Behind the Scenes: Libellule

It's weird how stories come to you. You'll be washing dishes or in the carpool line or at some board meeting and--Click! Pre-Teen Wolf. And all of sudden you're imagining how an 11 year old girl who has always known she is a werewolf (her family's pretty cool about it) would feel about becoming a werewolf for the first time at a new school in a town with a previous werewolf population of zero. Then you add it to your list of story ideas and get back to chopping garlic or whatever and hope that the beans soften in time for dinner. Some of those ideas never see the light of day. Others bubble to the surface and shout and wave until you feel like you have to write them down so that you can think of something else.

Libellule ended up being was like that, even though I thought she would be different. Instead of starting with a random idea that came (seemingly) out of nowhere, this character started with brainstorming a cool fairy world with my amazing friend and thought partner, Candace West. But when it came time to write, the main character didn't feel real to me until I was walking to pick up my youngest from school. I stopped to watch a dragonfly, and suddenly knew who she was and who her father was. Her father is a character whose story I've been telling in my mind for years now, and when I realized that Libby was his child I knew her as well as if she were breathing.

Cheesy? Absolutely.

Melodramatic? Hopefully not.

True? Yes.

The only thing left is for me to not mess it up. ;-)