WILLIAMSBURG — Local Sara Raasch’s journey to New York Times and USA Today best-selling author began at the lemonade stand.
Raasch, who always wanted to write and loved stories, recalled one of her earliest memories. Her cousins had a lemonade stand and she had made picture books to sell instead. While the books didn’t sell well — she was only six or seven at the time — she still wanted to write stories and see her books on a shelf.
“I’ve always loved the power of stories and how they can comfort people and to show people that things can get better,” Raasch expresses.
Raasch said her recent adult romantic comedy story, “The Nightmare Before Kissmas,” has had the most impact of her currently published stories. The work, described on her website as “Red, White & Royal Blue” meets “The Nightmare Before Christmas” in a quirky romcom where the golden-hearted Prince of Christmas falls for the totally off-limits Prince of Halloween, is her first book that wasn’t aimed for a teen audience.
“It was the first book in a lot of ways that I put different parts of myself into that I hadn’t ever in books,” Raasch says. “My debut book when that came out, ‘Snow like Ashes,’ I said a lot that it was the book that it was the most me book that I had ever written at the time it was. That main character was who I wanted to be when I was a teenager. She was strong and fierce and went after what she wanted.”
“But in the book that came out in October [‘The Nightmare Before Kissmas’], I kind of went back to those roots of putting myself into a book in a way that I hadn’t in a very long time,” Raasch continued. “So that was a really impactful thing for me as a writer and was very terrifying too to put another book out that was very personal and had a lot of myself in it.”
Raasch, who said she has always loved the history of this area, added that her favorite books when she was young were the Felicity American Girl Doll books. She still has the books today, as well as the doll, and credits it as one of the first series that inspired her to write, noting her first writings were Revolutionary War stories.
“I really like living here. The atmosphere is very becoming with writing,” Raasch explained.
On March 11, the sequel to her adult romantic comedy, “Go Luck Yourself,” will debut. The book is described as an enemies-to-lovers romance holiday mash-up that pairs the spare prince of Christmas with the crown prince of St. Patrick’s Day. Currently, she has another adult book planned for the fall about wizards and another teen book in the works.
While no local signings are planned, she hopes she will be able to set up something the Fallen Acorn Bookshop when “Go Luck Yourself” comes out.
To learn more about Raasch and her work, visit her official website.
