found myself exploring ways to challenge this familiar trope. What if there was a Byronic hero who really did fall in love, but who still was too messed up to actually change his ways? What if the heroine of the story wasn’t his love interest, but someone with a different kind of connection to him?
As I continued writing, other influences began to creep in, including (and in no particular order) Wuthering Heights, the seven deadly sins, and the music of Lana del Rey. What resulted was an adult novel that initially began its journey in traditional publishing in early 2015.
I’ve written about my experience in traditional publishing elsewhere, but to make a long story short, the novel went on sub, received some good feedback, but was ultimately deemed too hard to sell, in part because of the genre blending (unfortunately, one of my trademarks) and the abrasive, unlikable heroine. (Louisa might have been a bit before her time, but I think we’re ready for her in 2022.)
I rewrote the book as a YA novel and put it back on sub. This time, I came really close to publishing; an editor loved the book and wanted to take it on, but ultimately her publishing company decided to turn it down. It was the closest I’d ever gotten to achieving my dream of publishing, and it was a really rough rejection. I’d never known that you could get an agent, get an editor who loved the book, and still be turned down.
When Mike and I decided to start Bayou Wolf Press, Come One, Come All wasn’t originally a possibility on my mind. As many of you who have been through the rejection process can attest to, once the dream of a book dies, it is a real grieving process. It often feels easier to move on to new projects and let the old ones rest in peace.
In the last year, however, I’ve had a bit of an awakening with realizing my love of horror that, for whatever reason, I’ve been in denial of for a very long time. After falling absolutely in love with the works of Mike Flanagan and recognizing the impact that horror has had on my writing, I couldn’t stop thinking about Come One, Come All.
I re-read it with fresh eyes after being buried for so many years, and I decided it was time to resurrect the idea, this time fully committing to it as a Gothic horror.
I’m extremely proud of the book that has resulted from this journey. As painful as it was to go through those rejections back in 2015, I truly feel like THIS is the version of the novel that was meant to go out into the world. Because the genre wasn’t clear in my mind when I first wrote the book, I got some feedback from well-meaning people who didn’t totally understand my vision (mostly because I didn’t understand it!), and I made some changes to the story that took it off course from what I really wanted it to be.
Now, with a clearer idea of the story I really wanted to tell, I was able to fix the things that never quite clicked before and shape the novel into what it was always meant to be. The version being released tomorrow is the clearest vision of the story I always wanted to tell, and I think I am finally a good enough writer to have the skill set to tell it.
For anyone who’s interested, I hope you’ll check out Come One, Come All, and I hope you love it as much as I do. It’s been quite a long journey in bringing it to life (afterlife?), but I’m excited (and, okay, yes, terrified) to finally be here sharing it with the world.
Find it HERE — available in ebook, paperback, and on Kindle Unlimited
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E. Gilliland mostly believes in ghosts and other supernatural spooks, but she has a standing agreement with them to keep a respectful distance. When she isn’t writing, she is most likely sneaking classic Gothic novels into her class curriculum, or arguing why we need to value adaptations as art. She is also the author of the Austen University Mysteries, and she lives in Alabama with her husband and son.
