Fridays off the Wall with Jane Toombs

Whew, it's been a busy week and I'm so glad it's Friday. I'm looking forward to some rest and relaxation but it won't get here until Monday night (ie. Grandma and Grandpa arrive. :-))


Today, I'm welcoming Jane Toombs, author of Hallow House, for some fun at Fridays Off the Wall.

What is the most adventurous thing you’ve done? 

At seventeen and a half, a total innocent, I left my small village of 3000. my parents and friends to travel to Los Angeles to join the Cadet Nurse Corps in 1944. The patient population of Los Angeles County General Hospital where I would be taking my training, was at that time 3000--the same as my village in Michigan. I traveled alone across the country by train to get there, in cars full of service men. They turned out to be harmless, since one of the older guys immediately took me under his protection and didn't allow any "fooling around." I didn't see anything unusual in that at the time--just thought he was a nice guy. Nobody protected anyone at the hospital--you just had to learn on you own how to survive. Which I did very quickly.

That's an amazing story. A very brave journey for a young woman at any time. What is the most unexpected thing that has happened in one of your books? 

Since I’m not a Pantser, but a plotter, this is extremely rare in one of my books.  One time, though, I set out to write a gothic, which was intended to be about one heroine and one hero.  Before I finished I had 157.000 words, and multiple generations had passed through my fingers to the screen, including s different beginning the predated the original one.  So what did I do with this lengthy multigenerational paranormal gothic suspense romance? I sat on it Finally one of publishers, Books We Love Publishing Partners, who puts books directly into Smash Words contacted me. . They’d done Ten Past Midnight, Dark Tales by Jane Toombs and wanted to know if I had any other completed work. So I mentioned this long multiple genres work and one of them said, “Find a place to cut it in two and it can be done as Part One  and Part Two, in separate books.”  I thought that’d be impossible, but I was wrong. There was an obvious cut-off place about halfway through the ms.  So both parts of Hallow House are now out.

What is your favorite line for your most recent book? 

I suppose my most recent book would be the one coming out from Red Rose Publishing  on June 2--Shadow On The Floor, the first book in my Deadly Darkness Series.

            ”In case you didn’t notice, she didn’t step on the shadow.”

Sounds innocuous enough, yet the secrets of this old house lie in the shadows. To have a stranger avoid them is extremely unusual.  

That is really a great line.  It's so subtly sinister. Do you have any characters who keep bugging you for their own book? Will you give them one?

I’ve been coerced by secondary characters before into letting them have their own story, so the likelihood of me doing it again is very high.

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What one thing would make your writing space perfect? 

A new desktop computer with all the bells and whistles, including a new printer and a computer chair fitted to my size. (One can always dream…)

We wouldn't be writers if we didn't.  

More about Hallow House: 

A house built for love, but doomed to evil. Two children, one will live, one will die.  Is it possible for evil to reside with innocence?  What is the real secret of Hallow HouseHouse?

To find out more about Jane, visit her website at http://www.janetoombs.com.