The Little Seer Blog Tour Day 1

Today is the first day of a two day blog tour featuring a new book by Laura K. Cowan

Today, I will share Laura’s answers to questions about her book and tomorrow, I will feature a review of the book and more tidbits.

Inside The Making of The Little Seer, a Speculative Supernatural Novel

By Laura K. Cowan, author of The Little Seer

People often ask me how I wrote a novel about the supernatural and prophetic dreams. The answer? Well, come peek over my shoulder a bit to see. What went into the making of The Little Seer was nothing short of supernatural itself, and I’m not talking about my effort, though that was pretty intense.

Where Did The Idea for The Little Seer Come From?

I was bullied for years as a kid, and a journal entry I wrote about wanting people to love me for who I was was actually read in front of my seventh grade class and ridiculed, so suffice it to say I had some fear to work through before even being able to get back to writing as an adult. Putting my writing out there for people to judge? Yeah, terrifying. You can read more about my miraculous journey back to health in my full bio on my blog, but long story short: when my daughter was born, I realized I wanted to write an imaginative adventure story for her like the ones I had loved as a child, but one that also acknowledged the pain suffered by people who don’t fit the mold–whether in church, school, or society in general. I had been through a painful church split on top of my wedding that destroyed my faith community as well. But I had also experienced the most miraculous moments of my life after these devastating events, including being healed from an incurable disease through prayer, so I wanted to explore the role that rejection and other painful life experiences play in our paths to healing and life. The result was a story that was a little more grown up than I had originally planned, I suppose just because the reality of the conflict over our souls is pretty intense stuff.

Is The Little Seer Inspired By Your Life Experiences?

Inspired, yes, but The Little Seer is not my story. Yes, I went through the disillusion of seeing people who were my spiritual mentors behaving badly and discovering that the church I was raised in couldn’t answer some of my most pressing questions about life and faith, and yes I even had prophetic dreams about the event that helped me through a difficult time, but Aria’s story is very different from mine. One of my concerns about this story is that people will assume that the people I knew as a kid are as badly behaved as some of the characters in The Little Seer. None of these characters is meant to portray anyone I went to church or school with, so please don’t interrogate my friends and acquaintances and ask them if they ever tried to destroy my life! 🙂

How On Earth Did You Come Up With Those Dream Sequences?

Would you believe that my own dreams are weirder than Aria’s, and more complicated? Maybe lots of people’s are, but mine seem to be particularly intense, and I think that’s the reason I don’t believe you can thoroughly understand someone from their waking life alone. When I wrote the dream sequences for The Little Seer, I took a symbol from one of my own dreams that had some significance for me, such as tornados or bears, and then wove it into a fresh dream from Aria’s perspective. There is a whole different level on which you can read The Little Seer, by following colors and nature symbols through the story to find foreshadowing of their significance in her discoveries about her identity. If you like the book, read it twice and look at colors, plants, water, weather, and the rustle of angels’ wings the second time, and I think you’ll begin to experience the story on the level that I do.

Can We See What You’re Working on Next?

I’m working on a novel called Music of Sacred Lakes that explores the relationship between a person and the land that gave birth to them. I’m excited about this book, because it explores how some of the worst things we do can lead to our redemption and our reconnection with creation. My protagonist, a young man in crisis from northern Michigan who accidentally kills a girl, struggles to find his way back to his connection with life through living by the shores of Lake Michigan and trying to hear its voice. He is haunted by the dead girl in a series of terrifying encounters, but in the end, this horror is what leads him to peace. It’s a weird and wonderful story, and I hope I can do it justice. I will begin my second round of writing and editing in the next few weeks, and as soon as I have something that’s ready to share, you can find excerpts from the work in progress on laurakcowan.com. I’m also working on a speculative supernatural short story collection called The Thin Places: Supernatural Tales of the Unseen, which takes 30 different “What if?” questions about the way the spiritual world works, and spins them in all directions, from modern mythology to the marriage of fairy tales and time travel. I’m pretty excited about where these next few years will lead, and I hope you’ll come along for the ride. My rule is no boring stories, and I hope you like what I come up with.

Laura K. Cowan, The Dreaming Novelist, writes spiritual supernatural stories set against rich dreamscapes. A lifelong dreamer and modern Christian mystic, Laura draws from subconscious depths to bring the things we believe are impossible, spiritually and physically, into the world in a literal way, to bring the supernatural into the natural and help others come to see their infinite worth and the exquisite possibilities that exist in a world in which the supernatural is part of the natural order of things.

Laura has worked for years as an accomplished writer and editor in genres such as green tech, green parenting, and automotive media, and has been called one of the best copy editors in the business by multiple colleagues, including late mentor David E. Davis, Jr., whom TIME Magazine called “the Dean of Automotive Journalism.” She is the founder of popular green parenting blog 29 Diapers, author of Ecofrugal Baby: How To Save 70% Off Baby’s First Year, and Road Test Editor for Inhabitat, the web’s largest green design blog. Laura’s work has appeared in Automobile Quarterly as well as on numerous parenting sites including BabyCenter, EcoMom, and Inhabitots. She lives in Michigan with her husband and her 3-year-old daughter. You can find her on Twitter, connect with her on LinkedIn, or email her at laurakcowan[at]gmail.com.