Will you write a story about me?

Hemingway did it. Paul Bowles did it. Even my most favorite writer of all, Joan Didion, did it.

All these creative geniuses adhered to the philosophy: Write What You Know.

It’s so much easier and can be a whole lot more authentic to spin stories about the people and places you’ve experienced firsthand. Crafting my first bestseller, Kingston Court, and then penning Choosing Hope, was relatively easy in that I wrote about what I lived or observed in my everyday world.

 

Fortunately, as an artist, I recognized it was time to push myself out of my comfort zone.

 

 

 

 

 

My new journey began when my nine-year-old goddaughter, a girl born on my birthday, asked me to write a book about her. I started imagining. I pictured her at twenty-three and then I mixed in my own childhood DREAMS and EXPERIENCES.

What if my little Shelby R. became Shelby Day? What if she blossomed into a driven, talented, brave woman who left her home in Los Angeles and moved to small-town Ashland, Oregon to pursue her dream of becoming an investigative reporter? And what if, when she got there, she found herself tracking a brutal double homicide with a mysterious killer who seemed to be following her every move?

The clock would be ticking. If Shelby didn’t solve the crime soon, she could become the next victim.

I told Shelby yes, I would write her make-believe story.

But if I was going to set aside creating romance novels about Southern California women my own age, and venture into a romantic thriller involving murder and millennials living in the Pacific Northwest, I needed to research.

And so it began. I called my old television station in Oregon, the one I haven’t worked at in nearly twenty years! The powers that be at NBC 5 News welcomed me.

I can’t thank Patsy Smullin and Robert Wise enough for allowing me to visit after all this time. They even called Shane Bishop, the national producer for Dateline, and he agreed to meet up with me at the station and answer my questions.

Then I dialed the lovely Julie Cortez, communications manager for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and she arranged for me to come watch a play, take a backstage tour, and pepper her with questions about her awesome job (one of the girls who will be murdered in the Shelby Day story is a former beauty queen who works as the communications manager for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.)

My love, Julian, offered to drive me NORTH. Lucky for us, it turned out to be so much more than simply a working trip thanks to the wonderful people we met and places we visited, not to mention the best traveling companion a woman could ask for.  And it was all in the name of research.

Because, one must study, experience, and if at all possible, immerse themselves in a culture, in order to write it well.

Here’s more  pictures from my research:

 

Shelby, Aunt Holly can NOT wait to see what your request inspires. Thank you for the great idea!!!!!