Hello riders! It's another bookish Friday and I got a special guest post from author Deborah J. Lightfoot joining us for this morning. She is featuring her book "Adverse Reactions," today on my blog because she is having a sale. You can grab her book for $1.99 from 4/21 to 4/24. Make sure to grab it at its discounted price so you don't miss out on this great read. Happy reading everyone :).
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Where Do You Get Your Ideas?
Guest post by Deborah J. Lightfoot, author of ADVERSE REACTIONS and other books
Every writer gets asked: Where do the ideas come from?
For many of us, the question is so unanswerable, we can only smile gently and deflect. Have you heard about the warehouse in Poughkeepsie, where ideas can be had wholesale, a dime a dozen? (Wink, wink)
Seriously, most writers have no real idea where the ideas come from. Ideas well up from the subconscious, far below the level of awareness. More than once, as I’ve come awake in the morning, I’ve had the entire plot of a book running through my head. It’s a mad dash to the keyboard then, stopping only to grab a cup of coffee before feverishly pounding out the main points of the plot before the whole thing evaporates back into the ether from which it came.
That was not the process, however, for Adverse Reactions, my newest book. I have no memory at all of where the original idea might have come from. It was too long ago: I actually started the book in 2005. I managed 24,000 words of it before I hit a wall. I’d reached the first “plot point”—pivotal moment; major turning point—and I had no clue where things went from there.
So I shelved the manuscript (plopped it into a file cabinet, actually) and went back to writing the epic fantasy that eventually became Waterspell, a saga that grew by three books in 2022–24 to end up as a six-book series—altogether, more than 680,000 words.
But I never forgot that partial manuscript. I’m not a person who leaves things undone. I’m determined to finish what I start (even if it takes six books and 680,000 words to do it). In 2025, therefore, I pulled that manuscript out of the file cabinet and sat down to read what I’d written 20 years earlier.
What I found in those rough-draft pages—the compelling urgency of it—surprised even me. The story gripped me. I found myself caring deeply about the protagonist and the awful situation she’s in as the story opens.
What was even better, though, was the way my mind leapt ahead when I reached the end of that 24,000-word partial. A score of years earlier, I hadn’t known where the story went. Now I did. The logical and dramatic next steps in the quest for justice were clear.
During those 20 years, I’d done a lot of writing and a lot of living (some of it hard). I’d gained experience, deepened my understanding of people and their motivations, and observed the good and the evil of which humans are capable. All of that living had equipped me to finish the story—to finish what I’d started, and to do it in a way that has been personally fulfilling.
Thank you for reading, and for spreading the word about my cross-genre, post-apocalyptic, paranormal, gritty modern “Western.”
In a world that demands mindless conformity, be your own exceptional self.
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When your mind makes you the enemy, either your mind must die, or you will. Unless yours is the mind they can’t break.
Adverse Reaction
by: Deborah J. Lightfoot
Genre: Dystopian Paranormal Suspense
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Check out Reviews and Recommendations!
WHAT READERS ARE SAYING:
“This novel is immediately immersive, with an opening scene that sucks readers in with vivid sensory detail and a great sense of suspense.”
—The Black List
“What a story! I was picked up from the first page and you never let me go thereafter. The premise is original … compelling … convincing.”
—ARC Reader
“A very enjoyable read. Excellent pacing. Immersive language. Polished, effortless writing. I’d love to see a prequel (or three)!”
—ARC Reader
“Relevant to the current situation in the world. Ostracizing others who are different out of fear and ignorance. Cruelty and inhumanity.”
—ARC Reader
“Believable and relatable.”
—The Black List
“Thematically rich, as Devin faces constant self-doubt but eventually comes to find empowerment in the unique abilities that have made her an outcast.”
—The Black List
BLURB:
Purity demands a bullet. Devin brings a reckoning.
Since she was six years old, Devin Perridin has been locked behind the walls of the family home to keep her hidden from those who would kill her. But at sixteen, she is exposed as a "Syke," one of an outlawed minority who possess extraordinary powers of mind over matter. Snatched from hiding, she escapes the firing squad, but only to be imprisoned in a house of horrors: the Peaceful Hills Sanatorium and Rehabilitation Center for the Treatment of Persistent Mental Disorders. After an unknown time of torture and "behavior modification," brutally designed to destroy her psychokinetic reflexes, she emerges from the asylum severely damaged in mind and spirit. Her salvation may lie in the series of crimes triggered by her release: first kidnapping, then attempted murder, and then a mustering of forbidden forces to assault the remote pseudo-psychiatric facility where she had been tortured into near-mindlessness.
Drawing upon a strength she had always known was hers but had never before been able to consciously control, Devin defies the authoritarian society with its unjust laws that demand her death. She pushes through pain, isolation, and moral quandaries to seek justice for not only herself, but all members of a maligned and cruelly persecuted minority. A post-apocalyptic, paranormal allegory for the times in which we live.
When your mind makes you the enemy, either your mind must die, or you will. Unless yours is the mind they can't break.
*** GET IT ON SALE FOR ONLY $1.99 4/21 TO 4/24! ***
Purchase your Copy Today!
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Castles in the cornfield provided the setting for Deborah J. Lightfoot’s earliest flights of fancy. On her father’s farm in Texas, she grew up reading tales of adventure and reenacting them behind ramparts of sun-drenched grain. She left the farm to earn a degree in journalism and write award-winning books of history and biography. High on her bucket list was the desire to try her hand at the genre she most admired. The result is Waterspell, a multi-layered fantasy series about a girl and the wizard who suspects her of being so dangerous to his world, he believes he’ll have to kill her … which troubles him, since he’s fallen in love with her.
Learn more about Deborah...
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