I suppose the best way to endear The Limousine to anyone who wanders onto this page is the story in which I wrote it. Generally my stories are ones that bounce around in my head for a long time until I figured out a way to execute it. Sometimes it takes years. Sometimes it takes a few months. The Limousine was different.

I was watching a slasher flick with a friend, See No Evil 2, Starring WWE’s Kane, now Mayor of Knox County, Tennessee (it’s a fun, stupid B movie). And for some reason during the film, I kept thinking about how great of an idea of a movie that was about people held hostage the back of a limousine by someone like Jigsaw. And I imagined the limousine being full of like buzzsaws and various traps and other ridiculous, funny stuff. I figured it would be easy. But as happens with ideas, the kernel idea evolved into something I didn’t see coming. It was only a few days later I literally set pen to paper.

I wrote the entire first draft of The Limousine by hand. It took me 23 days. I estimate that first draft to be about 50,000 words. I’m what they call a "pantser" meaning I don’t plot or do any real planning before I write. I had no idea who was going to be in this limousine or why, or who the driver was or what his motivations were. I found myself fascinated by these characters who could be contemptuous in one part and sympathetic in the next. I found myself feeling bad for characters I thought were horrible people and discovered evil hidden in others. When I finished that first draft, I read it the next day. Instead of taking a break as I normally do between drafts and work on something else, I immediately rewrote the book on the laptop.

It took me even less time to write the second draft, which came in at about 76,000 words, 20 days in total. The first time around I only got a glimmer of who these characters were, but this time I got a good full-view. I’d created quite an ensemble of onions that get peeled away page by page. They were beautiful and abhorrent, cultured and barbaric, weak and powerful. Of everything I’ve written, this was my favourite cast of characters, and being stuck in the limousine for the majority of the novel forced them to interact with each other without getting any space, which really let their personalities contrast.