The Co-Writing Diaries #5
The Department of Dark Errands
Welcome to my blog series chronicling the wild, wonderful journey of co-writing the romantasy series, The Department of Dark Errands—London’s most elite (and most dangerous) magical intelligence agency. From brainstorming the magical underbelly of London and morally gray love interests to navigating the (occasionally stormy) waters of collaboration, I’m unlocking the bedroom door to share the real behind-the-scenes story of crafting a fantasy romance series with .
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Let the adventure begin.
In diary entry #3, I mentioned writing on a wing and a prayer. One of the many things I love about writing is the research.
Remember my first debut serial that I abruptly scrapped after four chapters? I’m going to let you in on a little secret about that series idea. Several years ago, I learned that my hometown of Phoenix, AZ was ranked 3rd in the nation for human trafficking activity. Third! Needless to say, Alice had nothing on this homegirl when it came to diving down that rabbit hole headfirst.
A while back, I’d read an article about an actress who used to be on the show, The Walking Dead, being involved in helping to break up a trafficking ring in Colombia. That article led me to Operation Underground Railroad, a nonprofit organization started by a former CIA/Homeland Security agent that runs missions into foreign countries to save children from sex slavery rings. He’d started the organization in January 2012 and, within a matter of six months, had saved more than 250 children!
I thought this was an amazing organization and wanted to find out more about it. I browsed their site for hours before contacting them, hoping to speak to someone about what they do. Lo and behold, the VP of Operations and Foreign Missions contacted me, and through a phone interview, I received a more in-depth look at how they operate.
While O.U.R. mainly focuses on foreign countries, I wanted to create a similar fictitious organization domestically, focused on Phoenix.
And the Nemesis Group was born.
The idea for the Department of Dark Errands series came from two paragraphs in a post on Alisa’s gotham girl ‘stack:
My friend, Meredith—the brilliant one who thought up laying the birdseed trail from the noisy Mockingbird’s nest to the Tech Bro’s Tesla, so that he would be inordinately outraged and repatriate said bird—who had by then learned the theme to Friends and was driving the entire building bonkers—said, “What is needed in these situations is a company that specializes in non-deadly, anonymous ‘Dark Errands’.” Again, Meredith wins the week.
Wouldn’t you SO love to work for The Department of Dark Errands? A team of bizarro Amelies—targeting, sabotaging, hexing, and pranking only jerkwads? Of course, Teodora could be the operation's Q—testing all of her hexes and curses. Camille would make an exquisite Ms. Moneypenny—undercover right when you need her. Selena would need to be M as she is so bossy, and the rest of us could be agents 005, 006, and 007. We would market it on Telegram and to Dark Web chickenshits. I think it is genius. Meredith delivers once more!
I screamed my head off and commented in all caps, “CAN SOMEONE PLEASE GAWD WRITE THIS SERIES??!!!!!”
Alisa replied, “I CAN SO write this series! … Can you imagine all the cool weapons??? And the music???”
BWAHA! Yes. Yes, I can.
When it was time to create the Department itself, I happily performed a forward-2½ somersault-in-pike-position dive back down the Research Rabbit Hole.