This is an excerpt from one of my other blogs:
http://laurel-rainsnowsaccidentallife.bl...
So much of what you will read in my novels sprang from real-life events. And the incidents in "An Accidental Life" are no different.
It is no accident (pun intended!) that the story is set in California's Central Valley, since I have made my home here for many years.
The issues confronting the character Karin Larson, whom you meet in the opening pages, are not unlike my own. I, too, had intended to follow a different career path and somehow "ended up" in social work.
Of course, at the very beginning of my life, when I fell in love with books and the written word, I wanted to be a writer. But the pathway to that particular dream was twisted indeed!
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had made different choices. Like Karin Larson, whose thoughts meander along that pathway, we conclude that our choices, accidental or otherwise, DO inform our lives. And, for the most part, these choices are irreversible.
So what we try to do is learn to accept the paths we've taken, and if we are not happy with the outcome, perhaps we can still make better choices in the future.
After many years in social work, I was finally able to realize my dream of writing a novel. And then I wrote four more! I am currently working on another one—in between my blogging adventures!—and hope to finish it at some point in the not-too-distant future.
As a nod to "borrowing from real-life" for my novels, the cover of "An Accidental Life" shows an A-frame house that I once owned in the foothills.
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