Join me and several other m/m authors as we celebrate the holiday season on Keira Andrews’s blog. You can check out several of the posts already there. Mine will be coming December 19 and will include an excerpt from Take Me Home that I have not shared yet here on the blog or my website. Although, it won’t be new to those of you who pick up a copy of Take Me Home when it releases this week.
For those of you who do check out Take Me Home, I truly hope you enjoy Kyle and Evan’s story.
Thanks for checking out Keira’s blog and helping us celebrate the holiday season.
I mentioned the other day there would be a few more chances to win a copy of TAKE ME HOME. The lovely Janna at Rarely Dusty Books invited me to do a guest blog today. I’m talking about the setting of the train in Take Me Home and how setting can be used to help shape the story and the characters.
Comment for a chance to win a free copy of the book on release day. The winner will be announced on December 13.
When writing I often utilize my imagination, but I also will pull from my own experiences and the details I can recall about certain places I’ve been or people I’ve met. For Take Me Home I was able to use my experience of traveling across the United States on a passenger train.
But I also do a fair bit of research for each of my stories. I used to dread research, but I’ve learned to embrace it and see it as an opportunity for two reasons: 1) to learn something new about whatever I’m researching and 2) to expand my understanding of the world and the characters in which I’m writing about in a particular story.
I’m a visual person. I find pictures and videos helpful to really get into the story. Even if my description ends up nowhere close to the visual, the images create a spark of ideas in my mind that keeps the description from being stale and typical (at least typical for my writing and my usual vocabulary). Through my writing research I’ve learned about places, occupations, animals, symbolism, and more I might never have had a reason to delve into otherwise.
During my research phase of writing Take Me Home, I saved links and images and descriptions in one document for inspiration as I wrote. So I thought I’d share a preview of Take Me Home using only a sampling of the pictures from my research notes. Under each photo is a link where I found the photo and the credit if it’s available.
**Please note: Some may consider the following minor spoilers for the story, but the pictures give away only a few more specifics than the blurb and merely illustrate the story’s premise.
