Welcome to the newest addition to my blog! Behind the Waltz is a little bit of a behind the scenes look at some of the stories I’ve written. You know, kind of like showing how the sausage is made.

To christen this new installment, there’s nothing more appropriate for me to talk about than my first published book, Connect. To be honest, Connect was a very special book specifically because it was the easiest work in progress story I had at the time I wrote it that I could sprint to a finished book in a couple of months. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before, but in case I haven’t, I wrote Connect for NaNoWriMo 2014. It was my NaNoWriMo virgin experience, and I wrote it all by hand because I didn’t know that the official NaNoWriMo site had a word counter thing going along with it. Oops.

The reason I chose to write Connect when I did was because I had just discovered what NaNoWriMo was and I wanted to publish a book, damn it. Back when I was plotting out the novel, I had a (slightly unhealthy) obsession with a certain character type. The “ladykiller” character. You know the one I’m talking about. That guy in movies who saunters up to the leading lady and sweet talks his way into bed with her.

This obsession came about from spending countless hours watching a combination of How I met Your Mother (a popular tv show from like 2007) and the movie Crazy, Stupid, Love. Each one of those pieces of media had this “ladykiller” character in it. My reasoning behind Rusty, the main character of Connect, was to really explore this kind of character in a greater depth.
So, for my boy Rusty, I wanted to do something a little bit more involved. Since most of the stories involving this kind of character don’t place him at the forefront of the story as the main protagonist. Usually, anyway. And when they do, its about a guy who’s down on his luck after getting dumped and tries to overcompensate by becoming a jerk and then realizing the error of his ways and turning into the saintly holy version of himself that deserves the girl. It’s boring, and it’s been done before.

See, I wanted a story where the ladykiller guy goes from awkward shy oaf to the smooth ladies man we all love to pretend to hate. You know, really get to know how he got to the place where he ended up being this suave guy. I’m not afraid to write a character who’s a complete and total dick. Apparently.
I wanted a character who’s character arc went from ‘shy loveable loser’ to ‘ladies man’ in his first book. After that I could do the sequel where he learns the error of his ways. Starting out, it ended up being really easy to do, because unlike How I Met Your Mother or Crazy Stupid Love, Rusty doesn’t have a main love interest. I think this part of his characterization ended up being a key component in his development. I could hide his destination because the woman he was meant to be with is someone he doesn’t know at the beginning of the story. Originally, I was going to give him a romantic target to aim for, but I decided against it fairly early on because I feel like it’s not something that’s realistic. In Connect, as in life, dating is a complicated mess and nobody knows how things are going to turn out. I wanted to give the story that same sense, so I couldn’t have a romantic target that Rusty was chasing.

Without an ultimate romance partner, I was faced with a bit of a challenge. How to I give Rusty a goal? This stumped me for a while, if I’m being honest. Well, that is, until I came up with the idea of the trinkets. I’ll talk about the inspiration behind that creative decision in depth later, but, as a quick summary, each chapter of Connect has an item that Rusty gets from the girl (or person) he meets in the chapter that he had not met before. Rusty’s goal had to match up with that, so his ambition became one of him attempting to simply become better at dating. While it seems too simplistic, it kind of lined up pretty well with what I needed. It gives him a reason to agree to let Angel torture (read: mentor) him, it guides him into situations where he’ll be open to meeting new people, and it allows the people he meets to move the story along more organically than if he knew what he wanted in the beginning. That being said, the way the story ended up… well…

Thanks for checking out my first Behind the Waltz! Who doesn’t love talking up their own work, am I right? If you want to check out Connect, where Rusty comes from, you can check it out here. It’s available on Amazon in ebook or paperback! You can also read my other novel here.
Til next time,
-Rj Waltz