Ask the Author: Joy Jarrett
Answered Questions (3)
Joy Jarrett
I admit that I hate feeling out of control. Writing is the most amazing thing because you can control everything in the fictional world you're creating. It's the very best kind of therapy ever. Writing, to me, evokes the same feeling as when I was a little kid playing make-believe games. I can get in the flow and lose all track of time and place as I'm transported to something pulled from my own imagination. As I type, those characters and their world are written into existence where there was nothing before. It's an exhilarating experience. In a way, writing is creating your own reality, if just for a little while.
Joy Jarrett
My latest book, Branching Out, is another Scary Good Romance. It's set on the lush Oregon coastline at a raptor center where my heroine, Willow, rehabilitates birds of prey and runs a logging museum supposedly haunted by the ghost of The Bandage Man. She's a gritty, determined woman despite the tragedies that beset her family and left her raising her teenage brother on her own. Her latest venture to fund her birds is opening a tree house hotel. On opening night, her old high school nemesis appears dressed as The Bandage Man to play what's meant to be a harmless prank on a bachelorette party staying in a tree house. Willow isn't amused when Nate accidentally damages an old tree on her property, and she seems to be the only woman alive immune to Nate's good looks and charm. Nate, however, is completely won over by Willow and eager to prove he's turned over a new leaf since his distant high school days of bullying. So he helps Willow out with some repairs around her property and removes the limb he damaged from the old tree, having no idea this action will trigger something horrifying. Suddenly, the familiar urban legend of The Bandage Man seems fun in the face of the very real and ancient evil that Nate's unleashed. As one terrifying event after another occurs, the evil grows to threaten everything Willow loves--which, to her amazement, just might include Nate after all.
Joy Jarrett
A few years ago, my family stayed in an old converted schoolhouse on a working elk ranch in Colorado. The owner of the ranch insisted the schoolhouse cabin was haunted. It was summertime and stiflingly hot in the attic's sleeping quarters. I marveled at how dark it was on that ranch and listened to the eerie sound of elk bugling right outside the cabin. I got up in the middle of the night and had to navigate the twisting staircase by way of a very sharp elk antler railing. In the middle of the cabin sat the the rocking chair where the owner swore the ghost of a teacher from the schoolhouse's nineteenth century days would sit and rock. It all creeped me out so much. Old Cravings isn't a ghost story, but its horror was borne from the remote location and loneliness of that old schoolhouse cabin. The cabin was accessible only by a ranch road over three miles long. It got my imagination going like crazy and I couldn't help but wonder-- what if something terrifying happened here while being trapped by a snowstorm?
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