For Love

Writing what I love

Almost ten years ago I decided I wanted to write romances. I chose to create a penname for them: my middle name and married last name. I wrote a novella, and that was published and then… I got distracted.

I had always intended to write a multi-generational family series in Bluehills, of the Macquires and their friends and neighbors. Life, love, and loss in a tiny Western town. It’s near and dear to my heart. My own life intervened: earning my BS, getting married, raising four children to adulthood, moving from Ohio to Texas where I finally felt at home again after being moved out of the West when I was still a child and powerless to object.

This year, with my roots near at hand and my life feeling unstable as ever, I decided it was going to happen. First, I wrote a bit of Drema’s story. After a decade gone, I was closer to Drema, and to her loss of her first husband, than I was to Irina and Dev in their flush of young love. You can find Drema Little Dream in the Raconteur Press anthology He was Dead When I Got There!

I loved returning to Bluehills, which isn’t a real place, but is drawn from so many places I have known it feels real to me, and I hope to my readers as well. I also decided with the help, er, enablement, of friends, to make 2024 the year I started writing love stories again. Which is where Tako Tuesday comes in. I’ve been working on Slice of Pie, which was supposed to be my Valentine’s novella, but again, life. This last week, I decided I’d tackle a smaller plot. A happy, feel-good, return to the Macquires, and the wedding of those two lovers who had overcome so much to find one another.

So, here you have Farmwife, a short story that brings us up to date again, a year in Bluehills and a decade in real life. The best sort of time travel. I’m no longer the woman who wrote Farmhand. You can’t go home again, they say. You can step back into a beloved literary world and find it unchanged, still welcoming, still a balm for a troubled mind when you need some happy moments. I re-read Farmhand while preparing to write this, and managed to get a little misty over the story. I’m so looking forward to finishing Slice of Pie, and then I think it will be time to tell Glenn’s story. Or perhaps Jed’s tale… which opens with a woman jacklighting tarantulas.

Enjoy!