Writing Maxwell Demon was a culmination of a lifetime of polishing my skills in writing up to the point of publishing. I’ve talked about how I had written for years prior. I began developing characters for the series before I knew I’d be using them in it. For sharp eyes, they have noticed old accounts of mine using “The Blasphemer Series” to describe early shared writing pieces. Those pieces never made it into the series itself, but the title of them did.
When I came up with the series’ title, I knew, at least as a teenager, that someone would call whatever I wrote under this umbrella title would be offended. The topics tackled in the series clashed with beliefs held in the household I grew up in and with the communities, my family had been a part of throughout my younger years. Whether it was religious retellings or even sexuality, someone was going to be upset with my work.
I knew then and I know now that I write as a drummer drums their own tune. I write what I’d like to read, what I want to write, and all the while knowing someone somewhere would appreciate my work.
This book is a collective of all the things I knew as a teenager that my peers would’ve never understood, but I hoped I wasn’t alone. Writing was how I coped in my younger years. With some writer’s flair and playing in the sandbox of an empty document awaiting to be filled, I infused a great passion amongst the pages. This passion was religious studying, not just reading the Bible, but studying cultures and any religious book and historical references I could get my hands on. This is where I questioned things I read.
Questioning things is still to this day how I write and fix plot holes and develop my characters and stories. Why would someone do that? Why wouldn’t they? Very simple questions and researching for answers. I used this throughout this book. What does Hell really look like? Is it all brimstone and fire or something more familiar? What would be more disturbing, something not that far from the world one knows or something so bizarrely different it was unimaginable? Beautiful questions, that’s just my belief.
This is a story of redemption and reincarnation. Though reincarnation is for the betterment of the soul, it also held this terrifying idea to me. Living over and over, forgetting what happened in the previous life, and never knowing if you’re on the ‘right’ path in this one sounded more like a curse than a journey of enlightening to me.
How far would someone go if they truly loved you? A simple question, one deeply rooted in confusion for me growing up in a dysfunctional household, how I did. People that love you shouldn’t hurt you. I knew this much, but I never witnessed this, but I did dream of it. Meeting someone that would love me for me was foreign, but throughout the writing, I could imagine a world or many where this was answered. For Maxwell, the main male in Maxwell Demon, it was a never-ending journey to seek out his true love and be there for them.
I never really called this book a romance. It has a love story interwoven, but it’s much more than that for me. I knew it was a dark fantasy, but eventually, I learned it was horror. As I began working on it in 2014, I became stuck and put it on the back burner for a few months until 2015, when I finished it. During this break from this project, I wrote Human Ouija.
I had always thought The Blasphemer Series would be the one to get me the most ‘hate’, but it wasn’t, it was Human Ouija. During an event for its release, a guest was approached online by a family member of theirs telling them to go to church and to stop writing ‘books like that’. This was brought to my attention by the guest as it was unfolding behind the scenes. Human Ouija has always been a story about two things. How far would you go for someone you love and miss and a warning about dabbling in things that you don’t understand. See the irony? I did.
Judgment has happened all my life. I’m too fat. I’m too skinny. I need to smile more. Too much make-up or too little. I’m not enough of this or too much of this is the theme throughout a day in the life of Lynn Lesher, the woman behind the pen name L. Bachman (me). It’s always been from people that don’t get to know me or genuinely ask about my books. It’ll always happen, and I accepted that when I was still a little girl. If I had a favorite of all the judgments cast upon me, those who do not write telling me my work is ‘easy to do’.
Maxwell Demon was a challenge on many levels for me. Emotionally accepted that it was taking a big step forward onto a path I had always wanted to go down. Technically, I worried about how I would construct and tell a story I’d be proud of. I also wondered if it would even matter, of course, it did, but for a fleeting moment, I thought it wouldn’t until it did.