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Releases
Indie Next Generation Book Award Finalist - 2008
Read an excerpt
View the trailer
Persistence of Dreams
Sequel to Dreams for Stones
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View the trailer
Print available September 2009
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Appearances
The "Finneytown" Book Club
June 11, 2009
Discussed Dreams for Stones
Hostess: Sue Wagner
Back: Sue, Elaine, Su
Front: Gay, Barb, Loraine
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The Northeast Welcomers Bookclub
June 3, 2009
Discussed Dreams for Stones
Hostess: Kay Hartsel
Mickey, Toni, Carol, Elizabeth, Karen, Kay
Lil, Ann, Nancy, Dawn
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THE AUTHOR
The books I loved most as a child were about horses. After reading Walter Farley's Black Stallion series and Mary O'Hara's Wyoming ranch stories, I decided I was going to own a race horse and marry a rich rancher although--not necessarily in that order.
The "rich" part of the ranch equation was my own invention, since it was clear, after reading My Friend Flicka and Green Grass of Wyoming, that money could be a sore point between husbands and wives, not to mention race horses don't come cheap. I decided to simply side-step the issue with appropriate planning.
But when I started dating there were no ranchers in the offing, rich or otherwise. Instead, I fell in love with a fellow graduate student in the Medicinal Chemistry program at the University of Kansas. Not only does my husband not share my love of horses, he doesn't even particularly like them, given that one stepped on him with deliberate intent when he was ten.
Instead of ranching, my husband and I ended up with academic careers. We spent ten years in Boston, where our son was born. Then my husband had a premature mid-life crisis, and in consequence we moved to Puerto Rico. We lived four sometimes difficult, often exhilarating, and always totally engaging years there, both of us working at the University of Puerto Rico. We then left Puerto Rico and moved to Ohio.
In Ohio, I continued my career as a professor and director of a toxicology laboratory at a university hospital. That ended abruptly when my hospital merged with several other institutions and discontinued the type of specialized services I directed. I loved what I was doing and I didn't want to stop doing it, but I had no choice. And that turned out to be a good thing, because it forced me to consider possibilities I would never have considered otherwise.
One morning, during that considering time, I awoke with a dream image of a woman walking along a shore. For several days, that image niggled at me. Who was the woman? Where was she? What was her story? To find out, I sat down and began writing about her. I've subsequently learned, this is not an unusual event among writers--that sudden flash of an idea that doesn't go away. And from that tiny glimmer, whole worlds can be spun. But it was odd to have it happen to me, when the idea of writing something other than a scientific monograph had simply never occurred to me.
After I finished the story of the woman walking along the water, I experienced a prolonged bout of first draft infatuation. When it faded, I discovered the novel would best be considered experimental and left locked in a trunk. But it had served an important purpose. It showed me I was capable of stringing together 100,000 words in a coherent, although perhaps not yet compelling story. It also showed me how much I had to learn, and helped point me in the right direction to learn it.
Since that first inspiration, I have continued to write, honing my skills. And it paid off when my first novel Dreams for Stones was published by Samhain Publishers on Christmas Day 2007. The protagonist of Dreams for Stones is both a university professor and part-time rancher--proof perhaps that dreams never truly go away, but continue to influence our lives in unexpected ways.
WHERE DO THE IDEAS COME FROM?
When I tell people I’m an author, they often ask where I get my ideas. What I've come to believe is that experiences collect into precarious piles. Then something causes a shift and a random fragment--a few words, an image--spits out. Such fragments appear suddenly and unbidden, when I’m driving, exercising, cooking, daydreaming. I’ve learned to record them, even when they appear in the middle of the night, or else they tend to float away. But if I pay attention, I am often rewarded with additional bits and pieces that may eventually evolve into a story or add to a story already in progress.
What is truly magical, though, is when one of these random fragments written into a story, later turns out to be an essential fulcrum on which plot turns or character evolves. This happened when I was writing the sequel to Dreams for Stones. A secondary character in Dreams for Stones, Charles Larimore, is afraid of horses. When I began writing Charles's story, Persistence of Dreams, I discovered that giving him a fear of horses was precisely what was needed to develop a rich plot and the revelation of a complex and fascinating character.
All of my novels and stories have grown from similar tentative beginnings. As a result, I've learned to respect and to welcome the nudges from my psyche that initiate this process.
When I'm not writing, I can usually be found traveling (see Miscellany Page), or with my nose stuck in a book - or sometimes both.
SOME FAVORITE AUTHORS
Nevil Shute, S.J. Rozan, Dana Stabenow, Robert Parker, Elisabeth Olgilvie, William Tapply, Diana Gabaldon, Jodi Picoult, Laurie R. King, Barbara Kingsolver, M.M. Kaye, Takashi Matsuoka, Barbara Samuel, Rumer Godden, Dorothy Dunnett, Octavia Butler.........
