Thinking back on starting to write the Enchanted, Inc. series, I’ve been remembering some of the initial ideas that didn’t quite work out. A book that exists in your head as mostly an idea is very different than the book once it’s written, and this one spent more than a year in my head before I even started trying to mold it into an actual book with any kind of story to it.

To start with, I initially thought the company the heroine would end up working at would be the kind of business that had been in lower Manhattan for a very long time, with the city growing up around it. I even read a whole book about the House of Morgan, because I thought that fit. Once I started thinking more about what the story would be, I realized I couldn’t make a financial company magical. I ended up going with the software industry as a model, even though it was relatively new, because it fit the idea of spells as software, and because I’d done PR for technology firms, I had more of a grasp on that. It was a lot more fun to make fun of.

There was originally going to be a lot more bad boss stuff. When I was first discussing the idea with that editor, my pitch was “Bridget Jones meets Harry Potter when she goes to work with Dilbert.” I read books about women dealing with sexual harassment in the financial industry. Most of that went by the wayside. I still had the bad bosses, but they were just jerks, and the coworkers weren’t that bad.

Before I figured out who all the characters would be, I had this idea that there would be a number of potential “Mr. Right” guys the heroine ran into, and it would take a few books before one became the front runner. I imagined “shipper wars” going on among fans, with each guy having a faction cheering for him. But once I started developing the cast of characters and came up with Owen, that idea went out the window. I couldn’t imagine anyone else winning.

I do sometimes think I got them together a little too soon, but the initial contract was only for two books, and I wrote and turned in the second book before the first book was published, so I had no idea if there would be more books, and I felt it was important to give it some kind of closure. Then I got the contract for two more books, and I did the temporary breakup at the end of book 3 to allow a little bit of a reset to slow things down a bit and let them have at least a little conflict.

I had a lot more whimsical magical stuff in the first book because I was trying to make everything magical, but a lot of that didn’t carry through later because I realized I didn’t need it.

I knew Owen’s background from about midway through the writing of the first book and always planned to reveal it in book 5. That’s part of why I was so upset when they decided to end the series at book 4. Fortunately, the Japanese publisher wanted more, so I kept writing and was eventually able to publish it. I thought I was done with the series then, but the Japanese publisher asked for more books, so I came up with the idea for book 6. After that, I figured I ought to at least get them to a wedding. That’s why I think this really is the end. I went beyond what I planned and got them to the ending I’d hoped for. I’m not married and don’t have children, so I have to admit that I don’t have a lot of interest in writing the next phase of their lives, but you never know what might strike me.

Sometimes I wonder if I could go back to the very first seeds of that initial idea and come up with something entirely different. It might be fun to play with that concept.

We’re now just a week away from the release of Enchanted Ever After. I’ll make the paperback version live this Thursday so there will be time to order them and get them shipped around release day. It looks like there may be a delay for the Audible version, since they’re taking a very long time with that contract. I set the release date to give them plenty of time to have it ready, but I didn’t find out that it wouldn’t be happening then until I already had the pre-order up. It will be coming, but I don’t know when.

Last week, I talked about some of the very beginnings of the idea that eventually became Enchanted, Inc. When I first had that idea, though, it was more about the kind of thing I wanted to read. There was a part of me that thought it would be fun to write, but I went looking to read it, first. The problem was, I couldn’t find anything like that. I’d have thought that, given the huge success of the Harry Potter series and its popularity among adults, someone would have capitalized on that and done something like that for adults, substituting the workplace for the school environment. But I didn’t find it. There were only a few urban fantasy books out at that time. I read Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, which came close to what I wanted, and there was Emma Bull’s The War for the Oaks and Charles de Lint’s books, but not much else.

At that time, though, I was desperately trying to write a chick lit book. The American publishers had started looking for them, and new imprints were opening up to focus on that kind of book. I have to admit that I was a little dissatisfied by the American offerings, since they seemed to miss a lot of the point of what made the British books fun. They seemed to be trying to skew younger, aimed at the twentysomethings, when Bridget Jones’s Diary had been about a woman in her thirties. There was the emphasis on shopping that hadn’t been in the British books I’d liked. I was trying to write something that captured what I liked about the British books but that was distinctly American.

Unfortunately, it was without much success. When I sent a manuscript to my agent, I didn’t hear anything at all for about four months, then found a package on my front porch that was my manuscript with a note scrawled on my own cover letter saying, “I can’t sell this.” I sent that agent a certified letter severing the relationship — not because she didn’t like my book, but because of the lack of communication. I expected some kind of response within four months, and if there was a problem with the book, I’d have hoped she’d talk to me. I got the impression she was essentially breaking up with me, or at least being distant and unresponsive enough that I’d break up with her, an impression that was strengthened by the fact that she didn’t respond at all to the certified letter other than signing the postcard that came with it to verify receipt.

I was a bit worried about being unagented, like I was starting my career over again. I think I had at least fifteen submissions that year, all rejected. Then that summer, I went to a conference in New York. Harlequin was launching two new lines, a fantasy imprint and a romantic comedy category line. Most of my friends were writing for the romantic comedy line, and I had hopes of selling something there, so I went with them to the launch party. Their introductory titles for the fantasy imprint were fairly traditional fantasy, set in quasi-medieval worlds, so I figured they wouldn’t be interested in that crazy idea I’d had. I’d been thinking about it off and on over the year and a half or so since I came up with the idea, and I’d developed it enough to know that instead of getting magical powers, my heroine would be immune to magic and be the extremely normal one in the middle of wacky magical people. The problem was, I was afraid it was too girly for a fantasy imprint and too weird for chick lit.

