Nicole Pouchet Writes Beyond Fairytales in Trapped by a Song

Nicole Pouchet talks to Alexander “The Engineer” Lim, host of AuthorStory by alvinwriter.com about her book, Trapped By a Song of the Beyond Fairytales series.



“Just straight romance, where boy meets girl, boy dumps girl or girl dumps boy and they get together - that doesn’t quite do it for me. I like to have some kind of world building or something that goes along with it.” ~Nicole Pouchet

Nicole started out as an author writing memoirs and doing non-fiction. As a child, she read poetry, Shakespeare and other literary classics and serious literature and only began reading romance novels in her early twenties after getting depressed by a book she had read. She liked these (paranormal romance) so much that she decided to write what she loved in addition to handling and owning a marketing agency, which is her day job. Trapped By a Song is actually her third published romance novel, and counts Shakespeare and poet Nikki Giovanni as her literary influences. Nicole mentions Outlander series author, Diana Gabaldon, in particular, as the latter’s work can’t just be tied down to romance but also contains such elements as time travel and history, which appeals greatly to her, as she is a confessed geek who is very interested in science fiction and the paranormal.

Nicole’s publisher, Decadent Publishing, has a book series called Beyond Fairytales, and they assign a fairy tale to an author who doesn’t necessarily know the fairy tale they’ll be given. The fairy tale given to Nicole was a somewhat obscure one by the Grimm Brothers called Jurinde and Joringel, and from this prompt she wrote Trapped By a Song. Although Nicole kept a lot of the elements of the original fairytale, but she updated it to reflect modern-day Las Vegas and turned the villain from the original, who was a shape-changing witch, to that of a succubus, a demon which assumes female form to drain men of their energy.

Nicole points out that, compared to J. K. Rowling, whom she credits as having transformed the Young Adult (YA) genre of literature, her subject matter is oriented more towards adults, and thus has sex scenes, but her work is similar in that it contains elements that are fantastic compared to real life. Where doing research into paranormal romance, Nicole went to the Internet, rather than seeking out individual paranormal researchers to get as much information as she could on the paranormal elements she writes into her book.

Where book villains are concerned, Nicole picks the kind of villains that she herself finds frightening, particularly people who can change people and turn them into something that they aren’t, against their will. With regard to giving life to her characters, Nicole thinks of people familiar to her, such as her friends, or even celebrities, and then establishes her characters’ reactions based on how she believes those people will react when confronted with the particular situations found in the book. Nicole holds a degree in drama which makes her adept at figuring out characters’ motivations.

Nicole notes that, when she writes a novel, she does so essentially with herself in mind as the book’s reader. She admits that writing sex scenes is difficult for her, as she is aware that members of her own family are likely to read what she writes, and while Nicole admits she does get graphic with such scenes, she focuses more on the feelings than on the physical act itself, as well as keeping such sex scenes integral to the ongoing story to keep these from venturing into the field of porn.

Nicole had only six months to write the book, as that was the deadline given to her by her publisher, and she admits she had more incidents of writer’s block with this book compared to the previous books she wrote, and she attributes these to the characters, as originally envisioned, not being compatible with her outline. The easiest scenes for her are when the main characters meet, since she can get into what the characters think about each other. The most difficult for her are the sex scenes, which she strives to keep relevant to the story and also emotionally engaging, rather than just physically descriptive. Nicole is presently very interested in her paranormal writing endeavors. Beyond being an author, being a participant in the field of mental health is something that she would like to explore.

Nicole Pouchet’s website for her paranormal romance book, Trapped by a Song is nicolepouchet.com/book/trapped-song.

On Amazon: Beyond Fairytales: Trapped by a Song by Nicole Pouchet