About the Author:
In elementary school, Laura Lee Nutt checked out every fairy
tale in the library so often that if she picked something else, it was cause for
curiosity. Even into adulthood, she nurtured her imagination with stories of
fairies, true love, monsters, especially werewolves, and the fantastic, but she
wondered what happened after “happily ever after.”
This curiosity and catching an illness one chill winter day
brought her before a blank computer screen, desperately desiring to write
something new. Heinrich, Blanchette, and Karl swiftly spun the tale you just
read. Laura feverishly typed, barely fast enough to keep up.
Once Red and the Wolf was born, other stories coalesced in
Laura’s mind, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, all
asking the same questions: What might happen if the end of these tales wasn’t
really the end? What were these characters’ lives really like after the
harrowing events of the fairy tale? What if achieving true love and happiness
required something extra? Thus came the idea for this series, Embracing Ever
After, where achieving true love requires something special and happily ever
after isn’t really the end.
Guest Post and GIVEAWAY:
From Childish Babble to Polished
Publication, How a Writer Grows
By Laura Lee Nutt
(Giveaway details to follow.)
In my opinion, it’s always interesting to go back to an author’s
early works and see how they changed over the years. Just take a look at your
favorite authors and compare their first published book with their recent
releases. The contrasts can be startling.
However, authors often reluctantly share their early works out of
embarrassment, simple personal dread of those fledgling efforts, or hope that
they can one day polish them into something salable. Yet those pieces are
usually illuminating and can hold many a lesson for the aspiring writer.
So today, I thought I’d give you a glimpse into the journey I
have taken as a writer and into some of my earlier, more embarrassing work. For
you readers, I hope you find it fun and funny. You are allowed to laugh. Some
of my early works detailed here are worth a chuckle or ten. For you writers
trying to break into the publishing world, take this as encouragement that with
time, patience, and persistence, it can happen.
The Writer’s Journey:
I started writing early in elementary school. My friend Molly and
I used to make books about horses with illustrations. She drew far better than
me, I’m afraid. Recently, I found some of those old stories in a box at my
parents’ house. I could not tell you much of what they were about because my
handwriting was so horrid. I truly feel for my teachers back then. It’s amazing
they could grade my work at all.
Once I became legible, I wrote extensively. In 4th grade, I have
a distinct memory of writing a story about dinosaurs for science class. My
teacher asked, “Laura, are you writing a dictionary?” I believe I took the
longest of my class to compose the piece. It was in black marker with pictures
of dinosaurs, erupting volcanoes, and trees. I have not yet found this story,
but I can assure you it was deplorably absent of character depth, very unlike
Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park
which I was reading at the time.
Back then, most of my stories hinged around action or world
oddities. And might I add that I’m fairly certain they were riddled with
cliches. In childhood, the cliches help us learn the basics, much as playing
house lets us practice our adult roles.
By middle school, I’d discovered Star Trek and, to my mother’s woe, refused to read anything but it, Star
Wars, and Michael Crichton. Star Trek
the Original Series heavily
influenced my stories. Practically all my tales involved space adventure and
heroes that were remarkably like Spock. For a contest, one of my more divergent
tales involved a bunch of kids happening upon a cave, somehow getting kidnapped
by aliens, taken aboard a spaceship that looked like a Bumble Ball, and
fighting their way free, spilling a lot of purple alien blood. Why I fixated on
the purple blood at the time, I will never know. The story, naturally, came
nowhere near winning and not just because I could not spell to save my life. It
was a combination of Power Rangers, Star
Trek, and my brother’s toy collection, but very little of me.
I did not really start infusing myself into my stories--my
perspectives and love of emotional depth--until 8th grade. For English that
year, each class member wrote a story for a class anthology. I loved any
assignment that let me write stories. I turned my story in last because I kept
writing. In the end, I turned it in unfinished, and that was when I began to
realize that I had a problem: I never finished a story.
This was when I first sat down and really considered what I
wrote. I recall hunching over my desk in my bedroom, trying to restart the
story I’d turned in for the class anthology. Why couldn’t I finish it? Why did
it go on until I gave up writing or was forced to turn it in? It would take
years, however, before I realized why I had this problem.
As a special note, this story was the first I wrote with romance
in mind. There was not much romance in the story, but somewhere along the way,
when the characters’ got older, I envisioned a romance, sweet and chaste with
held hands and a Disney-style kiss. Deeper emotions, true love, and the
sacrifice for it were beginning to set roots in my storyteller’s imagination.
The summer between middle school and high school, I had my first
real romance. We met at camp, went out for a month, and then he cut it off. I’m
still not sure why. This experience unlocked something in me, though I did not
realize it until I sat down to write this post. It gave me license to deeply
feel love and hurt and all those emotions that I’d shunned as a kid, and that
strengthened my writing.
