The ocean was spectacular as always. Is there ever a time with waves and sand that a person doesn't get a reset? This time even more so since the vacation rental home had belonged to an artistic woman who put her stamp on every single inch of it. Nothing though is more powerful than our Pacific Ocean-- not to me anyway.
The new anthology is out and that's very rewarding. It had its rough moments, but thanks to a lot of people, it made it. I hope those who aren't regular western romance readers will give its short stories a chance. For me it's been an interesting experience to say the least.
My own writing is back on track with the Arizona historical that will follow Tucson Moon. Every story is different for how it evolves and this is no exception. I never imagined this story until I considered it for my short story and realized it had a lot more potential than that. Before I actually began writing it, I had thought novella, now I think novel and over 80,000 words but not sure by how much.
Desiring to do it led to a lot of research into aspects of the Yaqui world with which I was not familiar enough. I have never written a Native American hero who was pure blood. This hero is and raised in a Yaqui home but the Yaqui culture is a complex and interesting one with I believe enough options to make this work. Then I added to the mix, a heroine who was one of the first college, female graduates in the United States in architecture-- yes, she's fictional. It is not fictional that women graduated from co-educational colleges in the late 1890s.
There are some fascinating female architects, of that time, like Mary Colter. For those who have been in Hopi House on the Grand Canyon, a fascinating and very interesting building, they have to wonder about the one who designed a structure that fit its environment but also depicts the culture of its location. That's the kind of architect I admire.
So my heroine was an architect, but it won't be the heart of the story. No, that's Arizona, the O'Brian and Cordova familes, and a love story. Its heroine was a little girl in Tucson Moon but she's all grown up now in a fascinating time in America's history, a transitional time in more ways than numerically entering a new century. Lots of fun writing something like this, and I am just at the beginning of it where new discoveries are happening regularly.
I've mentioned many times how much I love writing western romances whether historical or contemporary. I love the energy of such stories. I created a trailer to promote the new anthology of short stories; so will leave that here with a tiny bit of my feeling for this genre.
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