Savannah J. Goins Interview
Welcome to Ink & Magick. I'm your friendly neighborhood witch. What kind of spell can I get for you (or your character) today?
My character and I would both like to eat as much food as we want without getting fat! We both like to cook (thought she likes it a lot more than me), and we both wish we could be movie star-skinny while we eat all the things.
Haha don't we all? I say eat whatever you want, just manage your portions. Also, walk for 30 minutes a day and always take the stairs. As for a spell, try writing down however much weight you want to lose on a piece of paper, fold it up, and burn it to help it manifest. Tell me about your young adult fantasy novel, The Gwythienian, which was released November 3, 2017.
Seventeen-year-old Enzi Montgomery had worn the stone around her neck for years. It was set in a cheap metal fitting, nothing fancy.
But it made her wonder if she was crazy.
Sometimes, when she had it on, she could disappear. She couldn’t make it happen. It just worked on its own. But always at convenient times, like when she’d needed to hide again from Caleb.
Maybe she'd only been imagining it; insomnia could do that to you. The nightmares had never left since that day seven years ago, and she'd never really learned to cope with them.
But what if she wasn’t crazy?
When she finds out that someone else has been searching for the stone—someone from another world—she must decide what to do with it.
Should she get rid of it? Or find out what other secrets it holds?
Dragon wrangler, eh? Tell me about your dragons. Besides dreaming up the dragons in my book, called Gwythienians, I have also had several pet dragons and wrestle them frequently at my day job as an RVT (registered veterinary technician) at an exotic animal clinic. While the dragons I wrangle don’t get quite as big as Smaug or Saphira—and I have yet to meet a fire-breather—many of them are creatures you don’t want to get bitten by. I wrestled a five-foot iguana just this morning, actually. I’ve also wrangled tegues and monitors, and snakes big enough to eat them.
It sounds like you've got your hands full. Which one of your characters surprised you?
My main character, Enzi, a seventeen-year-old human girl, surprised me the most. When I started writing her story, she was quite a lot like me. I didn’t think I could create a character that wasn’t very similar to me because I would have nothing more than my own life experiences to shape and influence hers. But, as I learned more about her, I discovered that she didn’t have to be much like me at all. The more I wove into her story, the more her own true self emerged from my fingertips onto the page. That was a surprise. But I am so glad it happened! She is much more interesting than I am. ;)
I love when characters take on a life of their own. Who is your favorite or least favorite character and why? My favorite character in this book is Gaedyen, the first Gwythienian Enzi meets. His personality came more easily to me than Enzi’s, and if I could meet anyone in real life, it would be him. He has a lot of secrets, but as he learns to trust Enzi and share his own past, as he discovers the one person in the world who doesn’t hate him for his association with events that weren’t his fault, he begins to soften and show what a truly amazing person he is. Plus, he is a sentient dragon. You can’t get any cooler than that!
Wow, talk about a hook! If you could time-travel, would you travel to the future or the past? Where would you like to go, and why would you choose that time period? That is a tough question! I might go to the past and tell myself to spend less time watching TV and more time writing. I might go a bit further back to, say, prehistoric times, to see real dinosaurs/maybe dragons if there were any. I wouldn’t want to meet them—I’d like to return back to present time in one piece—but I would love to see them.
Well, I hope you'll let me know if you do ever gets chance to see real dragons. I want to hear all about it! What can readers who enjoy your book do to help make it successful?
If you enjoy my book, the most helpful thing to do to make it successful would be to leave a nice review! Amazon, Goodreads, Instagram, your bookish blog, anywhere! If you enjoyed reading the book, tell another book nerd friend that they should read it, too!
Share the love! What can we expect from you next? Book 2, The Crivabanian, will be coming out in 2019! Fingers crossed for ARC availability in late 2018.
Good luck and best wishes in your future endeavors! Stop by again.
Thank you so much for interviewing me, D! :)
Since reading C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia when she was ten years old, Savannah has been passionate about getting into other worlds.
Many other books have served to inspire Savannah over the years, including Christopher Paolini’s The Inheritance Cycle, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, among many others.
Savannah has also always had a love for real, live animals, especially the unusual ones. She wanted to be a veterinarian when she was little, but as her interest in writing grew, she opted to become a veterinary technician instead, so that she could spend more time reading and writing stories. She works at a vet clinic that sees unusual animals, and Savannah particularly enjoys seeing reptiles there.
She lives in central Indiana with her husband and their pets, and sometimes has a foster animal or two hanging out as well. Her favorite pet is a sweet little rat named “Kaz” after the character in Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows.
When she is not reading or writing or working with animals, she may be found sketching, painting, sewing, baking, napping, and occasionally socializing. She loves to drink tea and coffee, and claims to be dark chocolate’s biggest fan.
You can connect with Savannah on her website, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest. And you can get a copy of The Gwythienian on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo.
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