This is the story of how it took me 12 years to write Mr. Wrong.

It’s a long one. Settle in.

I’ll be honest: I don’t know where to even start talking about this book. It is, at the time I’m writing this note, my favorite thing I’ve written, by far. I love the stupid, self-sabotaging dumbass at the center of it, and I love Mitch for sticking around until she got her shit together.

But this book has been hell to create.

I first started writing it, on a borrowed laptop with a glitchy screen, for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November of 2005. Yes, you are counting correctly—almost a dozen years ago.

In 2005, I was a huge General Hospital fan, and very involved in the online soap fandom; SoapZone was my second home, and I made friends there that are still friends to this day. (If any of them are reading this, they’re going to nail me on the bit of stolen Jax/Brenda dialogue. That’s what us professional author types call an homage, guys.)

And yes, we did drive to big conventions (and small ones) to get autographs and pictures, and we did pay a guy who smuggled scripts out of the studio, and we did know an awful lot of backstage gossip. (Some of it might even have been true.)

We all had favorite couples, and favorite characters, and favorite actors, and banded together in groups united in our love for (or hatred of) any of those things. We made entire websites devoted to specific couples, and the actors that played them. And some of us gravitated to the ones who didn’t get quite as much attention.

And there was one actor in particular—not even a contract actor, just an occasional appearance—with a voice that made female hormones sit up and take notice, and a lazy sexy drawl that could make a strong woman weak. That voice is where Mitch was born.

(This actor also had a predilection for plaid shirts with snaps. No way was that not going in there. The section where the snaps first make their appearance is virtually unchanged from the first draft.)

It was right around this time that I first heard of NaNoWriMo, and I thought, “Hell, why not?” I’d been writing since childhood, had even been published back in the 90s. I could do this.

So I gave GH a fake name, and the other ABC soaps, too, and I stuck Kari in there as an amalgam of me and my friends, and I said what-if? Not what if a soap fan fell in love with a soap actor—which is why Kari couldn’t be the main character—but what if someone else did? Someone who would think he wasn’t anything special and then discover he was everything. And so that was Jenna. And I stuck them in a story together, and gave her a bunch of terrible reasons not to like Mitch. (In the very earliest version, it was because he had a mustache. I wasn’t always the towering talent I am today. *snicker*)

I “won” NaNo that year—meaning that I got to 50,000 words, which is the goal of the challenge. The problem was, I didn’t finish the book.

I had quite a lot of a book. I had the ending, very much as it is today. I had the beginning; in fact, that first line hasn’t changed—not so much as a single letter or punctuation mark—since I first wrote it on November 18th, 2005.

(Oh, yeah, I left out that part. I started NaNo that year (my first year) working on a completely different book, and couldn’t get anywhere with it. So I scrapped it on the 18th and started over, and I still managed to write 50,000 words of this book before the month was over. Go me!)

But what I didn’t have was an awful lot of the middle. It was a mishmash of half-written dialogue, notes to myself, scene summaries, and then the occasional actual chapter, like signposts along the road telling me “This way to Mitch and Jenna’s happy ending.”

And what I really didn’t have was real people who had real thoughts and feelings, and did things for reasons that made sense. I had some cardboard cutouts going through the motions.

It wasn’t good enough.

So I put the book away, and I wrote something different for NaNo the next year, and something different the year after that, and so on. And every once in a while I’d drag out this manuscript and move some words around or add a scene. And in this way, over the course of nearly a decade, I cobbled together 70,000 words—and the story still sucked like a black hole.

And then, in the waning days of 2014, fresh out of a job and with a single short story published on Amazon’s self-publishing platform, I did something crazy: I listed Midnight Confessions (which had been its name for many years at that point, though I can’t remember what I called it initially) as a preorder on Amazon, to be released in late March. That was 90 whole days. Surely I could whip it into shape and put some … I don’t know, something, in the middle and voila!

Then I opened the file, remembered what a disaster the whole thing was, and how it had been pieced together over the course of a decade, and went straight into a panic attack.

