Karen Wiesner: I Have Dreamed a Little Dream (Authors and Dream Inspiration), Part 2

I Have Dreamed a Little Dream, Part 2

by Karen Wiesner

"Believe in your dreams. They were given to you for a reason." ~Katrina Mayer

As a writer, the question I get most often is where my ideas come from a lot. While I can honestly say everywhere, more often than not, dreams play a huge role of my fiction writing. Something about that twilight between sleep and dreams is a veritable playground for imagination! Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series is one of my series, in particular, in which many of the stories within it stemmed from a fragment of a dream that I was able to develop into a story. In the course of the next several posts, I'll be going over how these these nightmarish gifts from the ether came to me.

This is the second of four posts focusing on my Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series and the vivid nightmares or ideas that inspired the titles.

Karen Wiesner's Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series

** Nestled on Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin is a small, secluded town called Bloodmoon Cove with volatile weather, suspicious folk…and newly awakened ghosts.

Don’t close your eyes… **

BOUND SPIRITS, Book 1

** As a child, Esme was kidnapped and locked in a cold, dark basement. Her friends were rodents, insects, and the changeable terror that held her hostage. The only thing that kept her sane those nightmare years were her books. She’s been on the run since her escape a few months ago, never expecting to find another bound spirit come back to life. **

I’d wanted to write a ghost story for a long time—inspired after reading THE WOMAN IN BLACK and THE MAN IN THE PICTURE by Susan Hill (actually, nearly any ghost story written by her). I love that atmospheric kind of story with almost a gothic horror edge. After brainstorming over the course of many months, I came up with the idea of having the ghost story in a very unlikely place—a campground/county park. As soon as the setting was established, I thought, In fiction, what is a ghost but a bound spirit? Well, that gave me a great idea about having a heroine who’d been kidnapped as a child and held captive for most of her life until her escape. So…another bound spirit.

Reviews and Honors for BOUND SPIRITS:

5 star review and Reviewer's Top Pick from Readers Favorite

5 star review from Huntress Reviews

5 star review from Harriet Klausner

5 star review from Linda's Reviews

5 star review from author Jenna Whittaker

5 star review from author Barbara Custer

4 star review from RT Book Reviews

4 star review from The Romance Reviews

4 star review from author Marilyn Byerly

THE BLOODMOON CURSE, Book 2

** An unsuspecting nurse is lured to an ancient family mansion said to hold both ghosts and horrifying secrets in order to care for three orphaned children. Amberlyn was brought to Bloodmoon Manor to uphold the family legacy. Either she finds a way to escape with the children…or she becomes the next bloodmoon bride. **

Way back when I first got the idea for writing this book, my intention was to write a “modern gothic”. Everyone laughed at this because it’s like an oxymoron. But I wanted to write something with the palpable atmosphere you find in old fashioned gothics, only I wanted to put it in a more modern setting. I also loved the idea of putting the heroine in a place where she was basically trapped, no way in or out.

Reviews and Honors for THE BLOODMOON CURSE:

2006 Dream Realm Award Finalist

2006 eCataromance Reviewer’s Choice Award Nominee

2015 BTS Red Carpet Reader's Choice Award Nominee

5 star review from Huntress Reviews

5 star review from Fallen Angel Reviews

Fallen Angel Reviews Recommended Read Award

5 star review from EuroReviews

5 star review from Sime~Gen

5 star review from eCataromance

5 star review from Gotta Write Network

5 star review from Linda's Reviews

5 star review from The Romance Reviews

4 1/2 star review from Once Upon a Romance

4 1/2 star review from The Romance Studio

4 star review from BTSemag

CROOKED HOUSE, Book 3

** Some doors, once opened, can never be closed again… Corinne has become the heir of her dead husband's family estate. Crooked House lives up to its disturbing name, as does the last of the line who disappears so often she could believe he's a ghost. But to believe is to accept the claims of ghost hunter, Rafe Yager: The longer she stays in Crooked House, the less chance she'll ever leave. **

The basis of CROOKED HOUSE, Book 3 of my Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series, was formed when, in a dream, I saw a woman visiting some obscure relative of her brand-new husband. The house was weird and creepy, to say the least. When I woke up, I decided to merge bits of this with an idea I'd been toying with them about having the hero's sister in THE BLOODMOON CURSE be the heroine in another “modern gothic”. I was going to send Janine to some obscure relative, kind of like in Naomi A. Hintze’s novel YOU'LL LIKE MY MOTHER, a favorite story when I was a teenager. I’d planned to name it THE FAMILY or CROOKED HOUSE, both of which inspire something menacing in the right genre. I was also playing a horror video game around that time that gave me some ideas about getting stuck in a house inhabited with ghosts and other menacing supernatural creatures sucking out human physical energy.

