The following article is from a wonderful author whom I am lucky to count amongst my friends.
Julia Blake is warm-hearted, funny and straight-talking; her words dance across the page, keeping you entertainingly captivated from start to finish.
In this guest post for Electric Eclectic, Julia addresses a question many authors are asked.
One of the questions readers ask me the most is, where do you get your ideas from? The honest answer is most of the time I have absolutely no idea. I’ll be going about my daily life and suddenly a scene, or a name, or a scrap of dialogue will float into my brain. For a few days, weeks, months or even years, it will simply sit there, putting out little tendrils of ideas that twist and grow and take root in my imagination, until suddenly, bam, I have a complete plot in my head, fully formed, as if from nowhere.
Occasionally though, I can pinpoint the exact moment when a book was conceived and can say “there, that was when it all started.” It was like that for The Forest ~ a tale of old magic ~ my most popular book to date. Over a decade ago I was at a family party. It was one of those parties where ages ranged from babes in arms up to great-grandfathers ensconced in the corner with a glass of sherry. It was getting late, the party was winding down, parents of very young children had taken them home and I was sitting on a chair sharing the dregs of a bottle of wine with my brother. Behind us, a group of elderly gentlemen were reminiscing about the good old days. Only half-listening, my attention was abruptly grabbed when one of them came out with the best line ever. Leaning towards the other gents, he enquired…
“Whatever happened, to old Wally Twitchett?”
Wally Twitchett? What an amazing name. My imagination started humming. By the time I went to bed that night I could “see” Wally in my mind right down to his patched but clean clothes, his beak of a nose and protruding Adam’s apple. I could imagine him rattling around the village where he lived on his old boneshaker bike, because, of course, he had to live in a village. An old, isolated, insular village in a forgotten corner of Britain. A village that appears suspended in time and peopled with quirky characters all with names as odd and memorable as Wally’s. Maybe, the residents of this village never leave, ever. My, that is interesting. Why do they never leave? Because the village is slap bang next to a big old creepy forest with something evil at its core that’s placed a curse on the village and its people. Ooh, a curse! I love it. What type of curse? And so on…
You can see from this process how one simple name can spark a chain reaction in an author’s brain, where one idea tumbles onto the next and the next and so on until the whole plot lies before you. Rather like those domino effects where one tap sends the first domino falling onto the next and it’s only when the whole lot has fallen the picture is revealed.
I wrote the book.
Over a decade later, I published it.
To my joy, others loved the village and its characters as much as I did, and even though Wally ended up a minor character, he still finally found his voice in my story.
A sweet postscript to this story happened last year. I work part-time for a mattress and bed retailer and was one day putting through an order for a lovely young girl and her husband. They wanted to finance the purchase so in the course of completing the form I asked her for her maiden name. Twitchett, she replied.
I stared at her in disbelief.
“No relation to Wally Twitchett?” I tentatively enquired.
“Oh yes,” she replied, he was my great-uncle.
I couldn’t help the smile of disbelief that spread over my face and explained to her the significance of that name. Intrigued, she ordered the book there and then, wanting to share it with the rest of her family. It is touching to think that even though the real Wally Twitchett died childless many years ago, some small part of him will live on forever in The Forest.
“I met a man made of leaves, with roots for hair, who looked at me with eyes that burnt like fire.”
An impenetrable forest that denies entry to all but a select few. A strange and isolated village, whose residents never leave. A curse that reappears every generation, leaving death and despair in its wake.
What is lurking at the heart of the Forest?
When the White Hind of legend is seen, the villagers know three of its young people will be left dead, victims of a triangle of love, murder and suicide. This time, Sally, Jack and Reuben have been selected, and it’s their turn to be tormented by long-buried jealousies, aroused by the dark entity existing within its shadowy glades. Only by confronting the Forest’s secrets, can they hope to break the curse and change their destinies – if they have the courage.
Keeper of secrets. Taker of souls. Defender of innocence. Existing on the very edge of believing, there is the Forest.
This is its story
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speak. I wrote the Pseudoverse Series because I believe in one adage: If you want to read something and you cannot find it, write it yourself. I believe some things need to be said, and I have a lot more to say in the coolest and most devious damn way I know how. That devious side of me would be hiding messages in plots and narratives as all of the writers before we did since the dawn of charcoal and papyrus. When I am alone at night squirming in pain staring into the darkness with a journal on my end table, and a chapter-by-chapter movie begins in my head, all of the pieces of the novels fall into place, and I’ve worked them all out: 
The entire Pseudoverse Series is a puzzle! The novels are in themselves divine puzzles waiting to be slid together. Enjoy them as a fun roller coaster ride that never stops (Check out the Blog on Heliotrope as a Storyboard). The historical accuracy will blow you away from the hours of research that DC Belga and Cad Gelb put into these stories. Cobalt will be forever a stunning debut novel I will cherish as young parents cherish their newborns. I as most authors do when they finish their first novel, wept. These novels are not masterpieces to be shoved into a bookshelf and admired from afar but loud grenades that go off in your hand, leaving a mark on your forehead that begs the question: “You know, there is more to this book than just this beautiful pulp-inspired cover. Look closer, and you may see something you never saw before. Why would someone spend all this time doing this?” Duck! Its a well-executed barrage of hidden events going off all around you in all different directions! Your grey mass explodes!
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