A Look Behind The Curtain

While cleaning I found more of my old notebooks and one had some early work from Excite in it. Stuff I had completely forgotten about. My notes are difficult to understand at best as my thought process takes place only about 40% on the page when I ask myself questions, so it was tough to decipher some of it, but I found my lists of names for the drug .

I’m going to share them since they are a fun insight into the process, but some of them are rough, as I believe I started the lists right at the beginning of the project. I learned the name of the drug just as Jon did; after a bit of consideration and bouncing ideas off of other people.

Some of the other names that little pink pill might have had:
Scorch—I’m not sure where this one came from; possibly early on I wasn’t sure what the ‘science’ behind it would be, so it just sounded cool.
Misfire—likely one about nerves misfiring while under the influence. Again early on, when I wasn’t yet clear on the science.
Glut—I was getting deep in research now, short for glutamate, a brain chemical that I decided would be integral in the pill
Neuro—it’s neurotoxic, so this one made sense to consider.
ReUps—more ‘deep science’ (aka maybe correct, maybe totally wrong) the idea that the pill was a re-uptake inhibitor
GRI—Jon’s technical name for it, and the one he suggests to Kat; Glutamate Re-uptake Inhibitor
Excite—our eventual winner; the pill is an excitotoxin in the end
Binder—there was a science reason for this one too, but my notes are scratchy. It had something to do with taking the complete sensory input from an event. Which was what I was going for the high.

I’m pretty sure at the time I thought many of these were better than they are, but GRI, Excite and Binder seem to be the final round trio, with stars around them. I wish my notes were clearer, I hardly remember that part of the process.

The only thing I came up with more of than names for Excite were covers—just like the drug names some are pretty bad. Made by myself or author friends trying to give me ideas, I'll share some of those here too. I'm very visual so I tend to make a mock-cover early on in the process. They change as the story does, so here is a visual tale of Excite.

Also to celebrate my birthday, the Excite ebook will be on sale for just $0.99 on amazon on June 28th!