This is what I wanted
My new book came out today, and now I’m awash in the joys and nervousness of a literary birth. The joys abound. The nervousness I can handle. Let’s move on.
A question I get regularly—and understandably—falls along these lines: How much of you (that is, me) is in the book? It’s an almost impossible question to untangle. Every book—every single one—is a mysterious blend of memory and experience and imagination, and at the outset, when I’m just trying to get my arms around an idea, I have no way of knowing how much of each ingredient will end up in the actual, tangible book. That’s what makes the whole endeavor fun and worthwhile, for my money. If the answers were all there and accessible, I’d have little reason to write.
That said, I can say this: This book, as much as any I’ve written so far, existed equally in memories of an ever-distant youth and a more recent past. If you cruise over to the book’s page on this site, you can read about that. I’m thankful for having been part of a family that really let me sink into the part of the world where This Is What I Want is set. I’m thankful, too, for having been there at an age where new experiences were swept into my system as if captured by a sponge. I leaned heavily on both of those eras of my life as I built and populated fictional Grandview, Montana.
The book also marks another change for me, this one in the realm of point of view. My first four novels, for different reasons, were written in the intimacy of first person. For all merits of closeness that come from seeing a story through a singular character’s eyes, I found that view entirely too limiting while acquainting myself with Grandview. Here, then, are eight or nine third-person points of view, with characters rotating in and out of the spotlight as four days in a town’s long history play out. In the end, each character has made his or her move—or several of them—and each has come to bear on the others, not to mention the wide cast of secondary and tertiary characters who make appearances. Human desire and human frailty are endlessly fascinating things, and Grandview has both in ample supply.
I’m proud of this book. My partners in bringing it to life—the friends and colleagues who offer encouragement, my agent and editors, the talented folks who build it into Kindle and paperback and audio versions—have helped shape what it became, and it would be much the less without their presence.
I say I’m grateful an awful lot. There’s a reason. I am.

Kimberly Ranee Hicks -- http://mellojune.blogspot.com