“More tension!” another reader demanded.Īccording to every personality test I’ve ever taken, I’m the peacemaker, the mediator, the one who values harmony. “Throw every obstacle you can in her way.” I imagined calamities: car crashes? Fist fights? That didn’t feel true to my story or to my character. “You have to really make your main character suffer,” came back the beta reader notes on one of my first drafts of what would become Between Two Skies.
No wonder I’ll never be a Very Famous Novelist, I thought to myself. Torment! Peril! These were levels of drama I never rose to in my writing. “I never want my readers to be bored,” she added. She spoke with relish about dreaming up fresh perils and pitfalls for her heroines to face. “I love coming up with new ways to torment my characters,” she said, with unfettered delight in her eyes. You can check that out at /blog.I was sitting on the couch of a Very Famous Novelist, interviewing her about her upcoming book for our local newspaper.
Every Friday on my blog, I shine the spotlight on a fellow artist's latest book. If you want to know more about what I'm up to, it's easy to subscribe to my newsletter- just click on the "subscribe" button at my website,. My dear friend, Mary Nethery, and I have co-written two nonfiction picture books celebrating interspecies friendships: TWO BOBBIES: A TRUE STORY OF HURRICANE KATRINA, FRIENDSHIP AND SURVIVAL (Henry Bergh ASPCA Award winner) and NUBS: THE TRUE STORY OF A MUTT, A MARINE AND A MIRACLE (Christopher Medal Award winner).
My great-grandmother's experiences inspired my first novel, HATTIE BIG SKY (Newbery honor award) and I haven't looked back, writing titles such as THE FRIENDSHIP DOLL, HATTIE EVER AFTER, DASH (Scott O'Dell Historical Fiction Prize winner), DUKE, LIBERTY, AUDACITY JONES TO THE RESCUE, AUDACITY JONES STEALS THE SHOW, and the forthcoming, CODE WORD COURAGE. An avid reader and writer, it wasn't until I heard a snippet of a story about my great-grandmother homesteading by herself in eastern Montana that I found my true calling: writing historical fiction. I was born at Fort Lawton Army Hospital in Seattle and haven't moved very far from there since.
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