RT@shannonihayes The guest post that wasn't.... #IndyThursday

So I've been doing the blog tour right, and one of the stops was a guest post, I sat down weeks before it was due and spent the better part of an hour of my day to write the damn thing.  It was supposed to go live a few days ago.... 

Supposed to... Yeah didn't happen. Don't exactly know why, I'm sure there was some excuse I was given but I don't give a shit enough to go looking for it now. It's 4am and I decided I needed content, so I have gone on a hunt and found the damned thing. I wrote it, so I'm going to share it for fucks sake. Of course It's been edited slightly now. But without further ado...

Inside the Mind of an Author:

 How a Book Comes to Life

Written By S.I. Hayes

           I always appreciate the chance to connect with new readers and let them have little bit of a look into the worlds that I try to create for them. My topic for this post was about how a book comes to life. Well to be honest I think it is always different for me. It depends on the book. For instance my Fantasy Series The In Dreams Trilogy happened while playing a game of D&D.. When the campaign ended I couldn’t leave my characters at the wayside. I took them and molded the worlds that had been created into something new and fresh, running off with it until I had three novels that satisfied me for the time being. My Tale Centuries of Blood: Becoming was conceived one cold and inebriated night while I was doing an overnight shift working for a taxi company and my latest work Heart Of Stone well I simply woke up at 2:30 a.m. and decided I was going to write a contemporary romance. A week and 68k words layer I had my finished manuscript.

          I suppose since it’s my newest release I’ll talk about it. Heart of Stone just sort of happened. Writing its self, like most of my work I have an idea of what I want to convey. A story about life, love and in this case I wondered just how much crazy I could throw at a couple and see them hold their resolve. See them hold it together and not give up on each other where others would have. It’s a story about hope, loss, and betrayal. I go into my work wanting to express feeling and moments that we have all had, or wished to have had. I hope to write something that touches people in some way. My characters are developed as they come along, bits of their personality are definitely from me, and a lot comes from people I have known. I mix in pieces of them to round the edges and add scuffs to a character. I want them flawed, broken and at the same time strong and willful. They are walking contradictions because we are all of us humans exactly that.

        I’m a research hound as well. For settings I look up everything. Street names, stores, environments. This book takes place now (November 2015) and in the near future, I actually looked up weather predictions and the phases of the moon. Why? Authenticity. It’s what I do. It’s how I bring my books to life. I try to breathe the nuances of reality into the fantasies in order to give my readers something tangible to hold onto, if only so that they can say. “I relate to that.”

        I don’t know why I feel I need to have that tangibility, but I do. It’s part of my process. The rest just sort of pours out of me, it’s the old adage, “write what you know.” Well I try to know a lot, so that I can write everything and anything that comes to me. Does that make me somehow unique? I don’t know. I hope it makes me interesting at least.