CROOKED HOUSE has a lot of the classic elements of a ghost story--vengeful ghost, haunted house, tough-guy hero and vulnerable heroine--with some unique twists and turns in the form of a cursed ring, a novice white-witch best friend who literally has no idea what she's doing, a ramshackle house in Bloodmoon Cove serving as a portal into the spirit world, along with a reluctant ghost hunter that's one of the last descendants of the (fictional) Mino-Miskwi Native American tribe whose elders disappeared during a ritual at their sacred place at the top of Bloodmoon Mountain a hundred years ago. That ritual ripped a hole in the mountain and let loose a flood of spirits that haunt Erie County.

This is funny and a little creepy real life event, but I live in an old Dutch Colonial style house (think “Amityville Horror”). Since we moved in this house, we've had what we call demon flies (which are something I wrote into CROOKED HOUSE). Literally, we’ll kill one and another one…or a dozen…will appear a second later. I once closed myself into our small sunroom, closed all the windows, and put towels under the door to prevent the flies from escaping. Then I proceed to kill them one right after the other. This went on for ten minutes or so, and I must have had a hundred dead flies in the room with me. I suddenly got freaked out because this was completely unnatural and terrifying. I fled the room and didn’t go back into it for a long time afterward. Incidentally, we're said to live in the most haunted house in our town and the unexplained spirit(s) that keeps messing with our electronics could be the reason why. I'm only mostly joking there.

Reviews and Honors:

5 star review from Linda's Reviews

4 star review from Readers Favorite

4 star review from Huntress Reviews

Have you ever been in a house reputed to be haunted? Leave a comment to tell me about it!

Find out more about Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series here:

https://www.writers-exchange.com/bloodmoon-cove-spirits-series/

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MLBJ7XP

Happy reading!

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 140 titles and 16 series. Visit her here:

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

https://www.goodreads.com/karenwiesner

http://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/ 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/blog/ 

https://www.amazon.com/author/karenwiesner

Karen Wiesner: I Have Dreamed a Little Dream (Authors and Dream Inspiration), Part 1

I Have Dreamed a Little Dream, Part 1

by Karen Wiesner

"Believe in your dreams. They were given to you for a reason."

~Katrina Mayer 

As a writer, the question I get most often is where my ideas come from a lot. While I can honestly say everywhere, more often than not, dreams play a huge role of my fiction writing. Something about that twilight between sleep and dreams is a veritable playground for imagination! Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series is one of my series, in particular, in which many of the stories within it stemmed from a fragment of a dream that I was able to develop into a story. In the course of the next several posts, I'll be going over how these these nightmarish gifts from the ether came to me. 

This will be the first of four posts focusing on my Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series and the vivid nightmares or ideas that inspired the titles. 

Karen Wiesner's Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series

** Nestled on Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin is a small, secluded town called Bloodmoon Cove with volatile weather, suspicious folk…and newly awakened ghosts. 

Don’t close your eyes… **

While writing up the proposal for BOUND SPIRITS, which became the first book in my Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series, I had an idea about writing a series of ghost stories. I love scary, terrifying ghost/spirits stories as well as fun or playful ghost ones, but I also like the idea of exploring well beyond the boundaries of what a typical ghost story is considered to encompass. I intend to delve into the depths of supernatural elements with haunted places, cursed objects, portals to other worlds and/or time periods, and even unfathomable creatures from those other realms that have crossed into ours on Bloodmoon Mountain.

At the time I was working on this spark of a series concept, I was also strongly considering pulling a standalone novel I've written, THE BLOODMOON CURSE, from its publisher at time, as it'd been lagging there for quite some time. THE BLOODMOON CURSE was very mildly a ghost story, so it certainly fit the theme. Also, the book featured a small (fictional) town called Bloodmoon Cove, and I thought that would be the perfect setting for an otherworldly series. The Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series was born.

In late 2013, I got the rights back to THE BLOODMOON CURSE. I'd already finished BOUND SPIRTS long before that time and didn't want to wait around for it to be published, so I decided to make BOUND SPIRITS the first book in this new series. THE BLOODMOON CURSE became the second.