When I recovered, I went to work. I had a deadline, and missing it would be catastrophic. (Amazon does not like it when you let customers down.) I thought most of the story worked, but some whole sections had to go. I had to change Jenna’s profession because I no longer had access to the person on whom I had based her, who had a very specialized and unique job. I tried to update it to 2014, but at that point it had been 20 years since I lived in Manhattan, and I knew I was getting everything wrong. (Frankly, I probably got the 2004 details wrong too, but hopefully most folks won’t notice.) And, more important, soaps were no longer what they had been. The New York-based ABC soaps had all been cancelled, which made my plot literally impossible. It was more important to get the soap opera stuff right than it was to know exactly what the bar scene on the Lower East Side was like, so I decided I knew enough to fake that part, and that the story was very much a product of its time. I left it in 2004 (TiVo! Landline phones!) and moved on.

It took me every single one of those 90 days to get the book ready. I wrote the studio tour scene literally the day I had to upload my preorder to Amazon, with only a few hours to spare, hoping I wasn’t introducing any contradictions with anything I’d written a decade before. (Spoiler: I was.) And then I had to let it go. I had done the best I could in the short time I had given myself, and it was going to have to be good enough.

And it did okay, and got mostly good reviews, but I never got enough eyes on it to really go anywhere. I put a total of four covers on it over the 18 months it was published; none of them helped. I switched it into all kinds of other categories in the store; that didn’t help either. The fact was, the book wasn’t good enough, and I knew it.

And that was incredibly sad, because I loved the story, and had such tender feelings for its origins and what it had meant to me.

Meanwhile, I’d started doing freelance editing for other authors, and was doing a lot more of that than I was writing. My books stopped selling at all, and I abandoned a series in the middle, which is a Very Bad Thing. On the side, I was slowly building up a new pen name, writing a totally over-the-top, smutty billionaire serial (definitely check out the Author’s Note in The Billionaire’s Contract; that’s a good one), and that pen name was outselling my other books by quite a large margin. How annoying.

But what was done was done. My two standalone books were water under the bridge, and much as I loved them, I felt I had to look at them as failed experiments on my way to figuring out how to write a decent book. (The other book I’m talking about here was another NaNoWriMo novel, I screwed it up even worse than this one, and I’ll be republishing it as The Best Man sometime this year—once I figure out how to fix it.)

And then a friend said, “Why don’t you do a quick revision and republish them as Tessa, now that you understand the market better?”

Well, hell. Why didn’t I think of that?

So I unpublished them, got a new cover made for Midnight Confessions (now called Mr. Wrong, because let’s face it, that’s way better), and set a preorder for three months out (because one thing you can say about me is that I never, ever learn).

Then I opened the file, and once again went straight into a panic attack.

The book, which I hadn’t reread since it was published, was a disaster. No wonder it had never found readers. Jenna was flaky and unlikeable—and, even worse, she was unrelatable. There didn’t seem to be much reason for the things she did, or the horrifically cavalier way she played with Mitch’s feelings. I couldn’t stand her.

And Mitch. Well. My dear friend (and fellow author) Claire read the first half and asked me, quite bluntly: “Why does Mitch have a giant vagina?”

I laughed myself almost to death, and then when I was done I looked at the story with fresh eyes. She was right; the dude was a doormat. He never stuck up for himself, he never got mad at Jenna for being not just a flake but downright cruel, and when he found out about her night with Drew he called her up to offer a sympathetic ear. I wrote that. Hell, if I’d had him come over with some Ben & Jerry’s and some tissues it wouldn’t have been all that out of character, and I could have cut Kari out of the story. He and Jenna could have put their hair up in hot rollers and watched a chick flick. It was awful.

So I put together a short playlist of songs that told me what I *really* wanted this story to be about, what these characters were feeling that I hadn’t gotten down on the page properly. (You can find that playlist, if you’re interested, at bit.ly/misterwrongplaylist.) I dug in, tore the story apart, and put it back together using all the tricks I had learned over the eighteen months of editing that were now under my belt. I gave Jenna a better backstory, and some believable and understandable motivations. I made it much more obvious right from the beginning that Mitch kept coming around because she kept making it clear that she wanted him there, even if she was too damn stupid to figure it out. And I let Mitch stick up for himself, go toe-to-toe with her, and call her on her shit.

