The ALLD Backstory Volume One

Names + When it All Began

There’s some debate in my house over when I first started writing the story originally titled Story. Then it was June, July, and August. For a while, it was simply Summer Story, or the Fox Brothers. It became Rock Star Romance before it was the Sin City Series. And now, finally, we arrive at destiny...or something like it: A Little Like Destiny.

It may have been as early as 2001-02 when I sat in a college dorm room with a yellow legal pad, or it may have been as late as 2009-10, when I distinctly remember sitting in my favorite spot telling the story of Reese, Brian, and Mark in the house where we lived at the time.

Either way, I’ve known these characters a long time.

Here’s why I think it dates back somewhere as early as the college days: I was straight obsessed with Mark McGrath from Sugar Ray around that time. He was my original inspiration for Mark’s character—a sexy, tatted rock star who had a penchant for the ladies.

While Sugar Ray released an album in 2009, I admittedly don’t own it because I moved onto Adam Levine in the lull between SR’s album drops.

And here’s the other part.

I settled on Mark for the first name, but I still needed a last name. In 2002, the end of my senior year of college, who was hotter than the star of Just Married in theaters and That 70s Show on TV?

That’s right: No one was hotter than Ashton Kutcher.

In 2009, though, he was married to Demi Moore and released a movie called Spread that I only heard of when I Googled what Ashton Kutcher was doing in 2009 for the sake of this article.

So the lines of the origin of Mark Ashton’s name intersect closer to 2002 than 2009.

I chose the name Reese because I liked it. I originally pictured our lead female as sweet and adorably blonde like Reese Witherspoon but with long, wavy locks. Though her hair color changed in recent drafts after I found an exclusive photograph I fell in love with for the cover, she’ll always be blonde to me even though I don’t really picture her as Witherspoon any longer. And in 2002, I freaking LOVED that movie Sweet Home Alabama, so that line intersects with Mark Ashton’s pretty well.

And Brian?

To be honest, I have no idea where that name came from. I just liked it, I guess. I needed a normal dude name to sound like a brother to Mark, though Brian actually came first in the original series.

Now here’s where it all gets a little fuzzy.

VAIL’s original band name was Sugar Grove, the town in Illinois where I lived from 2004-2006. I wouldn’t have written about a band named Sugar Grove before I lived in the town by the same name. But in the original first book of the series, the story was much more Reese and Brian’s. Mark didn’t even enter the story until the second book, so it’s possible I started writing the series, forming the characters and getting to know them as I plotted events and graduated from college, and added the details about the rock star brother much later.

Who knows?

What I do know is this: On April 4, 2017, I decided to bring these characters from 2001 or 2009 into 2017.

And I couldn’t be happier with the result.

Next Article: The ALLD Backstory Volume Two

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