As long as I can remember, I've been obsessed with the truths that my physical senses cannot explain: the mystical things occurring on this planet. Writing fantastical stories is my testament to these other layers of reality.
There are many ways of looking at our world. Imagine sitting at home, perhaps in your living room. There’s a knock on the door. When you open it, a funny little woman is standing there. She is about half your height, and a plaid crimson kerchief—knotted under her hooked chin—covers her head. Her dress is sack-like over her square body. She’s wearing an apron that could use a good ironing and she’s carrying a battered brown suitcase that’s almost as big as she is.
“As long as you’re staring, a glass of water would be nice,” she says.
Despite her gruff manner, you sense something mysterious about this stranger, and to be honest, you’re dying to know more about her. When she crosses the threshold of your home, a strong wind slams the door behind her. You both jump. There hasn't been a breeze all day. In fact, it’sweltering and heat waves have been rising from the melting pavement for weeks.
When you offer it, she almost grabs the glass from your hand, and you can’t stop your staring—even though you know it’s rude—as she drinks in noisy gulps.
“What? You've never seen a spring faerie before?” she asks.
Before you can answer, she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “Guess not, there aren't many of us left. And I haven’t been to the Mortal World, since…”
She stops. Her deeply etched face softens. Something like sorrow pools in her dark brown eyes. She waves her hand. “That’s not what I’m here to talk about.”
Your heart tugs. You want to pull her from that sad place. “What’s in your suitcase?”
She points to the table. “I’ll show you.”
The suitcase is filled with eyeglasses. There are so many. Some have square black frames, others have round wire frames; there are a few speckled frames with octagonal lenses. You spy a pair of purple ones.
She shoves a pair of thick black glasses into your hand. “Put these on. Tell me what you see.”
With the eyeglasses settled on the bridge of your nose, you can’t see anything but yourself. You blink. You can see your hands and feet, your legs and toes. But the spring faerie—if that’s really what she is—is just a blur. You pull them off. She trades them for a pair of wire rims. With these glasses you can see her and your home.
“What’s your name?” you ask.
“Flora.”
“Like flowers blooming.”
She nods and looks away with that whiff of sadness.
Again, there is something about her that pulls at your heart. You think of the miracle of spring after a long hard winter, and that she shouldn't be sad—if she really is a spring faerie.
“But...you don’t have any wings,” you say.
She smoothes the wrinkles in her apron. “Not all faeries do.”
“But—”
She almost jerks the wire-rim spectacles from your nose. You reach for that purple pair. She doesn't stop you. Now, you can see down the street; your eyes travel the highway. Your view elevates, as if you are a bird. Soon you see the entire city you live in. With each pair of glasses, you see the bigger world.
When Flora tucks the temple arms of a pair of red frames behind your ears, perspective zooms around you. It’s like the lens pulls you into outer space, and you can see the entire world and all the billions of people who live on Earth.
Your heart flutters in your chest; it’s a lot to take in.
“Now—” Flora hands you a pair of fuchsia glasses with tiny rhinestones embedded in the frames. “Try on these.”
When you put them on, you’re able to see beyond the physical entirety of the world into the things that you've always known exist, but since you can’t see, touch, smell, or hear them, sometimes you've doubted. But you’ll never doubt again, because now—with these special glasses—you can actually see the bonds of love that death can never sever, the strings of fate that wrap the brown paper package of all our lives with twine, the tide of time that alters us, even as we never change...
But most importantly, you've seen that you belong here, on this planet. And you know—without a shadow of a doubt—that everything fits. Including you.
“I don’t ever want to take these glasses off,” you say.
Flora is already cramming the rest of them back into her bag. “Then don’t.”The Queen of the Realm of Faerie is a fairy tale fantasy series that bridges the Mortal and Enchanted worlds. The main character, Melia, is an eighteen-year-old half-faerie, half-mortal. She lives in Illialei, a country in the Enchanted World, with her two sisters and their mother. Melia’s father has been exiled to the Mortal World, and her best friend is a pixie.
Once upon a time, you lived in an enchanted world, too…
There is magic in all our lives; sometimes we need to look through different eyes to see it.The Queen of the Realm of Faerie includes many strong female characters within an intricate fantasy land. It is also a fairy tale fantasy.
I’m somewhat skeptical that authors hear their characters voices in the same way people who need medical attention hear voices. Which isn't to say we don’t hear voices and spend a lot of time with imaginary people. We do, but we’re in the business of creating imaginary people and making them talk. Thus, I think a writer hears voices very much the way that an architect sees completed buildings that haven’t been built and a musician hears music that has never been played. We train our minds to do this and some of us have a natural inclination to do it even before we start training. And yet, there’s an odd glamour that some of us attach to being a little mental, and I have to say, I've never understood it.
Now, I don’t want to get up on a soapbox and preach, so I’ll keep this part brief. I think mental illness is widely misunderstood, and idealized in a somewhat unhealthy way. So yes, it bothers me when I hear writers or other artists bragging about how they've got a mental disorder, as if this is some badge of greatness or authenticity. Again, I don’t want to preach. I merely want to put out there that the mentally ill are people who may or may not be artistic, may or may not be geniuses, and all have a difficulty to overcome that isn't glamorous. And their experience is different, I would say, than the writer who hears voices, though I suppose someone prone to psychosis could also be a writer and get inspiration from their hallucinations. It wouldn't be all that different from those of us who get inspiration from our dreams.