The (fictional) county the Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series is set is Erie County--what I think is a clever play on Lake Erie, which is one of the nearby Great Lakes (named for a Native American tribe in the area), and also because the town and those surrounding it (including the fiction city of Grimoire that's been featured often in the series) are “eerie”.

Have you ever dreamed something that became the basis of a story? Leave a comment to tell me about it!

Find out more about Bloodmoon Cove Spirits Series here:

https://www.writers-exchange.com/bloodmoon-cove-spirits-series/

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MLBJ7XP

Happy reading!

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 140 titles and 16 series. Visit her here:

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

https://www.goodreads.com/karenwiesner

http://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/ 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/blog/ 

https://www.amazon.com/author/karenwiesner

Karen Wiesner: The Stories Behind Classic Fairy Tales (Woodcutter's Grim Series), Part 8

 

WOODCUTTER’S GRIM SERIES—

Classic Tales of Horror Retold 

This is the final of eight posts focusing on my Woodcutter's Grim Series and the stories behind classic fairy tales. 

For the ten generations since the evil first came to Woodcutter's Grim, the Guardians have sworn an oath to protect the town from the childhood horrors that lurk in the black woods. Without them, the town would be defenseless…and the terrors would escape to the world at large.  

BRIDGE OF FIRE, Book 10: 

INTO THE SUN, Part 3 

by Karen Wiesner

 

Supernatural Fantasy Romance Novel 

** Loosely based on "The Three Billy Goats Gruff". A shape-shifting goat, William Gruff escaped being bound to the evil pervading Woodcutter's Grim, the sole shelter for supernatural creatures. Years later, he and his pregnant wife, Adaryn Azar, a phoenix, have no choice but to flee there themselves. But just one phoenix can exist in the world. Will the powerful magic Liam wields consume him before he can build the only bridge that can take him and Adaryn into the sun of Eternal Paradise? ** 

While I was outlining Part 2 of BRIDGE OF FIRE: Book 10, I became aware that one of the things that had never felt "connected" between the Woodcutter's Grim Series "Real World" and the "Mirror Darkly World" introduced in HUNTER'S BLUES, Book 9 was that the Protectorate Guardian in the Mirror Darkly World was a Pallaton (Reece). Why would that be? What caused the change/discrepancy between the two worlds? Since that book was already written and published, I had to abide by the decision and create a plausible explanation for the fact. 

I finished all three outlines for the parts of BRIDGE OF FIRE, then moved onto another massive project that took up most of my time. Nevertheless, in the back of my mind, I was thinking about the apparent discrepancy. In the very least, I wanted to answer the question for myself. I had a dim but gradually brightening lightbulb come on during this time: I'd already inserted two Pallatons in A NEW BEGINNING, Part 2 and INTO THE SUN, Part 3 in the characters of Nazarha and her mother. When I went back into the outline to refresh myself just before I started writing Part 1, I had a brilliant spotlight of illumination. I knew how to connect the Mirror Darkly and Real worlds. The explanation finally resolved what suddenly seemed like a major discrepancy (to me anyway) in the series. 

But that wasn't the only question that was bugging me. Even after I'd written the first draft of all three parts of BRIDGE OF FIRE, something else was niggling at me about who Nazarha Pallaton was in relation to the main female character, Adaryn Azar, throughout the three segments. Coming up with the answer to that is when I truly felt like this series was gratifyingly complete and strong in a way it'd never been before (again, only to me--I seriously doubt any of my readers even noticed). 

I feel great nostalgia in coming to a conclusion with Woodcutter's Grim Series--Classic Tales of Horror Retold. When I began it, I was a contemporary romance author who didn't believe I had what it took to write horror or fantasy, my two personal favorite genres. But, with Woodcutter's Grim, I got to develop stories with vampires, werewolves, dragons, phoenixes, various shapeshifters and creatures of lore, and I even mostly made up a monster of my own (the Unspeakable/Polyhedra). I dealt with alternate worlds, the ultimate good and the ultimate evil, a secret organization with roles that are passed on from one generation to the next (the Protectorate), familiar faces I've come to love and look forward to revisiting again and again, all while combining fairy and folk tales, mythology, fables, parables, nursery rhymes and poems into one complex, fantastical world. I hope my readers have loved taking this journey as much as I have and will want to drop by this town all over again with future readings. 

