Wattpad Featured Story: Like Wildfire

I am excited to announce that I just got a story featured on Wattpad! I hope you’ll take a moment to swing by and add it to your reading list and maybe let me know what you think.

This story is near and dear to my heart because it is a modern retelling of one of my all-time favorite Shakespeare plays, Much Ado About Nothing. Most of you probably don’t know that my day job is as a high school English teacher (shocker, I know!) and a few years ago I had my seniors study this play. A random comment by one of them is what started it all: “Ms. Reece, this play is just like high school with all the drama and gossip!” I totally agreed so we created a modern adaptation and filmed it. It was one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever done, but the result was a fully edited 56 minute film that we showed to the entire school. It was a lot of fun! But I will never do it again.

I couldn’t completely forget about Much Ado, however, and decided to write Like Wildfire for this year’s NaNoWriMo project. I had so much fun writing it! I set it in a fictional town in West Texas called Messina, which I plopped on the map near Sweetwater. I have lived in Abilene, El Paso, and Marfa, so I thought it would be amusing to set a story in the general vicinity. I usually set my stories here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, so it was refreshing to try something new.

I soon found out that writing a novel based on a play can be challenging! My biggest challenge was point of view: in a play you can see what everyone is doing, but in a novel you need to get inside the characters’ heads. But which characters? I chose to stick with the Beatrice, Benedick, and Don John characters (ooh, creating my villain was AMAZEBALLS!), but I did a few scenes from other POVs. I don’t know if those work and would LOVE some input!

The best part, to me, is that my oldest daughter (also a writer and English teacher) got interested in the project and is now working on revisions of Like Wildfire. We have great plans for it to be the first book in the Shakespeare High (or something like that) series. She’ll begin work on Love’s Labours Lost soon and I’ll pick up with revisions for her.

I’m also working with a group of high school graphic designers for a new cover, so stay tuned!