About "Yesterday" (Patreon)

I finished the Spanish edition of “Ayer”, including all corrections and artwork, on June 2015, and that was the edition I translated for you during this past months.

I’m thankful we thought about this and that you encouraged me to do it. It has been great to be able to redo all the text and even fix some parts that weren’t quite on point on the original version. In fact I’m going to release a new edition of the Spanish version with this fixes. And in a few months I will release the definitive english version on Amazon.

I don’t remember if I told you this, but this novel’s creation was a bumpy ride. I spent around three years documenting myself, researching and working on the story, characters and outline. Then I sat down to actually write it on 2008. At that time I was writing two novels at the same time, this one and another one that’s still on the making. A writer friend advised me to choose one as my first and focus on it and I did that on 2009, finished the first draft (without the final chapters) on June 21 of 2011 (pic below) and kept writing until summer of 2012 that I had a huge health scare. I woke up one day unable to talk or remember quite a few things, even unable to read.

I had been suffering from migraines almost all my life (runs in the family), and those last two years had been hard on me. I had periods of 40 days in a row of pain and mild fever, even had to quit my regular job (I had taken a break from music on 2008), but I had been writing on the good days. My doctor at that time gave me a new med she said it could help, but left me unsupervised more than was recommended. I even went to see her because I had been having some weird issues, like forgetting my ATM number or missing words on my vocabulary (you do notice the things if you had been writing for a while), that’s when she told me I should quit my job and take it easy while meds did their thing. Well, turns out they messed with my brain big time, the first diagnose on that July day I woke up not feeling myself being Alzheimers.

Then the next week, after some more tests, the doctor told me it was not Alzheimers, it was dementia, then started giving me antidepressants because she said that condition was causing me an attention disorder, and that would eventually cause a depression on me (I wasn’t depressed at that time, maybe angry or scared, but not depressed, so that caused on me a chemical depression). Well, that was also a mistake, she was wrong and I was lucky enough to have a moment of clarity and change doctors. Took me a while to be able to write again, I think it was around summer 2013 that I was feeling myself again and decided I had to finish this novel by any means, just in case I hadn’t much time left of clarity… or anything else.

Then I discovered I hadn’t left written or outlined the finale of it. I knew I had a very cool ending but I totally forgot the details, and don’t quite remember to this day how it was, just where I wanted to arrive with the reader. I was used my whole life to keep my stuff on my memory, and although I did take pages and pages of notes, I did not want to write down the end because I wanted to keep it fresh and with all the energy for when the moment came. That’s something I also do with music, I usually wait until I have the final version playing on my head to start to actually record all of it.

So I had no ending for the novel, and once I was able to sit down and work without my head exploding I had to rewrite many times the fourth page and epilogue until it worked and sort of get to the point I wanted.

I think I fixed some of that in this new adaptation, but I still haven’t decided about some parts of it. For example, one of my last notes was that I should place chapter 28 (the one when Laura and Jonah’s parents escape from Olympus) at the beginning of the novel. That would have set up a more action paced story. I still don’t know if that would be wise. But in my original ending there was a more in depth visit to the afterworld, a look into death and the circumstance that people had been starting to wake up around the world…

Oh, and the original tittle of the novel was something like  "Dreaming & Awakening" ("Soñar y Despertar" in Spanish). But I had to rethink it when I rewrote the ending. I also left a picture done for that first idea, before I had the meltdown, see below.

I aso wrote music for this story (and the other novel). I included some of those compositions on my album (well, my evil twin’s album) “Antheus”. And here you have the tittle track. Please let me know what you think, it could be very helpful :D