#BlogTour #GuestPost: The Log House by Baylea Hart @bayleahart @unbounders @annecater #TheLogHouse #RandomThingsTours

I’m excited to be on the blog tour for The Log House by Baylea Hart today and to have a great guest post from the author aboya the inspiration behind his books to share with you.

The Log House is available to buy now in ebook and paperback.  The ebook is currently only £1.99.  You can purchase a copy of both here.

Before I share my guest post with you, here is a little about the book.

Book Synopsis:

The forest is a deadly place. Nobody knows this better than Penny. She has spent her whole life hiding in the darkness, shielding herself from the terrors that watch and wait within the trees. When Penny is abandoned and left for dead in the forest, she is forced to navigate this terrifying labyrinth in order to return home to her son and take revenge on the woman who tried to kill her. But the murderous creatures with the false smiles aren’t the only monsters to lurk in the forest, and some demons may be closer than she thinks.

Guest Post: Inspiration behind the book.

What inspired me to write my novel?

There are so many things that can inspire a story. I’ve written characters based on people I see on commutes, or short stories based on a single line of a song I’ve found particularly interesting. Even the weather can inspire me sometimes. Usually though, my writing begins with a single image I see flash in my mind. With The Log House, this image was of a woman waking in a stairlift, miles above a forest canopy. I remember vividly waking up one morning with this image in my head, perhaps something left over from a dream.

In the end, this image didn’t make it into the novel, but it was enough to spark it into life. I wanted to know who the woman was, and how she would make it out. Character is always most important to me – I have playlists by the dozen of music dedicated to particular characters, but nothing I thought of seemed to fit this time. I could see the place she had been sent from, I could even get a taste of why she had been sent away, but the woman herself was hazy and out of reach, and remained that way until I asked myself another question.

Does the woman in the stairlift deserve to be there?

I have always loved morally grey characters, characters you never know if you can trust. The protagonist is the driving force of the novel, you are following events through their eyes. Though it would have been fun, and perhaps more conventional to go the route of the “wronged woman”, I decided I wanted to play with the other side of the coin. What if the woman DID deserve to be sent away? What kind of thing could she have done to deserve that?

Eventually, I decided I wanted readers to go through the novel both rooting for and disliking my main character. I wanted there to be points where she seemed to make a completely rational decision, only for a later event to show the spite and malice behind it. In the end, this push for a true “grey” character even shaped the layout of my novel. Instead of one long narrative, I found myself adding extra chapters, scenes from the past that would alter or add meaning to what was currently happening.

After a year or so, I finished with a story completely different to the one I had started with. Instead of a woman, scared and alone, hanging precariously over the trees, I had Penny; a bitter, vengeful woman who would take down monsters to get what she wanted. And boy, am I glad for it.

About The Author:

If you liked the sound of this book from my review please follow the blog tour and find out what these other fabulous bloggers are saying.