Blog Tour: Wayfarer by Rebecca J. Anderson

and this is day three! glad you made it :)
you can find Rebecca's blog and website in days one and two of this tour at the beginning of the posts. Here is the last part of the interview!

Marie: How did you get into fiction writing?
Rebecca: As a child I read enormous quantities of books -- far more than my parents, who did very little fiction reading themselves, could possibly keep up with. My love of fantasy began with my father reading Lewis and Tolkien out loud to our family, but on my own I read so many faery tales, and so much mythology and folklore, and later so much contemporary fantasy and science fiction, that my brain started filling up with all kinds of fantastic ideas just itching to be let out.

I started at eight by writing and illustrating my own fantasy stories, and at twelve graduated to borrowing my parents' typewriter and rattling away on it until all hours of the night, and by the time I was nineteen I had written my first novel. A terrible first novel, and one that will never be published, but nevertheless, it was good practice and paved the way for my second novel, which became (eventually, after many revisions) my first published book.
Marie: Do you listen to music as you write? Why or why not?
Rebecca: As a teen I listened to music constantly while writing, and used it to set the mood for whatever kind of scene I was working on. Later I got out of that habit, and only wrote in silence. But when I found myself getting stressed out over my own prose, and focusing too much on the words I was using to tell my story instead of the story itself, listening to familiar music really helped to distract and relax me. So now I write with music again.
Marie: How do you decide if an idea you have for a story is worth keeping?
Rebecca: If it keeps following me around nagging at the back of my imagination and won't leave me alone, it's a keeper. If I've forgotten about it within a few days of getting the idea, it probably wasn't worth it anyway.
Marie: What do you do when you get a 'mind block'?
Rebecca: In no particular order, any or all of the following:

Make large quantities of tea.
Eat chocolate.
Mope.
Whine to my husband.
Convince myself that I am a fluke and a fraud and will never, ever write anything worthwhile again.
Read other people's books, preferably books that are not even remotely like the one I'm trying to write.
Browse randomly around the Internet.
Talk to a writer friend about the problem, and/or show her what I've written so far and ask her opinion on it.
Go for a long walk and pray (which by that point usually means a teary sort of babble because I am so worried about not making my deadline).

And at some point, days or weeks or months later, I figure out why I was having that particular problem with the story, and I go back and revise the earlier chapters of the book to fix the problem, and then I can carry on again.

visit the others on the tour!
here are their websites/blogs:


Whispers of Dawn, The Book Cellar, The Hungry Readers, My Own Little Corner of the World, KidzBookBuzz.com, Reading is My Superpower, Book Crumbs, Becky’s Book Reviews, Fireside Musings, A Christian Worldview of Fiction, Homeschool Book Buzz, Homespun Light, Book Review Maniac