Archive for year: 2017

One of my favorite books is called A Tangled Web by L.M. Montgomery. It tells the story of a family, any of whom could receive a priceless heirloom based on the decisions they make in the year following the reading of the family matriarch’s will. The decisions that follow are sweet, funny, and sad. In the end, everyone is surprised, yet satisfied, with how things turn out.

As I was coming up with the idea for Talents, I knew I wanted to write a book that intertwined the lives of seemingly unrelated characters toward a common goal in the same spirit as A Tangled Web.

I started thinking about this book sometime in 2012. Like any good story 😉 the plot evolved from the question “What if?”

What if several people were given a gift to invest in their community? How would it affect the community? How would it change their lives? What if the real gift wasn’t the money but the impetus to step out and instigate change around them?

Thus, Talents was taken from my imagination and put on paper. This didn’t actually happen until fall of 2013. The story wasn’t finished until January of 2015. (Hey, I’m a busy wife and mom! I don’t get a lot of time to write!)

I enjoyed developing the plots for each of the characters, but my favorites turned out to be Parker and Ed. The challenge with Parker was keeping it believable. I’d get ideas, then I’d think “would this work in real life?” I’d go looking for people in real life who’d done things similar to the idea I had. You can see an idea I had for the book come to life in the book trailer for Talents in the form of the graffiti art I found to photograph.

Ed’s was challenging, because it *needed* to be over-the-top, but not to the point of becoming unbelievable. Unfortunately, I knew of real-life situations that weren’t much different than what I was writing for my character though some of it came from my own imagination. Art imitating life or the other way around? I don’t know. You be the judge.

A few people have asked me about Jackson’s character – Why didn’t I expand his story further in the book? Two reasons: Talents wasn’t about Jackson and his story, though he did provide a springboard to the real story. Second, I might come back to Jackson another time. This is, after all, only book one.

Both the ebook and the paper book are available for purchase today on TouchPoint and Amazon. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

My novel releases on Friday and I thought I’d use the next couple days to share the “behind the scenes” of how the book came into being. Ideas come in all shapes and sizes, but this one was more than two years in the making.

When you plan a book as an author, you plan three parts — the characters, the setting, and the plot. Personally, I prefer a book with engaging characters over a book that is driven by plot, though you do need both.

I thought of the parable of the talents in the gospels. How would a person write a modern day spin on that? I started thinking about it. I thought about the characters, about how their lives could intertwine. Then, I planned the plot points for each character.

The interesting thing about this book is that it’s really a collection of four books I wrote, then combined. I wrote each character individually and then put them all together. The very first readers got a rather disjointed book as I smoothed out all the junctions.

Let me introduce you to the characters.

I started with Beatrice Sutherland. Hers was the first story I planned and wrote. Originally, she was to be the main character. However, I discovered as I wrote her that she was more of a supporting character. A widow, she has become almost reclusive in her grief. She desires to participate in her community, but doesn’t think she has the talent to do anything.

Then I wrote about Collin O’Neill. A lawyer in a big company, he knows he has plenty of talent, but he has no desire to do anything with it for the good of others. Then his friend, Justin, gets him to step outside his comfort zone and his life is changed. Collin ended up being a supporting character, too. (I plan to tell more of Collin’s story in another book in this series.)

Parker Wilson ended up being my main character. I started writing him and his story flowed. He sees the needs and longs to do something to help in his community, but lacks the resources to do anything. But, given the opportunity, he takes his talent and turns it into ten talents. (Parker and Alice appear in another book in this series as well.)

Finally, I wrote Ed Raines. Ed was the hardest to write because he was the one who made terrible life choices. He is also, quite possibly, the most realistic character in the book. It pained me to write his story, knowing that as the author, I could write anything I pleased about the character. That’s the myth anyway. Sometimes characters take on a life of their own and you just write it down as fast as you can lest you miss it.

Another supporting character in the book is Pastor William Conner. I love Pastor Conner. He will be making an appearance in every one of the books in this series. He’s a gentle, gracious man who has stuck it out in a difficult area against insurmountable odds. I know men like him in real life. No, I didn’t write these men into my book. but I knew I could write his character the way I did because real people had done the same things in real life.

Talents goes on sale on Friday, July 28. You can preorder it on TouchPoint and on Amazon. I hope you enjoy reading the characters as much as I enjoyed writing them!