My very first assignment of high school involved a paper
describing an incident that was impactful, or something like that. I don’t
recall the precise wording of the original assignment. I wrote about the time
that my Australian Shepherd bit me in 6th grade. From a plastic surgeon who had
to repair my nose in the ER, I received 33 stitches. When I wrote the paper, I
went into detail about all this, but I also included the emotions more than
ever before. The fear, the pain, the twelve-year-old terror that I might die
and ought to tell my brother that I loved him. My teacher picked my paper out
that first day and read it to the class. Not only was this somewhat
humiliating, it was also the first true, outside confirmation, aside from my
family, that my writing was worth something. It was, in essence, a needed boost
of confidence.
However, I did not write much for a couple years after that. I
read a lot, and I got out my need to create stories through role playing games
with friends. Instead of pursuing writing as a career, I tried to be practical
and considered science and medicine. There wasn’t time to write in high school.
But English remained my favorite class. I loved Shakespeare, especially when we
got to act it out, and I still savored assignments that involved creative
writing.
In my senior year, sick of everything school related, I took a
creative writing class as an easy elective. By then, I’d become enraptured with
fantasy. My space adventure days were long gone. In creative writing, I
rekindled a spark I’d buried in my rush to make good grades and pursue a
practical career. I did high school in three years, and with all the extra
classes and work, I was exhausted and halfway to a robot. But that creative
writing class restarted my imagination. I was fascinated with images and the
beauty of language. For one of my first assignments. I penned “The Chandelier,”
a poem about a beautiful chandelier that represented all the gaudy but lovely
glory of fantasy and dreams. Also in this class, we had to actually submit a
work for publication. I got my first rejection letter but did not take it too
hard because I still was not really committed to writing as a career.
My second year of college, I began to write in earnest. Through
role playing, I’d fallen in love with characters that my friends, my fiancé
among them, and I created. The tale I spun from those characters included my
first real love story but was still primarily a fantasy adventure. I had a
whole trilogy planned out and was halfway through the first book when I
stopped. I realized I was not writing my stories. I was dictating other
people’s stories. Much as I loved the characters, I could not continue.
My last year of college, I took another creative writing class.
By this point, I wanted to write. Any other career would be something to do
until I became an author. This class was where I learned to finish a story.
Yes, until this point, until almost the age of twenty, I had never truly
finished a story. Oh, I’d tagged on a The End because I had to, but that was
all. Because my professor insisted on a complete piece, or so I perceived, and
because she gave us word and page limits, I was forced to finish a story. One
of our first assignments was flash fiction. My tale, from start to finish,
could be no more than 1,000 words. To me, this seemed an impossibility. Yet,
somehow I managed. The piece is called A
Flash of Color and is about a post-apocalyptic world covered in ash with
practically no light where the humans have devolved through fear. They go to
extremes to shut out and destroy anything different from them. I began the
story with the end in mind, and to my shock actually composed a true ending.
After that, it became much easier. I threw myself into writing, studying other
authors, reading outside of what I normally read, which is how I discovered
romance, and focusing on technique.
Over the following years, I wrote several books, each better than
I’d written before and some that I still wince at when I reread. I combed
through writing books and participated in seminars. I racked up a long list of
rejections, over 100 so far. When I wrote Red
and the Wolf, which is now my debut novel, it was unusual for me. I
generally did not write fairy tale romances, and I’d certainly never written a
novel shorter than 100,000 words. Yet it immediately caught the interest of
Piper Denna, my editor at Lyrical Press. And so I learned my next lesson in
writing: It rarely goes the way you expect or hope. In fact, the greatest
breakthroughs can come from the most unexpected of places and opportunities.
This month, Red and the
Wolf was released. It is the culmination of my writing so far. It possesses
far stronger structure than any of my earlier works. It has romance to spades,
which was sadly lacking in my writing for a very long time. And it has a
satisfying ending, a feat I could not achieve until almost twenty. It is about
overcoming fear, taking ahold of true love, heroism in the face of hard
choices, and, of course, a werewolf and a girl who once, as a child, walked
down a woodland path to her grandmother’s house and changed her life forever.
For more on
Red and the
Wolf, you can check it out on one of your favorite venders:
Amazon
Kindle,
Barnes
and Noble Nook,
iTunes,
or
Lyrical Store.
For a sample chapter, you can check it out on my website. (I also
have some of my earlier works there,
Glassed Eyed
Inspiration,
War Drums Beat, and
Entomophobia: An Insect
Incident, if you would like to compare.)
GIVEAWAY DETAILS: I’d
like to invite you to participate in the giveaway I’m hosting this month to
celebrate the release of
Red and the Wolf.
On Monday, April 1, I’ll announce the winners on my website—no tricks for April
Fools Day, I promise. You will have from 12:00 AM on Monday, March 11, central
time, to 11:59 PM on Sunday, March 31, central time, to gain points. Each point
counts as an additional time you will be entered in the drawing for a number of
prizes such as a beautiful, illustrated edition of Andersen and Grimms’ fairy
tales and Little Red Riding Hood’s basket complete with an assortment of
goodies to brighten anyone’s day, even a grandmother’s whose house has just
been burgled by a werewolf. For more details and how to earn points, visit
my website.
To earn your first point, comment on today’s post. How do you like your romance
heroes: alpha, sophisticated, charming, stoic, funny, mischievous, or some
other alluring combination? I like mine strong and noble with a bit of a dark
side.