At the party, one of the editors approached my little group and asked if we had any questions. I asked if they’d ever consider any contemporary fantasy. She said they might after the launch and asked if I had an idea. I told her the bare bones of my idea. My friends who were with me said her nostrils flared and she was visibly salivating. She handed me her card and told me to send it. I said it wasn’t written. She said, “Then what are you doing standing here? Go write it!”

And that was why I decided to write that book. She ended up rejecting it, but I didn’t get that rejection until after I already had an agent (a new one) and the book was on submission everywhere else. Still, it gave me the confidence to give it a shot, and it’s probably been the easiest book I’ve ever written. It just came pouring out of me, and I didn’t do massive revisions on it. There was some tightening and tweaking once I got an agent who wanted to represent it, and she suggested the frog-kissing sequence (which had just been a conversation with an offhand reference to kissing frogs as a way of meeting men in the initial draft), but the structure of the plot was more or less the same.

It was still a fairly hard sell. Since chick lit was the hottest thing going at the time and they were looking for something different, that was where we focused, though there was also a fantasy publisher in the mix that made it as far as the auction (before dropping out). I’ve had a lot of second thoughts about that, given that the chick lit market imploded soon after the first couple of books were published, and it took the series with it. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if we’d targeted the fantasy publishers instead, but urban fantasy was just starting to take off, and it went in a darker, more horror-oriented direction, so maybe they wouldn’t have been interested. And I don’t have time travel abilities, so it’s not as though I can change things now.

I never imagined when I first had that idea, when I wrote the first book, that there would end up being nine books and that I’d still be writing that series a decade and a half later. Though, I will confess, I did imagine that it would be more successful than it was. They didn’t really go after the adult fans of Harry Potter market, and no one else did, either. I still can’t believe no publishers really got on that bandwagon. I’d have thought the market would have been flooded with books about magical workplaces. I guess publishers are bad about thinking in categories. The Harry Potter books were for kids, so they focused on finding the next big thing for kids and didn’t consider how many adults were reading those books. Even my publisher balked at making that connection because the Harry Potter books were for kids (when I did my own PR using that angle, it was successful, so I wish we could have done that on a broader basis).

So far, this has been my most successful series. I haven’t really been able to get anything else to click like that, and I keep hearing from publishers that they want something else like that. But I’ve written that. I don’t really know how to write something that’s like that but that isn’t that. Maybe something else will click for me the way that one did.

Enchanted Ever After is coming two weeks from today. The paperback will also be available then (actually, a few days before that so they can be shipped). I don’t know about the audio. There’s been some holdup in the contracts over there.

Since I’m coming to a close on the Enchanted, Inc. series, I thought I’d look back on how it all began. I usually tell the story about when I got the specific idea, but the groundwork actually came much earlier.

It probably should have been a sign that my first published book was a romance novel about a woman trying unsuccessfully to write a romance novel and realizing that what she needed to be writing was fantasy, but I still kept plugging away at romance, banging my head against that brick wall. My romance writing career came to an end when my editor at Harlequin returned the manuscript we’d been going back and forth on for about a year with a photocopy about the upcoming US publication of Bridget Jones’s Diary, which had been a hit in the UK, and how that sort of thing might be the next trend. Her note to me was about how that seemed more like the kind of thing I should do, that the book we’d been working on would probably make a better single-title book than category book, and she enclosed the business card for an agent she suggested I contact.

I had a minor panic attack because that sounded to me like a polite kiss-off, but Jenny Crusie (who I knew from some online groups, and I’d given her a couple of PR leads) talked me off the ledge. She said that if they just wanted to get rid of me, they’d have rejected the book, not recommended an agent, and the agent my editor had recommended was her agent. I talked to that agent, who said she wasn’t sure why they’d rejected it because it was the perfect category book. She guessed the line was about to fold (it did). She didn’t think she wanted to work with that book, but she said good things about my writing.

The problem was, no one in the US was publishing those Bridget Jones kind of books. They were republishing the British ones, but it was a couple more years before they started looking for American authors writing that sort of thing. That was the era of the single-title contemporary romantic comedies with the cartoony covers, and I kept trying to turn that book into one of those — unsuccessfully. Then the American publishers started looking for chick lit books, and I came up with a few proposals that didn’t go anywhere.

Meanwhile, my life had all the ingredients for a chick lit novel. My job was going in some annoying directions — the bosses who’d been supportive had left, the tech bubble had burst so we’d lost clients, and my new boss was threatened by me and shutting me out of things I should have been working on, so we lost even more clients. I dreaded work, even though I was working at home. My dating life was sputtering. Everyone I went out with who seemed promising disappeared without a trace or a word after a couple of dates, in spite of leaving the last date with discussions about a specific thing we ought to do together the next time we went out.

I’d gone on a couple of vacations to England, where most of my souvenirs were books — more of the chick lit books I couldn’t get in the US, and I’d picked up the first few Harry Potter books. I’d read those over the holidays, so in mid-January I guess that’s what was on my mind when I climbed the stairs one morning to go to my home office and had that “Bridget Jones meets Harry Potter” idea burst. I liked the books about young women struggling with job, family, friends, and dating, and I basically had been Hermione Granger when I was a kid, so I related to her school life. What I wanted was a book that had all the chick lit stuff, but with magic, or something like the Harry Potter books, but about adult life other than school. Actually, my first thought was that I’d love to check my e-mail and find an offer for a new job that would take me away from what I was doing. Then I thought it should be a magical job. Then I had the “Bridget Jones meets Harry Potter” flash. At the time, though, I was just thinking about what I wanted to read, not that I wanted to write it, though I did get that “ooh!” shiver that told me it was a good idea. I just ignored that shiver because I was trying to write something else at the time.

There was no magical job offer (unless you count the idea that gave me a writing career), and I got laid off a couple of weeks later.

It was more than a year before I started writing that book.