This week’s Muse guest is Maddy Barone. Maddy’s Muse is from her time in junior high (that’s middle school for you young people.)
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An author’s inspiration can sometimes be hard to pin down. Seldom is there a single thing. It’s usually a plethora of things that grow and change with time. I’ve been writing since junior high school and my first inspiration came from the books by Sally Watson like Lark, Jade and The Hornet’s Nest. They were published back in the 1960s. She writes (yes, she is still writing!) historical YA novels with a touch of romance, loosely connected through a family tree. Her characters are so well drawn that the reader feels like she knows them, and the history is dead on but never boring. I decided I wanted to be an author like Ms. Watson.
Alas, my youthful attempts to write historical fiction lacked something. I turned to fantasy. That was better. No rules to bind my imagination. “What if?” became my mantra. What if I fell through a hole between worlds and found myself the prisoner of a handsome pirate prince who thought I was the daughter of the evil man who murdered his father and usurped his throne? Now, I was pretty young at this time, so my love scenes consisted of closed doors and shy smiles exchanged the morning after.
Next, Star Wars burst on my imagination, and all I wanted to write was space opera. All my princesses were feisty and capable of wielding a blaster or a saber with equal panache. Tough battle-hardened space pirates fell at their dainty feet, completely in love with them. I filled dozens of spiral bound notebooks with my crazy stories. I knew they were crazy because my 12th grade English teacher told me so. I was crushed. I continued to read and to write, because that was how I dealt with the trials and tribulations of life, but it was decades before I showed anything I wrote to anyone.
Fast forward twenty years. Ebooks were beginning to arrive. I read hundreds of romances, and many of those stories were similar to what I wrote. Crazy, over the top fantasy-ish romances with (gasp) sex. I wondered (in a tiny voice in the back of my mind) if I maybe I should consider submitting something. No, I decided, I wasn’t really a writer. I just played at it for fun.
As a gag gift for some gals at work, I wrote a story featuring them as the heroines. In the year 2014, a plane takes off from Minneapolis and crashes in 2064 in the middle of nowhere. The survivors learn that nuclear war destroyed technology and reduced the female population to a precious few, and there are werewolves and other paranormals in need of mates. To ensure that the strongest and best genes are passed down, men must fight for the right to take a wife. I would go home after work, write a scene and email it to them. This was very brave of me. After all, it was only 32 years since my teacher told me my stories were stupid. Every day Carla and Lisa would tell me it was really good and I should get it published. I preened, but waved off the scary prospect of letting professionals in the publishing world see it. Finally, to get Lisa and Carla to quit nagging me, I cut the story into two parts, one for Carla’s story and one for Lisa’s story. I sent Carla’s story, which I called Sleeping With the Wolf, to Liquid Silver Books and to my giddy amazement, it was accepted. So now, lo, these many years after my hopes of being a published author were crushed, I can stick my tongue out at Mrs. Flood and say, See? Some people do want to read my stories! So there! And all those battered spiral bound notebooks are just waiting for me to key them into a word document.
The fourth book in my After the Crash series came out on Monday, March 18. At last, Lisa’s story is out in the wild! Eddie’s Prize is available at Liquid Silver Books, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online books sellers.
You can learn more at www.MaddyBarone.com
