If I wasn’t a writer, I would be… a secretary. His books, The Chosen and The Promise, made me want to create characters that sprang off the pages of the book and into a reader’s mind the way the young Jewish boys in that story came to life in my mind. But one of the authors who did open my eyes to how words could make a character come to life was Chaim Potok. I find it impossible to come up with one and only one. One of my favourite authors is… Why? My favourites change from book to book. But if I continue to spread my creative sails eventually a little story wind will once more begin to blow and the story will sail on home to the end. I call it being stuck in the writing doldrums.
In every book I’ve written I generally reach a point in the writing when I despair of the story ever being finished or if finished, being a story anyone would want to read. My biggest challenge when writing is… staying the course. That was the perfect training for a young aspiring writer.
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier as well as classical literature like The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The books that have most influenced my life are… the great stories I discovered as a young reader in my public library. That was the best writing decision I ever made, and I thank the Lord for the inspiration that led me to write my Heart of Hollyhill books. I wrote about what I knew which was small towns and country churches. I determined to work on the story I wanted to write without thinking about the market. Prior to writing Scent of Lilacs, I went through a tough time in my writing life where my books gathered nothing but rejections. Many years later, in 2005, my first inspirational novel, Scent of Lilacs, was published by Revell Books.
In 1978, Warner Books published my third novel, a historical romance. I kept at it even after my first two novels made the rounds without finding a publisher. But I did discover how much I enjoyed writing novels. In the process I discovered I loved the novel form and have written very few short pieces since. I’ve never liked outlining, so I wrote the novel instead. But the last assignment for the course was to write an outline of a novel. I had written many short pieces and even had a few of them published in Christian magazines. I was inspired to write my first novel… by a writing correspondence course I took in the very early days of my writing career. Now I live on a different farm about a mile from my childhood home. No, my father raised beef cows, corn, hay and tobacco. Those fancy horse farms were a couple of counties east of us. And her cozy mystery Murder at the Courthouse
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