Bitten: A Guest Post by Jordan Stephanie Gray

Enter a world ruled by powerful werewolves, where Vanessa reluctantly lives among the monstrous beasts who took her family. As terror and war rage on, Vanessa learns who is really on her side, and who is just out for blood. Read on for an exclusive essay from Jordan Stephanie Gray on writing Bitten. 

As my first published novel, I expected the creation of Bitten to be resoundingly different from the thirteen manuscripts that came before it. That’s how long it took me to become published. Fourteen manuscripts written across twelve years to a whopping thousand agent rejections. Of course, those rejections led me to believe something must have been intrinsically wrong with my process, my prose, even sometimes me. I thought in order to finally achieve my dream, I needed something different. Some key component that would finally set my work apart from the shelved remnants of my despair.

Reader, I am so happy to tell you I was wrong. Bitten came to me the exact same way as any other idea. A sudden glimpse of character. A seventeen-year-old girl locked in a sterile room after she’d lost everything in the blink of an eye. I saw Vanessa Hart clawing at the door, demanding her freedom after she’d been bitten and transformed into a werewolf, and I heard a boy’s voice answer. From there, the story unraveled like a spool of yarn, soft and pliable between my fingers. And I thought about those characters, their brutal journey in an enchanted castle of secrets and lies, every single day. I couldn’t eat, sleep, or breathe without wondering what they were doing. I asked myself who Vanessa could (or couldn’t) trust. I asked myself how she would ever recover from the magnitude of her own grief. And, finally, I asked what happens next. What happens when fantasy collides with reality and you can do nothing but face it head on?

In short, Bitten is the novel of my heart. The series, with the finale, Devoured, releasing in October, is the series of my soul. Every single part of it—from the frenzy of teenaged emotions, the grief of loss, and the deadly machinations of a sinister werewolf court—all came from me. From the girl I was before those rejections rolled in again and again and again. From the girl who obsessed over Twilight, lived in the library, and dreamed that maybe she could one day write a story like all the others she loved so much. Even if she didn’t know it at the time, she did it. I did it. And so can you.

For any aspiring writers out there, I hope you know to stay true to yourself. You are what makes your books special. And for any readers who pick up Bitten, I hope you love it. I hope you find strength in Vanessa’s power and rage. Just be warned: it will end in ruin.