Story Behind the Story (Neuroner Duology)
The bullet points are the answers by J. Faith Kenney
How it all started
This was my debut series, but when I first starting writing it back in August 2017, I had no clue where the story was going in a way, but mainly, I didn’t know what would become of this story. I didn’t know if it would become a book or just a document on my computer. At the time when I first started writing the story, I was in a dark place in my life, and writing, especially writing Neuroner, was my chance to escape the world and feel some light in the dark time.
When I went into this story, all that I really knew was that there was this woman, Thela, who feels alone but is very successful in her career, and had a quality that separated her from the rest. I also knew she was an orphan and always had someone to protect her. This is Zac’s role in the story, but he was one thing I knew that was going to happen in the story.
Inspiration
A big inspiration for this story was the TV show Bones, which is my favorite show of all time, and the show Stitchers(?). I loved their storylines and certain elements that helped me build Neuroner. Another big element that I wanted in the story was something to do with the brain and memories, which is part of being a Neuroner.
Secrets
There are some secrets / behind the scene.
One of them is originally Neuroner was called Jumper because they can go from memory to memory. But in reality, I didn’t really like that, and I didn’t think it fit well. I just chose it because when Neuroner is first mentioned, I just needed something, so I put in Jumper.
Two, I queried Neuroner: Book One to agents to get traditional publishing. I did query a lot (chuckled), and it got rejected, you know. . . by all. But honestly, I can say Neuroner, the duology, wouldn’t be the books and story that it is today if I didn’t try that. After I did try querying, I took a step back from the series and asked why it was rejected, and when I went back in the story, I rewrote the whole story. I kept the bones and what I liked from it, but I rewrote it all. The begging of Neuroner: Book One had changed so much until I got to how I like it. In the end, the story gained about twenty thousand words, making it 92k words.
The third secret / behind the book is in chapter eight, I believe, when Thela is going under and feels like getting shocked by a wall outlet, um, that happened to me before I started writing that day. I was trying to plug in my laptop, not really paying attention, and my finger went in the outlet getting a well deserve zap of electricity.
Book two multi-povs
The reason why the second book has two points of view of Thela and Zac because I tried to tell book two in just Thela’s point of view, but it wasn’t working for the story I wanted to tell / how the story conclusion. There is a point in the second book, without giving it away, where Thela is just healing and is not there to see the results that need to happen in the second book, so that is why there is also Zac’s point of view. Plus I really love Zac and I loved going into his head, and as I said, Zac was always going to happen. He was the first real character I knew about with his history.