The Influence of Family and Life on Storytelling - Guestpost by Rebecca Hamilton

As part of the 'The Forever Girl' blog tour which is hosted by Dark Mind Book Tours I'm having Rebecca Hamilton over on my blog today. She will tell you about the influence of family and life on storytelling. But first let me tell you a bit about her book 'The Forever Girl'

The Forever Girl

Sophia Parsons’ family has skeletons, but they aren’t in their graves...

Solving the mystery of an ancestor’s hanging might silence the clashing whispers in Sophia's mind, but the cult in her town and the supernaturals who secretly reside there are determined to silence her first.

As Sophia unknowingly crosses the line into an elemental world full of vampire-like creatures, shapeshifters, and supernatural grim reapers, she meets Charles, a man who becomes both lover and ally.

But can she trust him?

It’s not until someone nearly kills Sophia that she realizes the only way to unveil the source of her family's curse: abandon her faith or abandon her humanity. If she wants to survive, she must accept who she is, perform dark magic, and fight to the death for her freedom.
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Doesn't that sound intriguing!?
Now on to Rebecca's guestpost:

The Influence of Family and Life on Storytelling

I’ve had some interesting experiences growing up, maybe even a few that were a bit spooky. One of the earliest stories I remember my mom telling me is how she once “flew” in the field in front of my grandmother’s house. She said she was running across the field with her arms spread and she really wanted to fly and then one day her feet lifted off the ground for a few steps too long to be anything other than flying.

I can’t tell you how many summers I wasted running across that field. Apparently, this skill was not passed down genetically. I tried to fly, I believed I could fly, but fly I did not. I wonder if R Kelly’s mom once told him a similar story.

My mom told me other stories about our family as well, and there is one in particular that sticks out in my mind. She says her great uncle (or something like that) was supposed to shovel coal on the Titanic. But as he was walking down one of the halls, his hat blew off (there was no breeze) and he got a bad feeling and didn’t go after all. That story did inspire me to write a short story once, but I never finished the story. Actually, I have no idea what I did with what I’d written. It’s laying around somewhere in my computer, I’m sure.

My family is known for having their fair share of secrets, too, but there’s nothing supernatural about these. These are the uglies. I won’t say much about them now, but I once started writing a memoir that I may one day finish, and that gets a bit more into secrets that are the drama of my family.

So I suppose, in some ways, the ideas of paranormal forces and family secrets you can’t talk about have influenced my stories. I think all my writing reflects me in those ways. Not the obvious ways—as in, a lot of people think I’m Wiccan. I’m not. But people think I must be because I wrote a convincing Wiccan character. But in the less obvious ways, there are pieces of my in my writing. It’s in the details, though, like the coat closets that smell of moth balls, or the one hiding place in my grandma’s house that my cousins could never find me in when we played hide and seek.

The mystery in Sophia’s family history, however, belong to her family alone.


click here for the other posts in this blog tour.
(some of them have giveaways!)