Writing for a YA Audience: Writing about a Dollhouse

Dollhouses have always intrigued me.  That and steampunk, but we’ll get to that later.

As a child, I had three dollhouses.  One was wooden, made by my maternal grandfather.  One was metal.  I used it for my Little People.  The third was plastic and I used it for my Victorian Playmobile set (I still feel bad that I never got the official dollhouse that went with the sets!).  I loved setting up the rooms and just looking at them.  My dolls didn’t always move around in them.  It was more for show.  I used my imagination to act out scenes.

There’s another dollhouse that sticks out in my mind, only I didn’t own it.  As a child, my mother and I went through an estate sale in the neighborhood.  In the basement, there was a dollhouse built to replicate the actual house.  I fell in love with it.  Unfortunately, it was expensive.  It was old and showed the effects of being in a basement.  Plus, it didn’t fit through the door!  I can still picture that dollhouse to this day.  I became obsessed with having an intricate dollhouse just like that one.

My grandmother bought me a wooden dollhouse kit.  It came with working windows, shingles, and a drainpipe.  It also came with a bit of trouble – none of us were carpentry inclined.  The dollhouse sat in its box in my basement for years.  Eventually, my then-boyfriend (now husband) attempted to put it together, but didn’t get farther than popping out the pieces.  A few years ago, a friend’s husband put it together.  It looks just as amazing as I’d always hoped it would.

My mother and I bought wallpaper, wainscoting, furniture, dolls… We’re in love with it, but we haven’t done too much decoration-wise.  Some of the furniture came in sets and we already know we’re horrible at putting sets together.  This dollhouse, sitting on the hall table, with its beautiful dolls keeps pulling at my imagination.  I wanted to create a story about a dollhouse, one with secrets.  Since I love the steampunk genre, I wanted to add in a taste of that.   Thus, along came CLOCKWORK DOLLHOUSE, a short story about dolls and secrets.

Have you ever seen a dollhouse that beckoned you into its walls?

Jordan Elizabeth is a young adult fantasy author.  If you have any spooky dollhouse furniture you want to part with, she would be happy to take it off your hands! You can connect with Jordan  via her website, JordanElizabethBooks.com.

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