Hello all! It is I, Ophelia, with you today talking about this woman that I've met in community theater that has inspired me to use parts of her personality as the character of "Mims" in the book. Who is Mims? Who is this community theater legend? Listen and find out.

So, ya know how sometimes you make plans and they just turn out so beautifully you can't believe it? This was not one of those times. I got a big case of the doubts and never ended up sending my first chapter to my friends, and so I decided that (after chatting about that struggle) I would just read chapter one here for you all.

Would love to hear what you think!

Howdy, howdy, howdy! Today I'm getting into my main characters, who they are, what parts of me they are (and what parts of others they are as well). I thought that this would be easy, but it turns out that getting deep into characters without giving away integral parts of the story is a little bit of a challenge. I also am getting into this idea that I have for the audiobook, and how I'm going to introduce some original music into the intros. Feeling brave to share one of them.

Speaking of feeling brave - I'm going to be sending out one of the first chapters of the book to a couple of folks (and let me know if you want to be added to that fun!) I'm hoping to get their feedback in next week's episode. This is making me all kinda of anxious just thinking about it, but I feel like sharing it first with people that have my back is a good starting point.

And, of course, I go tragically off topic several times and tell rando stories about my life. Maybe I should change the name of this to "I'm hosting a podcast about writing a book. . .kinda"

I love old fairy tales. The ones where the good people don't necessarily have a happy ending and where sometimes there's absolutely nothing to be learned besides sometimes life gets weird at times. So, for this book I'm exploring the precursor to "Sleeping Beauty" which is an old Italian Fairytale called "The Sun, Moon and Talia".

I'm also chatting about how I'm planning to incorporate the fairytale with the new story (and generally going through how I'm actually planning this time along - what a concept.)

Finally, I'm talking about how we are going to dive into some of the main characters next week and how I'm trying to use some people's crappy behavior as inspiration for villainous behavior.

There may be questions here. . .Who is Ophelia? Why is she writing a book? How does one "kinda" write a book? I'm here to answer these questions as you also get a chance to hear me ponder my life in general. Spoiler alert: there are spoilers!