In artistic circles, though, it’s not uncommon to hear people brag about having mental problems. One common one is the writer who has to write or they start to go a little loopy. What’s odd here is that I am actually one of those people, so I can attest: It’s not a sign of greatness. It’s an obsessive disorder (mine is very mild). In fact, I can’t help but laugh when someone tries to one up me on this. “Oh yeah? Well if I don’t write every day, I start pulling out my hair. I start talking to people who don’t exist and getting in fights.” I honestly don’t know what I’d do if I didn't satisfy my urge to write because… well, it’s a really easy urge to satisfy. Anyone who has gotten to the point that they pull out their hair or have delusions makes me wonder how they manage that. Do they not have pencils, pens, paper, a computer, crayons, steamy mirrors, dirty cars, gravel in the yard, or anything that they can write with or on? I’ll go so far as to say, they've got to be lying. The proof of my mild obsessive disorder is that I write an average of six days a week. I have no idea what would happen if I didn't because that would be really hard to do, and I wish this meant that I am therefore a great author, but it doesn't mean anything like that. Many authors better than I have admitted to me that they've taken years off from their craft with no ill effects.
So, I would argue that no one is so different from the average writer that they can’t get the general idea of what it’s like to hear character voices. Everyone creates in some way or another. Perhaps you don’t hear voices, but you can look at a barren garden and see rows of carrots and peas, or at cans of food and see a completed three course meal. That ability to visualize the next step is the same ability that writers use to write their stories, and just like everyone else, the exact way each of us goes about it differs.
I have a friend whose main character whispered the first line of her book series in her ear one day. I've never experienced anything like that. I, on the other hand, daydream constantly. Any time I can get away with it, I zone out and imagine my characters interacting, and if I don’t like the scene, I change something and run it again and again and again. Mine isn't as romantic as some. It just involves me looking like a space cadet much of the time. Some authors see their characters in other people, by picking and choosing characteristics and setting up situations. All of us, after we've been at it a while, have a very active fantasy life and spend a lot of time with people who don’t exist. My opinion, though, is that we live in an era of specialization. Some people specialize in building things, some adding things, some moving and shipping things, and some of us in imagination. Everyone imagines a little. Artists imagine a lot, all the time. It may make us a little quirky, but it won’t require medical attention, and some of us have mild disorders that add to our quirks, but that’s, again, a different matter entirely.E.M. Tippetts grew up in New Mexico and now lives in London, where she raises two boisterous toddlers, designs jewelry, and writes novels. A former attorney, she used to specialize in real estate and estate planning, specifically literary estate planning. She currently has five novels out, Time & Eternity, Paint Me True, Someone Else's Fairytale, Castles on the Sand, and Nobody's Damsel (Fairytale 2).
'That part of me I'd thought was broken past repair, wasn't so broken after all. I hadn't forgotten how to dream, I'd just stopped paying attention.'That's it folks, we can't stop paying attention!
“The street-smart science of LOOPER meets the cold, just-the-facts voice of DOUBLE INDEMNITY in this edgy, future-noir thriller that will have you holding your breath, looking over your shoulder, and begging for more.”
—Leigh Talbert Moore, author of The Truth About Faking, The Truth About Letting Go, and Rouge
“Do you owe more than your life is worth? No worries. A more deserving person than you can benefit from that excess life—and someone else will get paid with it. Enter the Debt Collector.”
—Dianne Salerni, author of We Hear the Dead, The Caged Graves, and The Eighth Day (HarperCollins 2014)
My stories are usually sparked by a question—a what if. An acquaintance tells me she's planning a weekend birthday getaway with her best friend, and I think … what if one of those friends took the getaway literally, and walked clean out of her life? That’s how I began my first novel Whole Latte Life. Or what if a place is so special, we are called back to it, and cannot escape it, no matter the impact on our lives? This is the dilemma in my new book Blue Jeans and Coffee Beans, in which a cherished New England beach casts a spell stronger than the pull of the tides for a group of reunited beach friends.
So no, I don’t hear voices that start my story. Rather than begin a story idea with a character, I draw upon real life. I’m intrigued with issues and questions that everyday, relatable people face—friends and sisters and mothers and daughters. Their fears and hopes and what-ifs inspire my stories, and my readers and I can then live them out on the page.
~Joanne
Time moves like the sea. She always felt so. Living right at the beach, time is placid and calm, soft waves of it rolling onto the shore of her days. One day follows the other, over and over, in a comfortable and reassuring was. No matter what she is doing, at any age, that awareness of the movement of the sea, and the waves of time, keeps her grounded.
But as volatile as the sea can be, so too is any hour, any moment. Washing ashore, overtaking her very self with its insistence, with its forward movement rushing by the force of time. Waves of the past have that way of pulling at her, leaving her gasping and struggling to get her bearings, to breathe evenly.And another ~~
Is Stony Point the place they forever return to for comfort, or is it the source of all their troubles?There are several other beautiful passage that I would love to quote here but it would give too much of the story away. And I can't do that. Just trust me when I say that this is such a wonderful story with great prose and characters you just come to fall in love with. And again, as in Whole Latte Life, Joanne includes creative people in her story so you get a lot of art and creative imagery, which appealed to my artistic side.
Typically, an idea pops into my head for a story and I begin brainstorming. While brainstorming, the first thing to come to me is usually the character names and how I want them to be and what kind of conflicts I want them to face. Once I begin writing, I don’t think I necessarily have voices in my head, but I definitely feel like the characters - and their emotions - inhabit me. So far, this has helped tremendously, especially when I am writing an emotional scene or one that is fairly difficult for a character.
Since I feel so close to them, it definitely helps the situation and their reactions feel a little more real while writing. Which as a result, I think, helps them feel real to a reader. I think it is crucial for an author to feel close to her characters, and whether you hear them in your head or feel them in your heart, you should know exactly how they would feel at any given moment.
