Rachel Huffmire grew up surrounded by wheat fields and gardens. Her mother paid her a dollar per classic novel she read, so in a quest to amass a small fortune Rachel finished over 200 classics in elementary school, including Don Quixote and Wuthering Heights. In college, she ran to the BYU bookstore for her first job. Behind the register, she watched local authors hold book signings and began dreaming up plots of her own.
She currently lives in Southern California where she enjoys sand at its finest: the beach and the desert. She enjoys playing board games with her two little boys, snuggling her baby girl, and reading bedtime stories to her husband every night.
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How did you come up with the ideas for your books?
Shattered Snow: I was listening to a time travel novel while I was
cleaning my bathroom mirror. “What if the magic mirror in Snow White was actually a time traveler?” The thought was completely random but left me stunned. I dropped everything and went running to my keyboard. By that evening, I had a completed outline. 30 days later, I typed “The End”.
The two ingredients seemed to fit together so well, it’s a bit surprising what a perfectly delicious ingredient time travel is for the Snow White fairy tale… and plenty others for that matter. As I dove into research, I found that Snow White may have been based on the real-life history of Margaretha von Waldeck, a 16th century German Countess who was poisoned for falling in love with the prince of Spain. I loved researching the time period, the castle she grew up in, the events in her life, and the Grimm brothers rendition of this story.
Granted: Some of my favorite fairytales when I was a child came from
Arabic folklore. Instead of relying on brute strength or ambiguous
morality like European myths, heroes used intelligence and wit. Women
weren’t helpless in towers. They scalded robbers with hot oil and
subdued tyrants with stories. I was always frustrated by how hard it was
to find them in literature growing up. When I was in college, I took a
class on literature for children, and we dedicated an entire section on
boys and reading. There’s a vicious cycle in publishing where boys have
a hard time finding things they’re interested in reading, so they don’t
buy books. Because there’s not a big demand, publishers don’t publish
books for boys. And around and around it goes. That lit a fire in me to
combine the two things I saw fiction needed most, so I wrote a retelling
inspired by “the fisherman and the genie” for 15 year old boys.
What do you love about being an author?
Being an author is such a fulfilling part of my life. For so many years
before I was published, I had a fire inside me telling me that I could
do this. I chased this dream for 8 years. Now that I have four books and
counting with my name inside them, I realize why I wanted this so bad. I
wanted to share stories! I attended a lecture on reading and the brain
and they showed a study about tennis players. They had half of their
test group practice the perfect serve over and over again for an entire
hour. The other half of the test group had to sit in a chair and imagine
themselves delivering the perfect serve for an hour. They performed
brain scans before and after the test and found something amazing. The
chair sitters had developed 70% as many new neurons as the actual tennis
players. That means that imagining something is 70% as good as living it
yourself! Stories have the power to teach empathy, offer new
experiences, and help us live more than one life. I love that I get to
be a part of that.