At this time, I'm playing with the idea of a "prequel" trilogy for the Woodcutter's Grim Series to develop the origin of the Unspeakable creature I created for BRIDGE OF FIRE. Only the future will tell if anything comes of my brainstorming. 

Unique creatures of folklore are something that fascinates me immensely. Leave a comment to tell me about your favorites! 

Next week, I plan to post one of what will be many writing craft articles. 

Find out more about this book and Woodcutter's Grim Series here: 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/woodcutters-grim-series/ 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MLBYBH1 

Karen is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 140 titles and 16 series. Visit her here:

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

https://www.goodreads.com/karenwiesner

http://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/ 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/blog/ 

https://www.amazon.com/author/karenwiesner 

Karen Wiesner: The Stories Behind Classic Fairy Tales (Woodcutter's Grim Series), Part 7

WOODCUTTER’S GRIM SERIES—

Classic Tales of Horror Retold

This is the seventh of eight posts focusing on my Woodcutter's Grim Series and the stories behind classic fairy tales.

For the ten generations since the evil first came to Woodcutter's Grim, the Guardians have sworn an oath to protect the town from the childhood horrors that lurk in the black woods. Without them, the town would be defenseless…and the terrors would escape to the world at large. 

BRIDGE OF FIRE, Book 10:

A NEW BEGINNING, Part 2

by Karen Wiesner

Supernatural Fantasy Romance Novel 

** Loosely based on "The Three Billy Goats Gruff". The son of shape-shifting goats, William Gruff escaped a dire fate when his family is bound to the evil pervading Woodcutter's Grim, the only shelter for supernatural creatures. Adaryn Azar, a legendary phoenix, changes his lonely life. But a happily-ever-after may be impossible when the hunter who's tracked her for centuries finds her again. Dying and resurrecting would mean forfeiting the life growing inside her. Unfathomably, Woodcutter's Grim may be the only safe place left. ** 

As I said back when I was talking about HUNTER'S BLUES, Book 9 (A Mirror Darkly World Novel), that story was a part of the series but in an awkward way. Originally, I called it a "futuristic" novel but that wasn't entirely accurate. Even before I finished BRIDGE OF FIRE, there were of course vague connections in the series between all the other books that came before and HUNTER'S BLUES, though no definite connections that allowed a timeline to be established. BRIDGE OF FIRE'S three-part tale provides the connections that I never realized were needed before it to explain how HUNTER'S BLUES fit into the series. 

I knew as I was outlining all three parts of BRIDGE OF FIRE that Woodcutter's Grim was becoming complete in a way that it never felt like the series would be before. A part of me wanted to leave it open-ended so I could come back into it if I ever wanted to. But I had a major change of heart and made radical life decisions in 2018 that made me realize I really wanted to tie up as many of my series as I possibly could and move on. 

My critique partner, Margaret L. Carter, told me while reading BRIDGE OF FIRE while it was a work in progress that she'd never read a story with a goat shapeshifter in it before. I realize that the St. Bernard shapeshifters were also unusual, though maybe not as unique. BRIDGE OF FIRE also has the last of the ancient fae lineage. Phoenixes, of course, are fairly common in supernatural stories. Phoenixes are associated with Greek mythology, and I confess I've made mine just a little different from all the research I did on them. I wanted Adaryn to be utterly unique. Find out more about the fascinating myth of phoenixes here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_(mythology)#:~:text=The%20origin%20of%20the%20phoenix%20has%20been%20attributed,texts%20may%20have%20been%20influenced%20by%20classical%20folklore. 

Are you as fascinated by phoenixes as I am? Leave a comment to tell me what appeals to you about this immortal creature of folklore! 

Find out more about this book and Woodcutter's Grim Series here: 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/woodcutters-grim-series/ 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MLBYBH1 

Karen is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 140 titles and 16 series. Visit her here:

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

https://www.goodreads.com/karenwiesner

http://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/ 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/blog/ 

https://www.amazon.com/author/karenwiesner 

Karen Wiesner: The Stories Behind Classic Fairy Tales (Woodcutter's Grim Series), Part 6

WOODCUTTER’S GRIM SERIES—

Classic Tales of Horror Retold

This is the sixth of eight posts focusing on my Woodcutter's Grim Series and the stories behind classic fairy tales.

For the ten generations since the evil first came to Woodcutter's Grim, the Guardians have sworn an oath to protect the town from the childhood horrors that lurk in the black woods. Without them, the town would be defenseless…and the terrors would escape to the world at large. 

