Susan Wiggs's Blog, page 26

picture perfect

Oh, Mount Rainier, you are so beautiful. I can’t stop taking your picture.

The view from here

My downspout this morning.

Sent from my iPad

the moon tonight

girlfriends

the view from the outdoor shower

He’s about the size of a nickel. #TinyCuteThings

The Lightkeeper

A nice reader sent me a picture of my book in a jungle in Costa Rica. The Lightkeeper is being published today! It’s special to me for a lot of reasons–the first book I wrote for Mira, my first novel set in my home state, and the first to be adopted by a book club.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Lightkeeper-Susan-Wiggs/dp/077831572X

August moon

beach read

JUST BREATHE*

In JUST BREATHE, Sarah Moon has an alter-ego of sorts in her comic strip hero­ine, who goes through many of the same tri­als and tribu­la­tions. There’s a lit­tle bit of me in Sarah, even though she’s younger, thin­ner and more naïve than I am. That’s the fan­tasy ele­ment com­ing into play. I live deeply inside the char­ac­ters as I cre­ate them, and that’s how the sto­ries res­onate with me and, I hope, with the reader. My char­ac­ters’ lives are entirely dif­fer­ent from my own. For exam­ple, I never went through arti­fi­cial insem­i­na­tion and I’ve never been preg­nant with twins, yet the emo­tions Sarah expe­ri­ences feel very authen­tic to me.

Faced with the task of start­ing over in life (with twins on the way!), Sarah dis­plays great resiliency and depth of char­ac­ter. But she’s also flawed and con­fused at times as she faces a com­plex, larger-than-life sit­u­a­tion, yet she ulti­mately finds the inner resources she needs to grow into her new life. I was inspired by women I know and admire—my friends, fam­ily mem­bers and readers.

Sarah and Will Bon­ner have a his­tory together. She was an out­sider in high school and Will was the star jock – so, years later, how do they make the per­fect couple?

That’s pretty much the entire roman­tic arc of the story, isn’t it? Both char­ac­ters are in the process of grow­ing and chang­ing, and one of the most dra­matic devel­op­ments in the story is their trans­for­ma­tion from two young­sters who were very self-centered and dif­fer­ent to a cou­ple whose bond is forged by self­less­ness and love.

A betrayal leads Sarah back home to Cal­i­for­nia, where she recon­nects with old friends and her own past. Her home­town was the right place for Sarah to find her­self. Glen­muir, in the wilds of the north­ern Cal­i­for­nia coast, is the place where Sarah’s char­ac­ter was formed, yet she left with a lot of unfin­ished busi­ness still open. Her jour­ney of the heart leads her back to deal with old issues she never faced. The set­ting in this story is a cru­cible for this char­ac­ter. It’s also a stun­ningly beau­ti­ful locale, where metaphors for growth and renewal abound.

Will has a com­plex rela­tion­ship with his young daugh­ter. Aurora, his step­daugh­ter, was the key who unlocked Will’s best self when he first res­cued her from a fire as a tiny girl, and the bond that formed that day linked him to her for­ever. That moment really set him on the path to fig­ur­ing out who he is. He wants to be a good dad (step­dad) yet as she enters ado­les­cence, he starts feel­ing in over his head. That’s where the real­ism comes from. Most dads find pread­o­les­cent girls com­pletely con­fus­ing, yet they can’t walk away.

Read­ers often ask how I went from being a math teacher to romance author. Actu­ally, the leap was in the oppo­site direc­tion. At the age of three, I declared myself a writer and rarely devi­ated from that path. I became a math teacher because I needed a job, and because I have a pas­sion for teach­ing, but I never stopped telling sto­ries or dream­ing of a writ­ing career. When I was in col­lege, I was given a bat­tery of tests and assess­ments to find out what careers would suit me. My top three were writer, teacher, and speech pathol­o­gist. So far, I’ve pur­sued two out of three. Read­ers can find more infor­ma­tion at on my Face­book page:https://www.facebook.com/susanwiggs

*Original post at www.writerspace.com

supermoon

This week on the View From Here…note the eagle is unimpressed with the anti-bird spinner…

one giant leap

This never gets old…