Celebrate Your Own Backyard

As a writer I am always looking for new ideas and sometimes I find them hiding in my own backyard. Of course I have a beautiful backyard to explore.  It's called the Rocky Mountains and they are mere minutes from my driveway.  Yes, it only takes 10 to 15 minutes to cross the first hump of mountains outside Denver and be in the foothill splendor of the Rockies.


One of the great joys of this area is driving up to the mountains to see the Aspen leaves turning gold in the fall, and this year was as spectacular as always.  I have to admit my favorite year was when I drove my Mustang convertible and made the trip with the top down. This year worked well, though, since my brother drove.

He took us along the Peak to Peak highway between Boulder and Estes Park, which has some amazing views of Long's Peak as well as the entire mountain range. I had driven it before, but the colors made this drive very special.

 But the big difference this year was that I got to take roads I had never been on before, even though they are right in my backyard. We drove into Rocky Mountain National Park, along Trail Ridge Road, which had me feeling like we were on top of the world. It's the highest continuous paved road in the United States, and it sure felt like it!

First as we neared the top, there was the odd view of trees clinging to survival as we neared timberline. I remember one of my California friends being amazed at the concept of timberline  and the whole idea that there were places in Colorado where trees can't grow because of the altitude and conditions. These trees actually reminded me of the Northwest along the western coast where they are so wind blown by the ocean that only half of them seems to be surviving. I think I felt as enthralled as my friend who was seeing this part of the country for the first time.

And then we reached the top...

 

 

We were driving along a road that made us feel like we were on top of the world as we crossed over the Continental Divide.  Actually at times as we drove near the edges, I felt like we might just slide off all the way down the 12000 feet to the bottom (okay, maybe not 12000 feet, but it sure felt like we could go a long way!)  This road is not open year round -- high snows close it in the fall and keep it closed until late spring.

This highway has been around in various unpaved and paved form since the 1920s, but the byway itself was once traveled by Native American tribes as they crossed the mountains between their homelands and hunting grounds.

And, of course, as we drove I concocted a story about a city woman unfamiliar with the territory getting lost up in this wilderness and everyone had a different idea about what might happen to her. By the time we got down from our trip to the top of the Continental Divide, we had come up with plenty of ideas. Of course, mine involved a romance between the woman and a sexy guy she runs across in those rugged Rockies. As so many of our trips do, this one also inspired us to come down and look for facts about the area, and gave us all a greater appreciation for living in Colorado.

So here's a toast (with champagne from the Brown Palace, another wonderful Colorado landmark) to those places in your backyard that you might want to visit and explore... and come up with new story ideas.  And do it before it's too late. Trail Ridge Road was closed this week -- due to high snow.

Celebrating Valentine's Day

Happy  Valentine’s Day!  Today we are celebrating romance. But let’s go beyond that. Let’s   As long as people love romance, there will be readers and luckily, there will also be writers. Who doesn’t love a good story with a happy or sometimes a bittersweet ending? 
celebrate and toast those special people who read and write romance novels.

Romance novels and novels and novelists come in all shapes and sizes.  I would love to run a list of them all, but it would be too numerous.  In danger of missing some of my favorite fellow writers, I am not going to list them all either. 

From the first time I picked up Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in my teens I was hooked. My best friend and I went through Sense and Sensibility and then Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. We always had a library book or two in our locker with our textbooks and they were usually romances. I spent summers walking to the library in the eastern Colorado heat every single week just so I search out a new romance. Then I picked up a Harlequin Romance and I got hooked even more.  And now I'm still reading romance, in all shapes and sizes, in print or on my Kindle and Ipad. I listen to romances on audio. As long as there was a good love story involved I've always enjoyed the story.

But I also found I loved writing romance. By the time I was out of high school I had written my own romance short story involving a kidnapping, a small town girl, and a rock and roll idol! I still have that story floating around in the basement somewhere though the penciled manuscript has probably faded and I doubt I could read my writing.

It wasn’t until years later that I began writing romances in earnest and trying to get published.  But I also had a day job that was pretty demanding and after a couple of rejections I stopped submitting and focused on writing TV news scripts. I saved the romance writing for evenings and weekends, and I didn’t submit again for a very long time.

Now, with a number of suspense books on the market and a mystery to come, I find I still haven’t lost the taste for reading and writing romance. There are still plenty of great stories out there and  I keep finding new authors every day. And I personally keep coming up with my own stories as well.

But I couldn’t celebrate Valentines Day without a tribute to one of my all time favorite love, Home Fires Burning.  That was the story of a young girl who met the man of her dreams when she was ten and knew from the moment she saw him that he was meant to be her husband. My mother told us the story over and over about the handsome cowboy who came to work at her family’s Colorado ranch when she was young and how she spent years trying to get his attention. It took her growing up before he even noticed her, and then a world war came between them and when he finally came home, she had been sent to California to live with a brother. But she wasn't going to be denied -- she caught the first train home and they eloped to New Mexico. Eventually they got to spend 48 happy years together. 
stories—that of my parents whose story I sort of stole and used as the beginning of my book,

And to me that is romance. I love to read those stories and write those stories where true love wins out in the end. Whether there is a family conflict involved, or a murder to solve or the love is between a poor woman and a royal or a shapeshifter or a vampire and the girl or guy next door, a great romance is always a joy to read.

So here’s a toast to the romance readers out there and to the many writers who make those stories come alive! Who are your favorite writers and what are your favorite romance novels?

Celebrating Success

Today I am celebrating my first great success of the new year.  Earlier this week, my latest book, Dead Man’s Rules became available on Amazon for Kindle.  The print version will be released in a few months, but Dead Man is now out there and available  and that is exciting news.

Dead Man is a book I began many years ago and then totally rewrote and then re-edited and finally turned into a series. It’s the story about a bloody hand print made left on a wall of an old dance hall by a dying man. Who was he? How did he die and does his ghost still haunt the dance hall?  Those are the questions my reporter heroine, Cere Medina sets out to answer in book one of the series.

After years of work on that story, I feel like I have good reason to celebrate, but it got me to thinking about celebrating as a writer in general and how often we forget to acknowledge our success, even the small ones.

Today I read a blog from a fellow writer who mentioned that we need to celebrate our successes.  I am in total agreement. There is nothing quite like finishing a book and knowing it is done. Oh, yes, it might need lots of editing, but when you write that final paragraph, those final words, wow, does it feel good. Your story is over.

That is a victory we all need to celebrate. How many people say they want to write a book, but they just don’t have the time?  How many have a great idea but just don’t know where to start? How many start, but then they get bogged down in the middle?  Each of these sentence probably has thousands of groups of people in them.  For the writers who do finish that book, you need to remember to celebrate that victory of getting to the end.

But there are other things to celebrate as well.  As I wrote in a comment to that blog today, I have taken to celebrating when I get a chapter done. For years now, when I finish a chapter, I give myself a round of applause. Yes, literally and out loud. Suddenly I’ll begin clapping and if there is anyone around they look at me as though I’m crazy. I’ve gotten strange looks at Starbucks, believe me. But why not?  Finishing a chapter, finishing a scene can be a reason to celebrate – especially when it’s been a tough scene you’ve been agonizing over.

 So celebrate. Clap for yourself when you finish a tough scene. Celebrate those successes. You’ve earned it!