 BRIDGE OF FIRE, Book 10:

 OUT OF THE ASHES, Part 1

by Karen Wiesner

  Supernatural Fantasy Romance Novel

 ** Loosely based on "The Three Billy Goats Gruff". The youngest son in a family of shape-shifting goats, William Gruff escaped a dire fate but his life is desperately lonely, engineering fantastical bridges that defy logic. Nothing prepares him for meeting Adaryn Azar.

Adaryn has a secret that keeps her on the run Loosely based on "The Three Billy Goats Gruff".. Just as everything she's ever wanted is about to come true with Liam, her enemy discovers her. But starting over would mean losing the timeless love she's found with Liam… ** 

BRIDGE OF FIRE started with a vivid dream I had of a man awakened in the middle of the night by a knock on the door. The police had come to tell him his wife was dead. He went to ID the body, and he was devastated and unable to function by this event. But, later that night, she came back to him and told him things about herself and her life that he could hardly get himself to believe...and yet he wasn't without his own secrets he'd been keeping from the woman he loved. 

While I didn't immediately see this as an installment of my Woodcutter's Grim Series, I quickly found a way to make it work in in my horror/fantasy world. I'd always wanted to write one based on another of my favorite fairy tales, "The Three Billy Goats Gruff". 

When I first started working on BRIDGE OF FIRE, I assumed it would be one possibly large novel. But, when outlining, I'd barely gotten past the part that merged with my dream (guy thinks his wife is dead, then finds out she has a huge secret--just like he does). They decide to go to Woodcutter's Grim, because it's the only safe place for supernatural beings such as they are. Also, in writing scenes in the viewpoints of both main characters and the heroine's closest family Torin (who has a young daughter), the story was fleshing out fast. 

The outline was huge at that point. I'd realized once the newly forged family entered Woodcutter's Grim, I had another character I wanted to include the POV of to really round out the story. I knew then that I had two novels in this one outline. I stopped, deciding I needed to sort it out before proceeding. I went back to the beginning and ultimately ended the outline for the first part of the story in the most natural place (when their new location would become Woodcutter's Grim). I went through, added scenes for the new POV character, then continued outlining Part 2 of the story again. 

Unfortunately, the same thing happened again long before I finished outlining the second part. The outline was growing bigger and bigger, and I was nowhere near coming to the end. Dividing it into three parts instead of two seemed only logical, and again I was able to find a logical place to divide Part 2 from Part 3 and switch up the POVs I wanted to feature in Part 3. Even after I finished the outlines, I wasn't entirely sure whether the books would end up novellas or novels, but they turned out to be full-length novels. All three parts of BRIDGE OF FIRE will be published within a few days of each other. 

"The Three Billy Goats Gruff" is a Norwegian folktale with a moral about being brave and clever in the face of obstacles that get in your way. I find it hilarious that Wikipedia describes it as having an "eat-me-when-I'm-fatter" plot. Who knew such a thing existed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Billy_Goats_Gruff 

Have you ever written a story with a deliberate moral in it? Leave a comment to tell me about it! 

Find out more about this book and Woodcutter's Grim Series here: 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/woodcutters-grim-series/ 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MLBYBH1 

Karen is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 140 titles and 16 series. Visit her here:

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

https://www.goodreads.com/karenwiesner

http://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/ 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/blog/ 

https://www.amazon.com/author/karenwiesner   

Karen Wiesner: The Stories Behind Classic Fairy Tales (Woodcutter's Grim Series), Part 5

WOODCUTTER’S GRIM SERIES—

Classic Tales of Horror Retold

 This is the fifth of eight posts focusing on my Woodcutter's Grim Series and the stories behind classic fairy tales.

For the ten generations since the evil first came to Woodcutter's Grim, the Guardians have sworn an oath to protect the town from the childhood horrors that lurk in the black woods. Without them, the town would be defenseless…and the terrors would escape to the world at large. 

