Small Press Week: SPWzoom

Today's topic for Small Press Week is: "#SPWzoom: Zoom in to provide excerpts, close-up photos, and anecdotes about your new books." So we asked some of our authors for anecdotes related to their World Weaver Press books. See what they they told us below!

Kristina Wojtaszek, author of Opal and Char

The entire idea behind my first book, OPAL, was kick-started by an obsession with three birds.  An owl, a raven and a dove to be precise, who visited Snow White's coffin one at a time to mourn her.  It was a small detail I kept coming across in various versions of the fairy tale I thought I knew so well, and I just couldn't let it go.  Who were these nameless beings that slipped into an otherwise very human story of a persecuted daughter, and why were they important enough to be meticulously called out in certain order?  I'm still searching for those answers.  Meanwhile, I couldn't help coming up with my own possibilities, and ended up creating an entire realm of shape-shifting Fae whose powers lie in their close connection to nature--powers that doom them as they become persecuted by those who loathe and fear such inhuman abilities.  It is very much the story of our own convoluted relationship with nature, which we both revere and fear, and can never entirely escape.  And of course my characters took off down more than one bread-crumb-strewn path, begging me to revisit various other fairy tales in my series.  Meanwhile, I'm knee-deep in ancient myth and muddied fables, hopelessly lost, still clutching those few feathers I found in the snow once upon a time...

A.E. Decker, author of The Moonfall Mayhem series

I was doing some research for my third novel when my mother asked me what I was reading.

"I'm learning how Smilodons killed their prey," I replied.

This was followed by one of the longest, most nonplussed silences I've heard in a while.

K. Bird Lincoln, author of Dream Eater

Writing the Portland Hafu Series has been a strange dichotomy of long, slow waiting and rollercoaster ride for me. I wrote Dream Eater quite a long time ago in terms of my life experience: I lived in Portland, OR and had two children under the age of 5. Only my short stories were published. I sent my novel baby around to several places and spent years waiting. It found a home with World Weaver Press and Dream Eater was published this year. That’s when the rollercoaster started. Now I live in SE Minnesota, have two teenage girls, two self-published historical fantasies, and am trying to write the two sequels to Dream Eater all in the same year. Yikes!

Let me give you a taste of the final two books in the Portland Hafu Trilogy:

Black Pearl Dreaming (Portland Hafu #2)
Last time my family made the yearly trek to Tokyo to see my husband’s family, I gathered some experiences and photos to help me write this book—wherein Dream Eater’s heroine, Koi Pierce, goes to Japan with her father in hopes of helping him with his dementia and to get a handle on what it means to be a dream-eating Baku.

My husband’s uncle was from this small, Aomori town where Jesus’ Tomb is located. I kid you not. This is a real thing. While I couldn’t make it to Aomori this time, I did talk to his family about it.

I also got a lot of shots of Japanese traditional storage houses called Kura. While there’s only one scene in Black Pearl Dreaming that ended up featuring a Kura, I embarrassed my husband almost daily by stalking them in his parents’ neighborhood and taking lots of pictures!

This book’s first draft was sent off to my lovely editor last month. Whoot!
 
Last Dream of Her Mortal Soul (Portland Hafu #3)
Koi Pierce comes back to Portland to handle attacks on the local Kind in this book. It’s been at least six years since I’ve lived in Portland! I remember all the wonderful cafes and pastry shops, however, I had to do a bunch of Google Map and Satellite research to remind myself about the layout of downtown Portland and some of the parks and landmarks where Koi will have to finally make some hard decisions about how far she’s willing to go to protect the people she loves.

One of the places is the Witch’s Castle at Forest Park. Way back at the start of Portland’s history a guy shot his son-in-law, got hanged, and his wife—who he blamed for his crime—lived there for years. Or that’s only a story and it’s the ruins of a public restroom built in the 1900s. Either way, it’s a great hike!