I love a good outtake reel—footage of those false starts and rejected pieces from the making of a movie that wind up on the cutting room floor.

In creating a book, writers end up with a similar pile of rejected footage. Today I’m letting you in on some of that which went into the creation of my sophomore novel, Shadow Sister.

Shadow Sister tells the story of a vintner’s daughter, bound by guilt, who embarks with a small-plane pilot on an Andean journey to discover secrets of her estranged, dead sister’s life and fulfill her last request. Along the way, she unravels secrets that test her devotion to home and make her question whether truth is worth the cost of forgiveness. Shadow Sister explores the mysteries of the human heart and the bond of unquenchable love.

Here are some of the ideas that got put on a page but didn’t make the final cut.

The Title

Titles are always hard for me. True to form, it took me until the last minute—and required input from my editor—before I finally landed on Shadow Sister. Before that, my working title was The Shadow of Light, and before that, I toyed with various versions of The Sweetness of Light. I’m so glad we finally settled on Shadow Sister—it is the right one for this book as, depending on your vantage point, the term could be applied to either of the two sisters.

Setting and Main Character

Shadow Sister takes place in two main locales: a vineyard in eastern Washington, and Bolivia. The Bolivian setting was never in question, but it took quite a bit of experimenting before I landed on the vineyard and made my main character, Sarah, a vintner’s daughter. This ended up providing a wealth of contextual details that dovetailed beautifully into the story I wanted to tell. Until I figured that out, I had cast Sarah as a marine biologist named Kate living in Seattle.

Scrapped Research

Story research, of course, turns up far many more tidbits of interesting info than a writer could possibly fit into the pages of a single novel. Here are some of the Bolivian fun facts I wished I could have used:

• Social customs
  • Bolivians tend to eat outdoors when it is not raining.
  • Many men do not feel comfortable eating in front of strangers, so they will often face a wall or sit hunched over their food when they are eating in public.
  • Cha’lla is a ritual blessing drawn from Catholic tradition, indigenous religious ceremony, or—typically—a combination of both. Performed by a yatiri (spiritual leader) or Catholic priest, a cha’lla ceremony is performed whenever a new building is finished to ensure future peace in that building.
  • Many Bolivians believe in karisirus, or night phantoms. These harmful spirits catch people out after dark or when they’re sleeping. Legend says that they split their victim’s stomach and extract some of the fat.
• Beverages
  • While the traditional Bolivian beverages api and mate de coca are featured in Shadow Sister, several others are not:
    • refresco (fruit juice with a dried peach at the bottom of the glass)
    • tostada (a mixture of barley, honey, cloves in water)
    • chicha (homemade corn beer)
    • singani (made from grapes, a cross between wine and whiskey)
• Language.
  • Spanish, Aymara, and Quechua are Bolivia’s three national languages, and they differ from each other greatly. For example, the number one in Spanish = uno, Aymara = ma, Quechua = hoq.

If this glimpse into what didn’t make it onto the pages of Shadow Sister piques your interest in discovering more of what did, then I’m glad to tell you that from now until April 3, the updated editions of Shadow Sister and Her Memory of Music eBooks are on sale on Amazon for 99 cents. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll download your copies today. 

And btw, you don’t need an e-reader to take advantage of an eBook. The Kindle app is free and available for both Android and Apple phones. While I will always and forever favor be a print-book gal, I do love the advantage an eBook on my phone for the advantage of always having it with me for reading wherever and whenever I find myself. Having a good supply of eBooks on my phone is especially handy for traveling–no extra weight to carry around.

Happy reading, friends!

🌺 Katherine

Featured image by Denise Jans on Unsplash