Sleigh Bells Ring by Sandra D. Bricker, Lynette Sowell, Barbara J. Scott, & Lenora Worth

I’m one of those who wasn’t born in Texas, but I’m a “got here as soon as I could” Texan. Many think of Texas as a cowboy boots, ranches, pickup trucks and barbecue state—which it is, but I’ve come to know my adopted home state as an extremely diverse place which people from all over the world call home, and they bring their own unique flavors. I like to think of my writing in the same way, as far as characters and settings go. For me, that’s the most fun part of writing, going somewhere in a story, and I hope my readers feel like they’re transported too.

I love the work of C.S. Lewis, in particular, but I haven’t really written any fantasy or allegory. Before I started writing fiction in earnest not quite twenty years ago, I enjoyed reading the romantic suspense of author Terri Blackstock. My fellow author-friends also inspire me. We talk about ideas we’re currently working on, idea we have for future books, and those fun what-ifs that spark our imaginations. Writing can be very solitary and I get inspiration from fellow authors when the going gets tough.

I write primarily contemporary and historical romance, and cozy mysteries. For me, it’s both setting and characters that make me want to turn a story premise into a book. I’ll sometimes start with setting, and wait for a character to walk onto my mind’s “stage” and see what happens from there.

When I was a kid, that character was Jo March of Little Women. The way she would lose herself in a story and find the drama in ordinary things, well, I really identified with that. I’d have to say the same is partly true today, now that I’m a novelist and I also work for a newspaper. It is very easy to get busy writing and burn supper (sorry, honey!). I also happened, like Jo, to marry a man with children that I raised as my own.

Writing, reading, and storytelling are all things that can be done for the sake of “fun,” but I see so many fictional things that have influenced our culture. Books and stories can reflect what we’re experiencing in real life. Looking back to the stories of the 1960s, for example, we can see the cultural fingerprints in many of the writings of that day. Sometimes I wonder what readers fifty years from now will see when they look back at today’s books. As a fun aside, my husband and I are Star Trek fans. Those who know Star Trek can easily see many of the imagined technologies from fifty years ago that are realities for us today—visual communications via smart phones, the use of tablets, being able to talk to our computers and not use a keyboard.