Inspiration: Getting started and who will play Tom?
Shelley and her dressage horse Briosa de la Belle Vie
If you ask my daughter Erin Bury, she will tell you that over the years, I’ve come up with innumerable ideas for a fiction novel. She was accustomed to receiving, “Hey, what do you think of this idea?” emails from her mom. None of those ideas stuck with me until I was conceptualizing a novel that would involve an entrepreneur who is also an equestrian, and who becomes involved in a complex set of circumstances.
I remember sitting in a pub with my husband and fellow boarding stable friends on a Friday night in Georgetown, Ontario 10 years ago, and asking their opinion on whether the book concept was viable. Over a few drinks and no doubt some poutine, we all decided it could be a fun ride, and the premise for Devious Web was hatched. The book has morphed into a colorful story of business dynamics and human motivations.
I mapped out the storyline and promptly put the book outline on hold while I fulfilled my company Grandy Public Relations Inc. contracts for clients like Canada’s largest software company OpenText, the University of Waterloo, Gap Wireless, and EXFO. It wasn’t until the Christmas of 2020 that I dusted off the outline and again asked Erin, “What do you think of this concept?”. As CEO of online will company Willful.co, a former journalist, and generally one of the smartest people I know, Erin is my favorite advisor along with my husband Roy. When the idea once again resonated with Erin and her husband Kevin Oulds, we had fun choosing actors to play the various characters for an imagined big-screen adaptation. That Christmas holiday casting game continued with my insightful friend Stephanie Brett who has been a great sounding-board and supporter for the book throughout the process.
They say you should write about what you know and, in my case, I’ve drawn on my communications career, time spent watching American political news and Dateline, general life experience, and equestrian adventures to create the storyline of Devious Web.
I wrote most of the book over a three-month period during the pandemic which provided huge chunks of time to do a data dump from mind to keyboard. Meantime I tended to avoid reading other authors’ works to maintain clarity of my own writing voice, but that didn’t preclude watching lots of Netflix productions and becoming notorious for quoting Grace and Frankie.
The rest as they say is history. I’ve spent further enormous chunks of time finessing the book and prepping for publication. In future blogs I’ll share unexpected aspects of book publishing that I’ve encountered along the way.