HUNTER'S BLUES, Book 9 (A Mirror Darkly World Novel)

 by Karen Wiesner

Supernatural Fantasy Romance/Mild Horror Novel

** Loosely based on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. When the evil in Woodcutter’s Grim unleashed, humans turned into ghouls with the instinct to contaminate others. The Protectorate—the guardians sworn to protect the town—are all that hold the threat at bay. Guardian hunter Reece Pallaton discovers the source of the evil, the mirror that’s only the opposite half of the “glass darkly” world he lives in, and his own terrifying connection to both. **

I started outlining this book while I was writing my second Writer’s Digest Books craft reference, FROM FIRST DRAFT TO FINISHED NOVEL (which was changed back to its original title COHESIVE STORY BUILDING after I got the rights back to the book and had it reissued). I was planning to use HUNTER'S BLUES as an example for that writing reference, but never did. Basically, I got a lot of the outline written during that time, but it kind of fell into the background because I was working on the new craft book. Much later, I started thinking that maybe there was a way I could turn this into a Woodcutter’s Grim Series novel. In this "mirror darkly world"* of Woodcutter’s Grim, the Protectorate has become hunters, keeping the zombies (they call them "ghouls") that have proliferated on the Earth at bay, and it’s not a fun job even as it is a never-ending one.

*Star Trek has this whole "mirror universe" plotline that most of their series have versions of, in which the normal characters in the show have evil counterparts in a mirror universe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Universe That's kind of what my Mirror Darkly World is grounded in. It's like a very dark version of the real world that all the previous books in the series were set in.

When I first decided to make HUNTER'S BLUES part of the Woodcutter's Grim Series, I choose a deeply disturbed obscure fairy tale about a woman who tricks her husband into eating his own son for the fairy tale my story would parallel, however loosely. Talk about dark! I couldn't come with any ideas in that vein though. "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" made so much sense, especially in light of who (and what) Tess (from "Beauty is the Beast" , Book 7, WOODCUTTER'S GRIM SERIES, Volume II).

The graphic on the cover of HUNTER'S BLUES really caught my eye when I stumbled upon it. Within the story notes I’d come up with, I had ideas about Reece disappearing for stretches of times, waking up and wondering where he is. This graphic gave me the concept of where he was when he disappeared and how seeing Shell “through a glass darkly” brought him back each time. While that's not the way the story ultimately worked out (it was his father who was trapped in an in-between world, mainly, and who used the mirror to look back on Woodcutter's Grim), I think the cover nevertheless works.

The development of this book was so strange. It never actually fit into Woodcutter's Grim per se, even after I finished writing it and it was published. In ways, the town of Woodcutter's Grim was like a futuristic version of the town in all previous stories in the series, so that's why, for first couple years after it was published, it had the subtitle of being a "futuristic" novel in the series. That was my attempt to make sense of how it fit into the series. But it didn't quite work. I didn't become aware until much later, when I began work on BRIDGE OF FIRE, Book 10 that it was wholly inaccurate. I realized then that the complication in describing the timeline is that HUNTER'S BLUES is set in a mirror world of Woodcutter's Grim.

When I was first outlining HUNTER'S BLUES, trying to figure out how all this was supposed to work, gave me endless headaches. More than once, I thought about giving up because I felt like there was no way to sort it all out. But I did eventually, and the explanation is in this graphic I created to make sense of it all:

HUNTER'S BLUES is set in the Mirror Darkly World of Woodcutter's Grim (while the rest of the previous books were set in the Real World of Woodcutter's Grim). In the Mirror Darkly World, the Protectorate's unofficial guardian is Reece Pallaton (Gabe Reece is guardian in the Real World). Until I wrote BRIDGE OF FIRE, I didn't realize just how important the Pallatons would end up in the entire series.

An obscure and impossible-to-confirm origin story of Snow White says that the classic fairy tale was based on the life of a German countess. At the age of 16, she was forced out of her home by her stepmother. She ended up falling for a prince and, given the politically inconvenient nature of the relationship, the girl's disappearance was more than a little mysterious. Was she poisoned? The girl's father also reputedly owned a few copper mines that employed slave children who, through maltreatment, were severely stunted and deformed. https://random-times.com/2020/02/08/the-dark-origins-of-the-fairy-tale-snow-white-and-the-seven-dwarfs/

Reviews and Honors for HUNTER'S BLUES:

5 star review from Linda's Reviews

4 star review from Huntress Reviews

HUNTER'S BLUES is a dark tale and it even has zombies (or ghouls), which is very "un-fairy tale-like"! Do you like stories with zombies? Leave a comment to tell me about it!

Happy reading!

Find out more about this book and Woodcutter's Grim Series here:

http://www.writers-exchange.com/woodcutters-grim-series/

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MLBYBH1

Karen is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 140 titles and 16 series. Visit her here:

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

https://www.goodreads.com/karenwiesner

http://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/ 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/blog/ 

https://www.amazon.com/author/karenwiesner