I had to replot the whole thing and write new scenes. I cut about 8,000 words, and then wrote 10,000 new ones. I had to write new lines in every scene that remained, and create whole new scenes to push the story in the direction it needed to go. Not a single word of the scene in Petrosino Square existed two weeks ago, and almost none of the scene where Mitch tells Jenna to lose his number. (Oh my God, how I cried when I wrote that scene—that line about another man’s sweat? Kill me, right?) I combined a bunch of repetitious scenes, and went through every chapter with a fine-toothed comb. At last! The book it was always supposed to be! I wrote this Author’s Note and sat back and waited for the accolades from my beta readers.

They fucking hated it.

They both absolutely hated Jenna. Hated her. Were thrilled when Mitch left her, because it was exactly what she deserved. They pointed out all the places where I was asking people to believe impossible things and root for unlikable people. And the part where I just repeated a major conflict because hey, two is better than one, right? And the fact that the ending didn’t ring at all true because frankly, at that point, there was literally no reason for Mitch to believe Jenna loved him.

I looked at the scenes they hated (which was, like, most of them) … and they were right. I had given Jenna a bunch of motivations that made sense in my head, and then I didn’t put them on the page. I had made some huge plot errors, not the least of which was more repetitious back and forth. I thought I had Mitch stand up to Jenna (and I did), but they both insisted he still had more patience than any mortal man could possess.

So, back to the drawing board. This time there was no patching to be done. There was no way to bring this Frankenstein’s monster back to life; it all had to go.

Oh, and by the way? I had already told everyone it would be out in a few days (which was not going to happen) and regardless of what I told anyone, I only had ten days because I was leaving the country. (Yeah, I set my preorder up to go live 3 days after I came back from overseas. Because in case you haven’t caught on to this yet, I am really not very smart at all.)

I wrote a new outline. Started the playlist back up. And I opened the broken book on one screen, a clean file on another, and started typing. I rewrote the whole thing from scratch, layering in all that Jenna was, all that she felt, all her motivations. We had to know her why, and she had to walk the walk. I had to figure out exactly where a real man’s breaking point would be and bring Mitch right to the edge without pushing him over, and I had to cut an entire plot arc because it was utterly, completely unbelievable. (In my defense, when I first plotted this book, I was watching a lot of soap operas. “Believable” isn’t really the criteria over there.)

A second round of beta reading. Better … but not quite there. The first two chapters were a total snoozefest. And she was right.

Another round of edits. More consultation with my round 2 beta. Some minor (thank God) tweaks.

And finally—finally—it was good enough. (I hope.)

So that’s what you’ve got in your hands now. I think that this story is a million times better than it was in its other incarnations, and I think you would agree if you saw them (which you never will because no way, man). I think that the frightened, vulnerable woman at its heart is someone we can all relate to (even as we want very much to throw her out her office window—too bad it doesn’t open), and I think Mitch’s quiet patience is admirable, but his eventual refusal to be jerked around anymore is believable and real.

I kept the voice, though, and the snaps. Because of course I did.

I have never done anything as difficult as writing this book—but I did it because I love it. I hope you loved it, too.

I owe an enormous debt to Claire Kingsley, who not only helped me get rid of Mitch’s vagina, but also asked me the pivotal question in what I thought would be the last couple days of revision; it didn’t fix the book but it brought it within reach of being fixable. Also I have to thank Katie Sullivan from the bottom of my heart for reading chapters hot off the keyboard and making incredibly insightful comments and suggestions. Nikki Quinn and Claire (again) slogged their way through a beta read of a book they hated and then spent literally hours answering my questions about how to fix it—and then read most of it again in bits and pieces as I made my way through, trying to repair it. And Ginger Forsyth and Nicki Ann Holt did the final beta read, showed me all the spots where I had still not quite hit the mark, and had an enormous impact on the first two chapters. You rock, ladies. If this book is any good at all, it’s thanks to you, for real.

One last thing, and I’m sorry to end with sadness, but this is important: While I was in the first major rewrite stage of this book, a couple of weeks ago, a very dear friend from those long-ago soap opera fandom days passed away. She was a champion for this book in its first incarnation, loved it despite its imperfections, and knew without having to ask exactly which characters were standing in for which real-life actors. She had only recently embarked on what was clearly going to be her happy-ever-after. Her light shone bright on everyone she loved, and she had one of the biggest hearts I’ve ever known. I’m better for having had her in my life, and the world is poorer without her. This new, better book is dedicated to her. Love you, JessB.

Tessa

6/27/17