From Ex-Satanist to Daydreams: My Writing Journey

September 18, 2019 | By Lindsey Barlow | Reply More

The inspiration for PIVOT came from multiple areas of my life, the most prominent being that a friend of mine in high school who was – at least at that time – a Lutheran, invited me to come to a special event her church was having, where an “ex-Satanist” came and spoke about her experiences to the youth group. Looking back on it, I doubt that the woman was an ex-Satanist and strongly suspect it was a scare tactic to make sure the youth group didn’t veer from Lutheranism.

At the same time, it was just such an eerie speech, an unsettling account of events, and it got me thinking and thinking and playing out scenarios again and again. It sparked an idea in me, and that idea grew over a decade into something entirely different – about a girl trapped in a cult who desperately wanted to escape, a girl facing a maniacal mentor with extraordinary supernatural powers

Up until this experience, though, I had always been a daydreamer. I would daydream constantly, especially while listening to music. I think that carried through to when I was older, and it’s how a lot of my ideas started budding. Music definitely helps. I don’t know what it is about driving and listening to music, but it gets the ideas going.

They start as images, or sort of like music videos, and then evolve from there. Then, things develop in the writing itself, beyond the ideas. I feel that, if you sit down and say exactly what you wanted to say when writing, you’ve kind of failed. It’s only by writing something beyond what you knew to write that you have succeeded – when you write more than you thought you knew. A story develops this way. You have an idea, and you think you know how to express that idea when you get started. Then, you find out that those scenes don’t do the idea justice, so you write new scenes and more new scenes, and you hone them, and then you go over and over it again. So, it grows beyond an idea, beyond the original image that sparked it all.

The story of PIVOT percolated for nearly ten years in the back of my head. Even though I had majored in creative writing in my undergraduate (and had flash fiction published), it wasn’t until I was working part time at a community college and pursuing my MA in English that, during my last semester of coursework before my thesis, I decided to really and truly try my hand at writing a book. It’s hard to say exactly what inspired it. I was just so energized.

Undergraduate and graduate school is terribly stressful, and it requires so much work, and I finally thought to myself, “If I put this much work into something that I actually want to do, I might succeed.” I had been able to figure everything else out – organic chemistry, Victorian history, etc. – and I didn’t really want to do those. So, maybe, just maybe, if I worked and worked and worked, I could do it. So, I pursued it. That was the year PIVOT was born – in 2013.

Jack Harper has now been with me for about sixteen years. She has manifested in different ways, with slightly different desires and personality traits, but she has always been there. She started blond, as though that matters, and then transitioned to having black hair so dark it’s almost blue. As said before, the ex-Satanist who spoke at my friend’s Lutheran church inspired the story, as well as – just a little – Jack herself. Jack is the survivor of a traumatic situation. She does what she has to in order to survive, and she is cunning.

As I continued writing, Jack, in her proper form, came to be. My favorite thing about the character is her genuineness in all things. Although she commits terrible acts, she is also fully genuine in doing them. She doesn’t know right from wrong, based on her upbringing. She is dangerous but innocent, as well. In other words, she comes at everyone on as equal of terms as she can understand.

Though she fits into a psychological horror type of villain at times, she is not necessarily a psychopath, as every psychopathic trait she has is a learned attribute, a second nature, rather than a choice. Each time she is given a choice, she chooses to step beyond this and become something else. Nevertheless, when she has to for survival’s sake or for the sake of saving others, she calls on her dark skills. Basically, she is the-obedient-and-well-trained-assassin-who-turns.

She is more than willing to create her own code, apart from what she has been taught. Jack is always thinking, planning, plotting, reconsidering, and she is always analyzing what comes her way. She is often calculating – she has to be to achieve what she achieves – but there are also times when she revels in what she does and her unearthly experiences.

Roland and Cyrus have been with me for at least seven years. They became fully fleshed out when I was writing the first draft. Cyrus is the “primal father.” What I mean by that is that he is the unstoppable adoptive father who heads the cult, has unearthly tools at his disposal, and is able to discover those who blaspheme before they can stop him. To Jack, he is a charismatic and maniacal mentor (think Charles Manson meets Lucifer from Supernatural).

Roland is like a second father to Jack. He starts as Cyrus’s assistant, but his heart shifts throughout the novel. It is difficult for me to say exactly what inspired these characters. I suspect part of it was that there are many cults in this world, and they all have a leader of some sort who convinces his followers he is capable of terrific and terrible things. I actually wanted a character who could back up his claims. Thus, Cyrus was born. I always associated him with silver – silver eyes and silver hair – because he’s cold and calculating. Roland, perhaps, is the other side of the coin. I don’t want to give too much away about Roland, though, as he is integral to the story and how it evolves and concludes.

Lutin has been with me since 2014, and his arrival in my novel was quite surprising to me, though he quickly became one of my favorite characters. When I realized that Cyrus needed access to tools and beings in order to gain otherworldly powers, and that I needed more grit in the novel (that is, I needed to explain things in the Pivotverse more), that’s how Lutin arrived. He is like angel and demon combined. His intent is pure and good, but he is dangerous.

Cyrus manages to capture him and uses his blood and soul to accomplish fantastic things in the cult. Even so, Jack is able to find Lutin in the basement of Cyrus’s mansion, and when she does, her world is turned upside down. Lutin helps redefine good for Jack, helps provide Jack with agency, as he gives her otherworldly powers. His body has cracks in it, similar to branches or vines, but these lines fluoresce with fire. I think Kintsukuroi helped inspire him.

The sense of an otherworld, too, greatly inspired him. He is beyond. Part of me suspects that my exposure to and love for Anne Rice’s work helped produce him – the sense of an ancient, wise, beautiful, and dangerous being. I have read much of Rice’s work. As said before, though, his arrival was very much a surprise. A lot of the book is this way. It evolved greatly from that one strange speech that I happened to attend in that small, Lutheran church.

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L.C. Barlow is a writer and professor working primarily in the field of speculative fiction. She has an MA in English from the University of Texas at Arlington and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program. She has studied with popular writers, including Nancy Holder, Elizabeth Hand, Ted Deppe, James Patrick Kelly, Elizabeth Searle, David Anthony Durham, and Theodora Goss. Her work has been published in Oak Bend Review, Flash Fiction World, Linguistic Erosion, Flashes in the Dark, Separate Worlds, Every Day Fiction, and Popular Culture Review. Her fiction has reached over sixty-five thousand readers and garnered praise, including a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Awards, a winner of the Indie Reader Discovery Awards, a winner of the eLit Awards, and IndieReader’s Best Books of 2014. Barlow’s horror trilogy – Pivot, Perish, and Peak – was picked up in 2018 by California Coldblood Books, an imprint of Rare Bird Books. The first of the trilogy, Pivot, will be released in the Fall of 2019. Barlow lives in Dallas, TX with her two cats, Smaug and Dusty.