Guest Post: No Saber Tooth Tigers Allowed by Samantha Sotto

***First, I want to call attention to my poll in the left sidebar about my best of list at the end of the year.  I’m trying to gauge interest in it.  Please take a moment to weigh in.

I LOVED Before Ever After by Samantha Sotto so much, I just had to have her on the blog!  She was kind enough to stop by my review of her book, which I LOVED (OK, maybe I already said that, but if you don’t believe me, read my review; if you want other opinions, check out the TLC Book Tour stops) and friend me on Facebook, which I can now use to keep track of her latest books!

Today, she’s going to share with you her writing space, well the space she writes in since writing her first book, Before Ever After, in a coffee shop.  Enough from me, let me turn it over to Samantha.

No Saber Tooth Tigers Allowed

The oldest known cave art can be found in the Chauvet cave in France. The most common cave paintings are of large wild animals. One theory behind this theme is that it was meant to magically help increase the number of animals the cavemen hunted. Hmm…now if I could only figure out how I could make that work in writing caves. I’d probably doodle something like this:

I wrote Before Ever After at the same table at Starbucks over the course of a year. Now that I’ve started writing my second book, I’ve switched venues. (This novel is an entirely different beast from my first one. For starters, it has bigger horns – and it knows how to use them. I am presently firmly skewered onto one of them and am unable to budge from chapter twenty-two. But enough about the-novel-that-is-slurping-my-brain-out-with-a-straw. This post is about caves. And magic.)

The cavemen were on to something when they lived in caves. Caves sheltered them from the elements and made them feel safe. Inside them, they didn’t have to worry about being eaten alive or drowning in tar pits.

There are arguably less life-threatening dangers surrounding us today, but one doesn’t need the threat of a horrible death to need sanctuary. Whether it’s a quiet place to put our feet up and inhale cupcakes or a spot to hunker down with the iPad and break our Angry Birds record, we need to stake out a little corner of the Earth for ourselves, even for just a little while. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. It simply has to be large enough to stretch our legs and spirits – without leaving any room for guilt. In this magical cave, for a stolen moment, it’s okay to not care about anyone but yourself.

Today, I thought it would be fun to take a field trip to my current cave. It’s perfect for hiding out from large predators, wrestling, er, writing second novels while the kiddos are in school, and exhaling. If that isn’t magical, I don’t know what is.

Thanks, Samantha, for sharing your writing space with us. I just love those shelves and all those great windows.