Author: Nicole Luttrell

I'm a speculative fiction writer. That means I write about dragons, ghosts and spaceships. Sometimes I write about the ghosts of dragons on spaceships.

My deconstructing journey, part one

I planned on writing this post for weeks now. The fact that a certain kicker for a certain football team decided to shoot his mouth off is coincidental.

Also, this post is going to be very long and this is just part one.

I was raised in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. While this isn’t strictly a cult, it is what’s considered to be a high-control group. I’ve talked at length about my experience with the church, and what it was like to leave it.

Years have passed. I have found a new faith. I don’t have any real relationship with most of my blood family. I have worked hard to build a life where I feel safe and happy.

I thought I was leaving behind all of the hurt and trauma. And for a while, I thought I was doing pretty good. I mean, I didn’t have anything really bad happen to me. I didn’t experience assault in the church. I wasn’t out while in the church, so I never suffered for that. I wasn’t driven to suicidal thoughts.

I mean, sure, I spent my whole childhood being told that women were meant only to be homemakers and helpmeets. Sure, I was told that I didn’t need the priesthood because I had motherhood. And yes, I was taught over and over that my only value to God was based on serving my family as a wife and a mother, leading me to devalue my education to the point that I never went to college and shrinking my view of the future to one, and only one, path.

But no one ever put their hands on me in the church, so what did I have to heal from?

Here’s the thing about thinking you’re okay when you’re not. You’ll be triggered by things when you least expect it. So when you start bawling halfway through a documentary, it’s confusing to you and everyone else in the room. And when you accidentally come upon a book that explicitly discusses the way you were raised baked into an allegory about an old children’s TV show, it wrecks your whole life for a while.

Or for a couple of months.

So I’ve spent a lot of time the last few months actively trying to heal. I’ve been working with a therapist and doing shadow work. And along the way, I’ve learned a few things.

I think at this point it’s important to mention that I am not a therapist or any sort of licensed counselor. I am a woman in her late thirties trying to make sense of her pain and heal from it.

When you’re taught something at a young age, it tends to stick longer. As a child, I was taught that there was one way a family was supposed to look. That there was one way a child of God was supposed to look. Especially if that child of God happened to be female.

Some of these lessons dropped away faster than others. I dropped the Word of Wisdom right away and started drinking coffee and tea.

Man, I love coffee and tea.

But other lessons, like a woman’s place in the world, those were harder to unlearn. Even though I know, logically, that women and men are equal, I still find myself having knee-jerk reactions that are not my thoughts.

Things that are nothing to most people are still daring and impetuous for me. Going to bars and having a drink. Wearing sleeveless shirts and shorts. Watching racey scenes on TV shows and movies.

If these things were crossing a personal moral line for me, that would be one thing. But I find more and more that it’s nothing of the sort. I want to be able to drink (responsibly). I want to wear tank tops because I swear the older I get the worse I handle hot weather.

But enjoying a glass of wine or being comfortable on a hot day is honestly pretty superficial. What I want to talk about is how LDS and other high-control groups are taught to serve others before they care for themselves.

As a child, I learned somewhere that a lot of people don’t consider LDS members to be Christians. I had no idea why, His name is right there in the title. It’s only recently that I realized it’s because most Christians believe that people are saved by God and Jesus’s grace alone. That we were forgiven for our sins before we even committed them. As a Christian Witch, I have faith that this is true.

LDS members don’t believe that. They believe that we are saved not by grace but by our works. How we serve our fellow man on Earth.

On the one hand, serving others is great! We should all spend at least some time considering how we can make life better for other people. That’s just a good thing to do. The problem comes when you’re taught to give when you have nothing to give. When you don’t have the money, don’t have the time, don’t have the energy or the spoons. When you have nothing of yourself to spare and nothing for yourself. When caring for yourself feels selfish.

That’s when the guilt sets in. When we are taught that we are not worthy of God’s love unless we are sacrificing all of ourselves in His name. When we do good works not for the love of our fellow man, but to score Heaven points.

This is a damaging way to look at the world. And it certainly damaged me. It’s led to a serious case of burnout that I am just now, maybe healing from. It’s led to a serious feeling that I am not worth anything to anyone unless I am giving something of myself to them.

I’m sure that the LDS church isn’t the only one to do this. And I’m sure that a lot of people need to hear this. So I’m going to say it here. You do not need to be giving other people of yourself to be worthy of love. You don’t need to be producing anything. You don’t need to be constantly running.

You deserve love. You deserve good food, good sleep, and good cups of coffee. You deserve to be happy. You deserve to take time for yourself and just do things that make you happy.

I have more tips about deconstructing, but we’re over a thousand words already. So stay tuned for part two next week. For now, please take this away. You do not have to do anything at all to deserve love. Once you can hold onto that, everything else gets better.

Paper Beats World is a labor of love. If you love what we do here, please like and share this post. You can also support us on Ko-fi.

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It’s Nova’s Launch Day!

The time has come! Nova, book five of Station 86 is available now on Amazon in both e-book and physical!

This book took me so long to write, and took such a wild, winding path. I am truly humbled by everyone who read this book already when it was posted here. And I hope that everyone who gets the book loves it as much as I loved writing it.

