Storytelling As Freedom: A Novelist's Evolution

She loves Star Trek and Shakespeare and ballroom dancing , and she loves telling stories , so we're going to be talking to her about her stories and everything that she's up to . So , in Krama , thank you so much for joining me today .

On a different note , I write books . I used to tell stories

to my children all the time , and actually before them when I was much younger , to the kids I used to babysit , and as I got older I decided to write a story for a good friend of mine called Anne , and since then Anne has been published because my eldest daughter found it in a dusty old box one day and asked me if she could read it .

So I grew up hearing stories and I grew up making up stories , and one day I decided , hey , maybe I should write these down . It wasn't until I was in my 20s , however , when I was hanging out with a college friend of mine on the night before her arranged wedding that I decided to actually finish something that I wrote .

So , taking the fact that she was she hadn't arranged marriage , I sat up with her all night wondering well , what if she ran ? What if she didn't get married ? What if we crawled out the window , shimmied down the columns onto the front porch and just took off ? Well , in this day and age , you know , women have a lot of choices .

I know that it's not exactly where we want it to be , but we have so many more choices than we used to have , and my friend and I could have run off . I already had a job , she could get a job , and then we could get an apartment and live our lives . But what would have happened if she lived in the late 1500s , early 1600s ?

More difficult , back then , women were often thought more of as property than people that could make decisions for themselves and live on their own . So when I decided to write a story about a girl who was running away from an arranged marriage , I put it back in the late 1500s and asked the question how would this work ? And from there Anna Survivor was born .

your life ? It doesn't , in fact . I'm glad you asked this question . A lot of people ask me if Anne is me . Anne is not me . In fact , I wish Anne , I wish I were more like Anne , because she doesn't hesitate , she's like this is not what my life is about , this is not what I want to do , and so she just breaks free of her family , me .

I have to think about it , like , okay , well , how do I do this ? It would take me , like I don't know , a full month of planning before I would actually run away from home , whereas Anne makes the decision overnight and she takes off before anyone else in the house wakes up . Also , there's an element of surprise around each and every corner .

Things that she would have never imagined could happen happens . So she's leaving home just to leave this arranged marriage .

She's not looking for anything but freedom , but in leaving she embroils herself in a larger situation that basically has consequences for the entire kingdom , not just herself , but her family and the royal family and other other islands off the coast of her country . So it's it's much bigger than what she could have ever imagined . So mirroring my life ?

No , I'm pretty simple . I live in my little home with my girls and I work in construction by day and then write my little stories at night .

what they put their minds to and , being the mother of two daughters , that was extremely important for me to put down and from there , anne of Survivor is actually the first book in a seven book series and I decided to have the entire series about the in this area . So Anne lives in Ryland .

Her issues actually encompass Ryland and predominantly the island of Ildalay . Well , the next part of the book , the next part of the series , is about a different character and it focuses on the island of Ildalay .

And then the next part of the story is another female character and it encompasses a completely different country and all of them have different situations that they have to overcome and different struggles . And I wanted to show girls that with Anne's situation it's more societal and family .

When the next character's situation it's still again society , but it's also believing in herself . And then the next situation is a girl who completely believes in herself , but she has to use her smarts rather than her brawn , like Anne or the next character , to handle her situation .

And once I ask that question , I want to answer it , and I come up with all sorts of answers , and if one avenue excites me more than another , then I might pin it down and say , hey , this could be a story . As far as my writing process , oh , it's willy-nilly .

I'll tell you , first and foremost , high in the sky , my writing process would be late at night , when nobody's awake . A bowl of popcorn , maybe some chocolate , some music in my ear and some tea , some hot tea , and I would just sit and write all night long .

I used to do that during COVID and I just hang out with my daughter's gecko and stay up till three in the morning just writing . However , now , since I have so much to do and so much going on , I've got one kid in college , one who's in her junior year of high school , and I'm writing books and running around all the time . I write whenever I can .

So that could be five minutes here , five minutes there . It could be an hour here , an hour there . This morning I actually went to a coffee shop and spent several hours just writing and writing while people walked around me . I'd get up every now and then for a coffee or a tea , and it's whatever I could possibly do .

I do like to , once an idea gets in my head , put a rough draft of the plot together . I really have to have a beginning , a kind of middle and an end .

But I like to create the characters , at least the main characters , and then , as what happens to me when I ask a question , I will put my characters in situations and since I've already like kind of fleshed out what their personalities are like , once I throw them in a situation they have to behave in a way that is true to their personalities and from there

the story grows . So if I come up with a middle that doesn't coincide with where the characters are taking the book , then that could change and it could also possibly change the ending in one way or another . But I let the characters drive the story forward and sometimes at the end I'm surprised at where we end up .

Sometimes it's better than I had hoped , sometimes it's kind of funny , but I like seeing where the characters take me .

? Who encourages you to do what you do , and what's your favorite book ?

And I've read that book dozens of times from different character perspectives and I just love picking apart the society in Jane Austen's book and I love the fact that she shows us what it's like for Edwardian women during the time and how they try to find their own happiness and how , in Pride and Prejudice , the Bennetts have five daughters and they all have a

different path , and I love that . I love watching how each of their stories unfold and I think she just did a beautiful job of it . If she hadn't , I wouldn't continue reading it . Not only that , it has a happy ending and I tend to like stories that have happy endings because we live in this world . It's , you know , I live real , real life .

I don't want to read real life . That's me personally . Now I've read stories that are nonfiction and I I really appreciate them , but it's not something I would reread . Not something I would reread only because I would rather , in my free time , read something happy and fantastical than to read something that is is real life .

If I'm , if I'm reading for enjoyment and not for study or for research .

On another note , I write romance novels under a different name and my first romance novel should also be out this year , but that is adult . I don't want to talk too much about that . That's adult , adult , and I don't want my young adults to read that .

That being said , I also have written a web comic and I'm looking for an artist to work with to flesh out that , and we'll let you know when that comes out .

, closes out with some final thoughts . Maybe , if that was something I forgot to talk about , that you would like to touch on , or any final thoughts you have for the listeners .

You keep working at it and suddenly those two words are a paragraph , and then it's a page , and then it's ten pages and you just keep on doing it .

Share it to all your friends . Thank you for listening and supporting the show and Cromer , thank you for all that you do and thank you for joining me .