ChaPter 2 - Carnival of Souls by Melissa Marr

An Accidental Novel
To some degree, writing every book is different. Some books I write in order (Graveminder);
others out of sequence (Fragile Eternity). Some series begin as short stories (Wicked Lovely),
and some were never meant to be anything other than a series (the Blackwell Pages, 2013).
Carnival of Souls was yet another new experience. It began with an image, not quite in a dream
but in one of those hazy, half-awake, half-asleep states where you know that it isn’t real and you
hope that you fall asleep so it becomes a dream. I didn’t. I woke, and I scrawled down about
eight hundred words to capture the images. In an alley stood a girl, a boy, and a woman-creature
who exhaled birds that disintegrated into ashes. The girl had been keeping a secret from the boy,
and in facing this woman-creature, her secret was about to be exposed. I posted part of that
excerpt on my blog, and then I returned to my novels under contract. Months passed. A year
passed. Books released; I sold a new series.
Then, one Friday in the fall of 2010, I opened that file, cued up Five Finger Death Punch,
and by Monday night, I’d written another thirty-five thousand words. It seems impossible, in
retrospect, that so many words could pour out so quickly, but once I started I couldn’t do
anything else for several days. That not-quite-a-dream image that started the book remained
central. The two questions I always ask when writing are “How did we get here?” and “Where do
we go from here?” For Carnival, I had to ask both questions.
The problem, however, was that I’d just sold my publisher a different series, and I didn’t
have a book due to them for a year and a half. A few days later, my family suggested that I’d
best confess to my agent that I had accidentally written half of a novel. I did, and my publisher