June 15, 2020
What’s the most unusual experience you’ve ever had? Have you included it in one of your books?
I’ve done some unusual things in my life. Some people might classify them as crazy. Like getting on a Greyhound bus to travel halfway across the country to go to a college I’d found in a book. (This was back in the days before the internet. All correspondence to/from the college was done by snail mail. ) Or dangling off a cliff for a basic mountain climbing course four months after breaking my collarbone in a bicycling accident. Or the time we (hubby and me) went camping in a wilderness area with our six-day old baby. (It was a wonderful experience!)
How about changing careers when I was over 40? Moving ourselves cross-country from Oregon to Florida? Or the decision to self-publish a novel when I was umpteen years old?
Go ahead. Pick one. None of them are in any of my books.
Not specifically, anyway. That doesn’t mean the life’s lessons I learned along the way haven’t influenced my stories. Harmony from my mystery series is never going to go mountain climbing, but my once-upon-a-time desire to be a librarian influenced her career. And the hills I went hiking and camping in provide a backdrop for two of my Free Wolves books.
It could happen in a future book. Maybe I’ll get one of my characters lost in the Rocky Mountains and they have to use their mountain climbing and wilderness skills to find their way back to civilization. (Did I mention the week-long survival training class I took in high school?) Or I can force Harmony to move from her beloved Oak Grove. How would she handle it?
Speaking of Harmony and her adventures, I received the first batch of paperbacks of The Samurai’s Inro, her newest story. Cross your fingers that the event I want to sell them at happens!
If you don’t want to wait that long, and want to purchase a copy now, you can find more information HERE
If you want to check out the unusual experiences of the other authors, you can follow the links below. And, as always, please sta safe until we ‘meet” again.
June 15, 2020
What’s the most unusual experience you’ve ever had? Have you included it in one of your books?
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They do say that nothing you do is ever wasted. I’m sure that, one day, you’ll find a place to use all that knowledge.
Some of it I’ll be better off never using!
I used to have this recurring dream about a dark, foreign man asking me to marry him. From around the age of fifteen, I had it for years. When I met my husband, our getting together was all the elements of that dream.
My recurring dreams are all of chasing through hallway to places I’ve only seen in other dreams
Camping with a six day old baby? Goodness me! I can’t say I’d even considered that when I had my own two!
It was a wonderful experience. My hubby did all the hard work and the baby slept most of the time while I relaxed
I used to bottle-feed mine, which would have involved taking too much equipment!
I nursed and we used disposable diapers for the trip instead of cloth ones. That made things a lot easier.
As long as the people lost in the mountains don’t have to cut their hand off with a dull knife, I’m good. Otherwise, I have a character who mocks a secondary character’s faith in “women you just met and might have disappointed” because he belongs to a “co-ed spelunking and cliff climbing” club.
No, no sawing off a hand or a foot from me. I have a bad enough time killing off my bad guys let alone putting a good guy through something like that
Who would have thought I could use the Mt. Washington experience in a fantasy (pre-industrial) novel, but the real life experience begged to be told, so fiction found a way.
I’m thinking you’ll find use for at least some of it, somewhere.
Some of the things that happen in real life can’t be put in a book of fiction, because people would never believe it possible!
Broken bones and mountains? You show how life can be stranger than fiction.