11 Facts You Didn’t Know About the “Free Falling Series”

With the cover reveal coming this Friday, I wanted to do a few special things this week, all of which will be focused on the Free Falling series. Today, I’m letting you all in on some things that didn’t make it into the book, scenes that changed, and characters who popped in at the last minute 🙂 Enjoy!

Three things first:

1) Don’t forget, “Gravity” is FREEEEE right now, with a very special offer in the front of the book 😉

2) You can pre-order a copy of the Free Falling novella “Today. Tomorrow. Always.” for only $0.99!

3) There’s still time to enter the Rafflecopter giveaway, even if you’ve already entered! The prize is a full, paperback set of the Free Falling Series!

❤ 11 Facts You Didn’t Know About the “Free Falling Series” ❤

• In the first draft of Gravity, Sam wasn’t an artist. I added that in during the re-write. She just felt so… one-dimensional to me, like she just existed, so I gave her more personality during that round. Adding in her love of art was part of that rounding out process for her.
• Exposed (the original draft) read very dark to me. AJ was single and cold. I hated him LOL. I nixed that version COMPLETELY (all 350+ pages of it) and started over. I’m soooo glad I did.
• Kira, Kira, Kira… she was added into book two about a month before release. Yes… a month. Reina was an only child and I made the snap decision to add in a twin for her. Little did I know, she’d have such a huge impact on the story as a whole.
• In the original book two, someone died.
• Exposed was written in two months. Mostly because I painted myself into a corner. With the low note book two ended on, I knew I needed to put the third book out quickly. With the changes that took place in the re-write of book two (i.e. nixing the death and adding in Kira), I had no choice but to start Exposed from scratch.
• There were originally 4 full-length books in this series. However, that felt like over-kill to me. It was actually about 80% complete, but I decided not to go through with it. Besides, with all the plot changes that took place during rewrites of “Secrets” and “Exposed” that book didn’t fit the series AT ALL by this point. Plus it was a continuation of the darkness of the original “Exposed” and I just wasn’t happy with it.
• In the first draft of Gravity, there was a lot more detail about side characters such as Leslie and Sam’s other friends. Some of AJ’s, too, but that made it feel more like a YA novel, which wasn’t what I was aiming for. So, I went through and cut out all that felt unnecessary and just focused on the two of them.
• Ugh… after publishing, I hated myself for making AJ’s real name (Anthony) and Antonio’s names so close!
• The first draft of Gravity was written in 2009, but I didn’t publish it until 2013. By then I’d given it a new title.
• Confession: when I started writing the book, I had NO IDEA if she’d end up with Antonio or AJ LOL. It wasn’t until I got into the characters and started really feeling the plot molding me, instead of me molding the plot, that I realized what was happening.
• I didn’t realize I wanted this to be a series until about halfway through book one.

❤

~XOXO

Raven