And if you’ve never read any of the Station 86 books, don’t forget that you can get book one, Seeming, for free on Smashwords.

Thank you all again for reading, for showing up here, and for supporting the work I do. You truly are the reason I keep showing up every week and at my desk every day.

And yes, book six is coming.

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Writing your second to last book

Nova comes out in a week. This is incredibly exciting. But, you probably already knew that. You probably also already knew that this is book 5 in the Station 86 series and that it is the second to last book.

What you might not know is that this is the first time I’ve ever written a series this long before. Woven was only four books, and one of those was a prequel. So, technically, that was only a trilogy.

Writing a long series, as I’ve found, is a whole different creature. Now that I’ve written the penultimate book in my series, I’ve learned a few things. And so today, I’d like to share what I’ve learned with you.

Have a series outline as soon as possible

I’ve talked a lot, and I mean a lot, about bad endings. Especially in my reviews on Haunted MTL. Endings that don’t feel satisfying, don’t fully answer all the questions asked during the series or simply don’t fulfill the promises of the story.

One of the ways you can avoid that sort of bad ending is by establishing a series outline as soon as possible. Ideally, before writing book one. I had a series outline for Station 86 after book one, and I honestly wish I’d have started earlier.

This is important for several reasons. The first is that it enables you to start working in foreshadowing from the start. A great example of this is Futurama. Spoilers ahead.

In the very first episode, we see a shadow on the floor when Fry falls into the cryogenic tube. It is several seasons before we find out who that shadow belonged to, and the significance of Fry being frozen.

Writing a series outline also stops you from feeling paralyzed when starting your next book in the series. Unless you’re writing a continuing series that doesn’t have an overarching plot, like The Cat Who series, you have an overlying story that you’re telling through the series. So it’s important to understand, at least a little, how each book is going to move that main plot forward, while also being a satisfying story by itself.

For example, the main storyline of Station 86 is that there are hollow mechanical things that are killing people for seemingly no reason. This is the main issue our heroes have to face. Each story has been about some new aspect of that.

Seeming set the stage, introduced our characters and world, and established that Earth had gone dark and wasn’t sending or receiving messages.

You Can’t Trust The AI was a story about AI dogs attacking Station 86, because the Hollow Suits had taken over their home station.

Virus was a zombie sci-fi story, that happened because someone was trying to create a weapon against the Hollow Suits.

Station Central was the first one to include an actual attack by the Hollow Suits. And Nova is where we finally learn what the Hollow Suits are, and our heroes come face to face with them.

None of this was by accident. It was all in my initial series outline.

But understand that it is not set in stone

This is something I think a lot of people don’t understand about an outline. Just because you have one, doesn’t mean it can’t change dramatically. If you come up with something better, or your original outline just isn’t vibing anymore, you can redo it. You can change it. You can toss the whole thing and start over.

For example, Nova was not going to be a book at all. All the important parts were going to be flashbacks in the final book, the one I’m writing right now. Then, I realized that there was simply too much to tell, and too much I wasn’t going to have the space for if I tried to do that. It would feel rushed, and unsatisfying. So, I wrote a whole other book. And in doing so, I had to rewrite the final one.

This is why this book took so long, but that’s a whole other issue.

The important thing is that you don’t have to stick to your initial outline. Your series is going to surprise you. Let it.

Anything might happen

A series ender can bring all sorts of surprises. People who you never thought would come back might. People you never thought would get back together might. People you thought were certainly going to live to the end of the series might not.

This is when it’s time to pull no punches. This is when your character’s worlds are unraveling. It’s when they’ve leveled up, been beaten down, and are standing just outside of the big boss’s reach. Which means it’s time to go for broke.

Which sometimes means making some tough decisions. Like killing a character you didn’t want to kill. Or having a love story end badly. Because, well, that brings me to the next point.

It can look like the bad guys won

No one wants to read a book where the antagonist is a pushover. They need to be someone intimidating. Someone it seems like the hero can’t possibly beat. And so, it’s okay if it looks like good is temporarily defeated in your second to last book. Maybe their team has been thinned. Maybe they’re imprisoned. Maybe we think they’re on death’s door.

Maybe any number of things. But, it’s okay for your second to last book to not have a happy ending. I would argue it’s probably for the best. Because we all like a comeback story, right? We all love the times someone defeats all odds and comes out with a win.

That’s what your last book is for. It’s the finish line, the moment of triumph after years and years of writing for you and years of journeying for your readers. So if you want that comeback, you have to knock your character down first.

Know what’s happening in your last book

While I was writing Nova, I had a document open the whole time for notes on the last book. Because, of course, this is what it’s all been building to. And so it’s fair to say that the last two books in a series are one book, just published at different times. Never is it more important that the story should flow from the last page of one book onto the first page of the next. I’ll be honest, I was tempted to write Nova and the new book at the same time, going through drafts together as though they were one large book. I might have done that if I hadn’t let so much time lapse between Station Central and this one. But if I do another long-term series, I’ll probably do just that.

If you’re writing a long-term series, I’d love to hear about it. And if you have any suggestions or tips, let us know in the comments.

Paper Beats World is a labor of love. If you love this post, please like and share it. And if you want to support us financially, you can do so on Ko-fi.

Nova is coming out next week! You can preorder it now on Amazon.

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