Cherry Blossom by Amy Laurens

Author:Amy Laurens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: how do you live forever, how to become immortal, tragic love stories, star-crossed lovers, women who don't give up their careers for men
Publisher: Inkprint Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Making Of

Cherry Blossom

So. I have a bit of a relationship with this story—and the story behind it probably has more plot points to it than the actual story.

A long, long time ago, I was a Very New Writer—as we all were once.

However. I don’t mean kindergarten-new, or even high-school new (though to be frank, there are many high-school writers who are much, much less new than I was at their age). I had, in fact, spent my primary and high school years tinkering with stories, not realising in the slightest that it wasn’t normal to be pulled out of primary school classes to go write and illustrate your own books in the tiny office of a woman whose job it seemed to be to take students away from class when they were doing boring stuff and give them something more fun to do.

I’d even studied writing at university, a couple of elective subjects in my Arts degree, and been told that I could certainly ‘string a sentence together’, but could I tell a story?

I’d thought I could, you know, until those classes.

Which is not to say the classes were bad; quite the contrary. They woke me to the understanding of exactly how far I had to go, if I wanted to be not just competent, but good at this writing thing. Turns out it’s a very different proposition to write laudable things as an adult than it is as a straight-A high-schooler. Who’da thunk.

So: classes. Realisations.

Somehow, I have no clue now, it’s far too long ago, I stumbled on Holly Lisle’s website, back when she only had a couple of $10 books on writing.

I bought them. I devoured them. It was like an inhalation after a deep dive: the refreshing understanding that yes, this, this is satisfying, and filling, and necessary on a compulsive, biological level.

So of course, when she pioneered her first ‘big’ course for writers, I got up at 3am to make sure that I’d get in the doors (darn time zone differences, the bane of my writing life I tell you). And I inhaled the course.

Somewhere in there was an exercise in coming up with story seeds, the little beginnings of ideas.

And somewhere in those seeds, I was struck with the idea of cherry blossom in moonlight, and a woman who wanted to follow a man beyond death, and the man who didn’t realise what he had until it was too late.

I tried to string the story together multiple times, and failed every one of them.

Then, one of my writers friends, back in my critique group days during-and-just-post university, sent out a closed call to just a handful of us: their publisher was running a moon-themed anthology. Some writers had pulled out at the last minute. Could any of us string together a relevant story in the next two weeks?

Gulp.

I was still very new to the whole short-story business—and indeed, the whole finishing-what-you-write business, having only finished four fairly-terrible novels to first-draft stage and a handful of short stories.

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