Jasmine's Place Issue No. 14 - December 2014 | Page 9

Wife. Mom. Author. Reader. Amateur nature photographer. Chocolate eater - Julie Arduini lives in NE Ohio with her family. You’ll often find her sharing how she’s surrendering the good, the bad, and maybe one day...the chocolate. She loves to write romance and here, she shares about the crafts of writing. How are your plots formed? I truly believe God gives them to me. On my own I’d never have the creativity to see a cast of characters rise up and form a fictional village. My imagination is always “on” so I look at the random things around me and God does the rest. Do you envisage characters before plots or the other way round? Each story is different. With Spectacular Falls I was in the village that inspired Spectacular Falls. I imagined the hero, Ben Regan, first and started asking myself questions. As I created Ben, the plot started to form. Entangled, the second in the series, came about when the heroine, Carla, started to pop up in Spectacular Falls with more issues than I wanted to use in Spectacular Falls. The plot unfolded in such a way with the first book that it was a smooth transition to start Carla’s story with Entangled. You've been working on different projects concurrently - a romantic series for subscribers, different parts of your Adirondack romance, and you also submitted a romantic story for a competition last year. How easy is that to do? How do you keep all the different plots and characters separate? It isn’t easy. I have to be very disciplined with time and organized with my notes. I use YWriter, free writing novel software and that helps me a lot. Each story has a file and within that I keep notes, write chapters and scenes, have notes on those things, jot down plot ideas and more. Why do you write romantic novels? I ask myself that a lot. I love reading them, but when I watch movies, I tend to choose action over romance. I’m not an overly romantic person, although I’m often thinking romantic things. It’s odd. I think I write them JASMINE'S PLACE 9 9