Guest Post: Valerie Gillen, Author of A Little Magic

The Plot’s Afoot

People are always interested in where writers get their ideas. Who among us hasn’t said Oooh, how in the heck did (insert name of writer here) come up with that great story? Ideas can come from anywhere – a newspaper article, a story on television, something you heard in the neighborhood, something you overheard while on line at Starbucks. Lord knows how many little scrawled notes and newspaper articles I have stuffed in a folder. And how wonderful is it when I take out those notes to look through them and realize I can’t read my own handwriting.

My first novel, A Little Magic, came from my love of the Harry Potter series, and wanting to write something in the fantasy/paranormal realm. I didn’t want to be seen as derivative, but a friend of mine, who is a best-selling author, said, “don’t worry about what people might think. If that’s what you want to write, go for it.” The heroine is an Irish step-dancer, because that’s what I do, and I wanted to share my passion for Irish dance with others.

I used to plot out everything ahead of time and write it all down in an outline, but lately I’ve been starting with the idea, and letting things incubate in my head, writing maybe this, maybe that on paper. It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Maybe my heroine’s grandmother was a witch, but she’s in a coma, so there’s nobody to help the heroine when her powers start to manifest. Maybe the fairies will help the grandmother but in return, my heroine has to help them find who stole their sacred Jewel. I take the dog for long walks, working things out in my head. I’m in a walking wellness program through work at the moment where you wear a pedometer and document your steps. I have to say, I’ve logged some good mileage so far working out knotty plot problems.

I based the cat in the book on one of my own cats, Fuzz. He can’t speak to me in English, but he does talk in his own way. Sometimes I can even figure out what he’s saying. The other morning, I took the dog out for his morning constitutional and heard Fuzz’s battle cry off in the woods. I worried whether he might be tangling with something that has felines on their breakfast menu, such as a fox or fisher cat. Off we went, the dog and I, me in my pajamas and a hoodie with my feet stuffed into boots. Through the neighbor’s yard, into the woods beyond and half way around the dang mountain we followed the sounds of Fuzz’s screaming, with me yelling his name and the dog dragging me over downed trees and through pricker bushes. Finally the yowls changed to the big meows he puts out when I’m calling him and he arrives to say “here I am!”, and I saw him sitting under a tall pine tree, looking very satisfied with himself. He had treed another cat that lives a good half mile down the road and must have been out on a reconnaissance of its own. I picked Fuzz up and they snarled insults at each other as I carried him away. And all the while I was thinking – rats, I don’t have my pedometer on. This little jaunt had to be good for at least a half mile.

In the book I’m working on now, the germ of the idea came from the fact that an ancestor on my family tree was hung as a witch in 1700s Connecticut. Family lore has it that they were pressuring her to put the finger on her best friend, but she managed to hold out until the friend got passage back to England. That friend later became the great-great-however many times over grandmother of Winston Churchill. How’s that for your six degrees of separation.

Valerie Gillen lives in Vermont with her husband,daughter, 7 cats, 1 dog and a black-and-white rabbit who chews everything. She is a competitive Irish stepdancer and currently working on her next YA adventure.

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