Ask the Author: Suzanne J. Bratcher
Answered Questions (6)
Suzanne J. Bratcher
When the well runs dry, I give myself a break from writing and read all sorts of things that have nothing to do with what I'm writing. If it's possible, I go somewhere new, even if just for a day. In other words, I stop trying to be a writer and play a while.
Suzanne J. Bratcher
In my stories I get to revisit places I'll probably never go to again and I've never done. In "The Silver Lode" I went back to a hill in Jerome and crawled around a cave I've never been in. What fun!
Suzanne J. Bratcher
Read, read, read! Dream, dream, dream. Then focus your reading on the genre you want to write. Next narrow your focus to contemporary works in your genre. Get an idea of voice, structure, and style. Translate one of your dreams into a contemporary form. Then...don't get too attached. My eighth book was the first one to be published. I'm currently going back and polishing three of the other seven. Four of my first books will never see the light of day--thank goodness!
Suzanne J. Bratcher
I'm working on two books. My fiction is the next book in my Four Corners Folklore Fantasy series. It's the Colorado book, "Tommyknocker's Gold." It grew from folklore I stumbled on when I lived in Colorado and got interested in the early miners. The Irish came during the potato famine, bringing tommyknocker (a sort of leprauchaun) folklore with them. My nonfiction is "Starting from Setting: Another Way to Imagine a Story." It has grown out of my habit of finding stories in places.
Suzanne J. Bratcher
Places inspire my writing. Jerome is a little town in northern Arizona that I started visiting in the late 1970s. Over the next thirty years I watched it go from a ghost town of empty buildings to a popular tourist town. The empty buildings whispered about owners to me, the exhibits at the Jerome State Historic Park suggested stories of lost mines, and the cliff dwellings suggested history impinging on modern day: the Jerome Mysteries were born. Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, caught my imagination so that I researched the Ancestral Puebloan Culture that built the ceremonial center. Kokopelli's Song sprang into being.
Suzanne J. Bratcher
The Gold Doubloons was the third mystery in my Jerome Mysteries trilogy. Because Jerome was established as a mining town, I chose to name each book after one of the ores mined there. Copper was the most plentiful, so the first book was "The Copper Box." Silver was next, so book two was "The Silver Lode." Gold was third, so this book had to be "The Gold ?" A legend that still circulates in Jerome occasionally is that Coronado left a bag of gold doubloons in the hills around Jerome. What if Reed Harper and Scott Russell went searching for the precious coins and crossed paths with someone willing to commit murder to get them? I had my idea!
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