How did Rise Of The Wolves begin?

The original book, I began writing around 2017/2018. My original intention was for it to be a stand alone novel that I would one day publish.

I started writing the book during my last year at school and someone who 3+ years later is no longer in my life, helped come up with tiny bits and pieces.

That is why I haven't credited him or given him any shout outs. This person who I trusted, hurt me in a lot of ways, including abuse that no young girl, or anyone should ever have to sit through.

Throughout my teenage years, while all of it was happening, I used TV shows and fanfiction as my escape from it all.

I also read a lot of fantasy books too.

So one day, I'm sat at home bored out of my mind when an idea struck me.

I had a passion for wolves that I didn't know what to do with, and a passion for fantasy and supernatural stories.

I decided that I would put this to use and I came up with the idea of a story about a teenage boy who discovers that he is a werewolf.

Since the idea had only just came to my mind, at this point I had no idea for names or any other characters. Just this one boy who gets thrown into a world that he never thought existed.

Once I had my mind set on this crazy idea, I began immediately brainstorming on my laptop.

The first thing I had to do was think of names and other characters. So I had a walk and talk with the person mentioned above and few names stuck with me for the character of the boy.

The first name I thought of was Lucas.

It was simple and kind of went with the character. But there was also something about it that didn't feel right.

The second name I thought of was Tyler.

It suited the whole good boy with anger issues theme. However because it had already been used in L.J. Smith's The Vampire Diaries, I decided against using it, since I did not want to copy.

I also thought of using the name Thomas, since it was the name of a previous story that I had began writing but abandoned.

Then another name came to my mind. Marcus.

Now this one really stood out to me. It was bad boyish, but not too bad. This name really spoke to me, and so my mind was made up.

Now that I had a first name for my character, I needed a last name and some family.

So I began playing around with last names that would go with Marcus. I knew that I wanted it to be related to werewolves in some way. Though I couldn't think of anything.

About a few days or so later, I was in the car with my parents, my headphones in to drown out their arguments, and I was listening the likes to Green Day and Linkin Park.

We then drove past this street called Crescent Road, and there was a hotel with the same name. The name was one I hadn't really thought about and then I started playing around with it in my head.

I ended up putting it together with Marcus, and came up with his name.

Marcus Crescent. His middle name didn't come until much later.

The next thing I decided to do, was think of some family members and a name for the town in which he lived.

At first I wasn't sure where the story should be set. In my mind, most great stories were told from somewhere in America, but then I thought about how there were very little stories that were set in England, my home country, and I decided that it would be nice to make up a town in England, rather than using a real one.

Now that I had decided where my story was set, I needed to find a name for the town. This was a tricky one, because I didn't want it to be too obvious or something cheesy. I went through many town names.

Waterfall Springs was one of them. I liked this name, but I found it too plain. So I decided that it wasn't quite right for the main town.

I did however write it into the second book as the town next to where the story was set.

Then I thought of naming it something like Crescent Valley. But since I had used the name Crescent for my main character's last name, it wouldn't have been the best idea to use it again.

Once again, I found myself thinking about the moon. While none of the names of the moon phases fit well for a town name, one particular word stuck with me.

Moonsong. So I took the Valley part out of Crescent Valley and put the two together to come up with Moonsong Valley.

The first character, besides Marcus, to be created was his younger sister.

Part of me always knew that I wanted Marcus to have a younger sister, as I wanted that kind of sibling relationship  where they weren't always fighting.

So I thought of giving him a sister that was three years younger than him.

The problem was for me, girls names were harder to think of. So I made a list of girls names that I liked and began putting them next to Crescent to see which would fit.

The names on that list were....

- Lyra
- Maggie
- Layla
- Georgie
- Hanna
- Sam

And many more which I forget now.

After a lot of mixing and matching I decided that Layla fit nicely.

I then had the second character for the book. Marcus's younger sister; Layla Crescent.

My next thought was parents. This wasn't so hard. I started going through some names that were popular in the 80s or even earlier.

The ones that stuck with me were William, because I had a grandad with that name who passed in 2017, so I wanted to use the name.

However with their mother's name, I originally had the name Mary in mind. The trouble with this, was that my family wouldn't take too kindly to it, as I had a nan with that name and putting the two names together in the same story. So I changed the name to a similar one. Mandy.

After thinking of the the parents names and what their characters were like, I thought that was that and I was done with the first set of characters.

The next thing was that I knew I wanted Marcus to have a best friend who was somewhat different to him.

I knew that I wanted this best friend to be a skater boy, who was quite the class clown but also had a serious side and a specific reason why he was always joking around.

I also knew that I wanted him to be one of a set of identical twins.

So I played around with looks and identities and eventually came up with a blonde haired, green eyed boy and the name that came to mind for the description was Joshua.

Joshua's background however, I had trouble thinking of. I went through different scenarios which would be a believable reason why he was a joker on the surface and doesn't really show his emotions.

Then I came up with the broken home aspect. Including an alcoholic mother, which was inspired by part of my real life since my mother had a drinking problem that she overcome.

The other side of the broken home that I came up with for Joshua, was an abusive father who was imprisoned for causing harm to his son.

Now that I had one of the twins, I had to create another. So I set my mind on creating a girl version of Joshua.

The facts I had made my mind up on were

One, that I wanted the twins names to begin with the same letter

And two, I wanted their personalities to be quite different because of them being identical.

So I went through girls names beginning with J and the names that spoke out were

Jules
Julie
Julianna
Jazz
Jana
Joey

Out of these names, I knew that the first two could be abbreviations of the first, and so I decided on the name Julianna since I wanted different characters to refer to her differently.

This is why Marcus will often refer to her as Julie, while Joshua refers to her as Jules.

Once the twins were made up, I decided I didn't want another family with only two children. I wanted their family to be bigger, so putting the parents aside, I focused on other siblings that they could have and chose random names for each of them.

I came up with two brothers for them. One which was the oldest son of their parents and who also passed away, or so it would appear.

Instantly for this character I chose the name Dalton, since that name is one I have always liked and wanted to use.

For the younger brother, who was also the youngest child, I wanted something that spoke of that childhood innocence. The only name that came to mind for that was Noah.

Aside from the two brothers I also wanted them to have an older sister who was always out partying and whose behaviour had spiralled since their family fell apart. I wanted that kind of name that screamed bad girl, party girl etcetera. The name that came to mind was Kayla.

Now that I had the whole family of the best friend, I needed a last name. Unable to think of anything that was gripping I went with one that was quite different to Marcus's, and one that was fitting for the twins especially.

The name was originally meant to be Warwick which would have been derivative of the place name Warwickshire. However it ended up being spelt the same way but pronounced as Warrick rather than Warwick.

The next thing I knew, is that I wanted Marcus and Layla to have a long lost brother. Instantly I liked the name Eric, since this brother was a character that was well experienced and very mysterious.

I needed a different last name for him, since it wouldn't have made sense for him to have the family name. So I went with something common which would help him to blend in with the normal world. I went with Daily.

However characters like Maria refer to him as Eric Crescent, only because she knows his secret. But when others are saying his name that doesn't know the secret or anything, they refer to him as Eric Daily.

With all of the characters in place, I began writing up the first chapter. I kind of went from there and it led to this amazing creation that is still going.