Tag: scary

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Behind the Scenes of “Whispers of the First Witch”

“Whispers of the First Witch” is a short story about a girl who has lost her mom and follows the whispers that took her mother to hopefully find her again. It was a fun story to write and even more fun to work with Eli Cuaycong on this art piece to bring out the creepy factor of the story.

How this story came to be was with a picture prompt about a year ago! The picture we were given was of a piece of playground equipment called the witch’s hat. You can see that piece of equipment behind the creature. When I began to write the story, my mind took me back to when I was a child, and how we had the same equipment in our small town. I loved playing on it and used to imagine it taking me to other places when I would spin with it, especially at night.

In the story itself, the daughter sees her mother as she was before but does notice that her mother seems slightly different. For this art piece, we brought out what the mother really looks like inside as she is trying to coax her daughter to come to her with whispers.

This story takes place in The Kasverse and has strong ties to Wyreli, which will be visited in later stories and is where all of civilization, demons, witches, and the world truly started.

If you want to read this short story, you can click below to be taken to its page on my website.

Happy spooky reading!!

Whispers of the First Witch Story
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Book Event

Oxford Exchange Bookstore hosted a book club event today discussing Gallant by V.E. Schwab.

Here is a link to the summary of an interview I attended where the author talks about this exact book: https://adoramichaels.blog/2022/03/10/book-event-20/

Since the author wrote this book for all ages and for each age group to be able to come away with something different, it was very interesting to hear how differently everyone approached the book when reading this. One of the big discussions was how some readers found it too spooky, while others found it not spooky or dark enough at all.

Something that everyone agreed on was how they had sympathy toward the main character Olivia and LOVED her spunk. They also had sympathy toward Mathew. We also found it very interesting how the two characters had to communicate with each other since one was unable to speak and the other did not know sign language. It was very nicely done!

EVERYONE loved the structure of this book, especially with the pictures involved in it. What was very interesting was hearing that some readers listened to the audio book and did not know that there were pictures connected to the book at all. This seemed insane to me since the pictures seemed so instrumental to the story, especially since the author herself felt they were needed for the story. But to hear that people still loved it through the audio book (some gushed at how well the audio book narrator did and were excited to see that there were pictures later on) was amazing and mind-blowing.

Everyone had different feelings about the very end scene of the book though. Some found it happy enough, some found it not happy at all, and some found it just plain sad and lonely. The takeaway though is that the ending fits the tone of the story and compared to where the main character was at the beginning, she is not truly lonely and it is in a way a happy place after all.