Secrets of Writing Small Town Witch

Tomorrow and Monday, Small Town Witch is available on Amazon as a free Kindle download! If you’ve been waiting to check out the story, now is your chance!

I’ve talked about the characters, how I wrote the story, and even shared a deleted scene from the novel. But what else is there to learn about this story? These are the top five secrets behind Small Town Witch. (more…)

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Author Interview with Jimena Novaro

I asked some questions of fantasy author Jimena Novaro about her approach to writing, life, and more. She had some surprising responses. Read on to find out what she said!
1. What inspired you to write your first book?

In some corner of my mind I always knew I would be a writer. I started
writing stories as soon as I could write; they just seemed to come out of
me. At first I only wrote to entertain myself, because what can be more
fun than opening up a window to another world and watching characters go
around doing whatever I told them to?

I wrote my first “book” when I was nine for the pure pleasure of pouring
words onto a page. That novel was so incoherent that the protagonists
defeated the villain with pancakes, but every day I sat down and wrote
another few pages in awful handwriting until I finished it. This made me
realize that I could write novels. Tons of them. So for the rest of my
life, I’ve never stopped, even though I never even considered publication
seriously until about three years ago. (more…)

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Deleted Scene: Poetry Slam

Today, I’ve posted a deleted scene from the book on SmallTownWitch.com. You can read “Poetry Slam” to see one of the scenes that didn’t make it into the novel. It takes place sometime after Rosa’s full moon flight but before the kiss. There’s more context before the scene on the other site.

There were a number of scenes that got cut for various reasons. Sometimes, I have to cut scenes because they no longer work as the plot changes, or because they slow things down too much, or they’re mostly just filler. For the nearly 86,000 words in Small Town Witch, I have a folder of over 20K words from “deleted scenes”, and I am sure there were plenty of little snippets that I failed to save at all. So a lot got the axe in the editing process. (more…)

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Research Wednesday: Choreomania

As a writer, my ideas can come from anywhere. Sometimes it can be spontaneous, like a suggestion from a friend, a flash of insight, or a memory from the past. But

dancing-despite-the-rain_l

ideas can also come from research, where I actively go and learn more about the world in order to find new and interesting things that I can incorporate into my stories. Each Wednesday, I’ll highlight a topic of research or something cool that I found which helped inspire me.

This idea came from listening to classical radio. I don’t remember the name of the piece that was being introduced, but the DJ was talking about the historical context of something that she

was about to play when she mentioned the idea of choreomania: the compulsion to dance. Although I was doing something else at the time, the name stuck with me, and when I sat down at my computer later that afternoon, I knew that I had to learn more.

(more…)

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