I didn’t begin my writing career until I was 33 years old, when I decided to write a book (called a manuscript until it’s published—I knew so little). I’d been writing all my life, but at that moment I made a conscious decision to refine the process. The difference between a published and an unpublished writer is really the desire to trim, tighten, and tuck that mash of creativity into something coherent. Working with a story, I believe, involves a great deal of intuition. As a writer, I’ve had to learn how to trust the process, and it’s not always easy. This element of faith is not unlike a religious leaning—you simply don’t have all the answers. If you’re lucky, they come at the end of the work, but sometimes they don’t. Writing is nothing if not a learning process.



My first book (yay, it was published so went from ‘manuscript’ to ‘book’) took four years to write. The Wren, a historical western romance, features a Texas Ranger reunited with a woman he thought was murdered by Comanche as a child. The seeds of this story came to me when I was 15 years old. There wasn’t much—just a girl who knew two brothers, and a ranch (which I assumed was in Arizona since that’s where I’ve lived most of my life). The characters became Molly and Matt, and his brother Logan, but when I decided to refine the story I had to become more specific. I soon realized the setting wasn’t Arizona, and after reading an entire tome on the history of Texas (Lone Star: A History of Texas by T.R. Fehrenbach), I knew I’d found the locale. It continued to be a back-and-forth process, however, between research and following the inherent thread of the story, a thread I wasn’t always aware of. (Often this becomes the underlying theme of a work. In The Wren it was the idea of home, and the many ways we define that.) But I trusted, and this book is still the most well-received of any of my stories.

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