What inspired you to write about Roy Parker and Jade in Skies Like These? Was it a love of the Old West or Butch & Sundance? I hope that all your inspiration is as creative as With A Name Like Love! Thank you for your time, Karen Elizabath.

Tess Hilmo Karen,

Thank you for this great question! It was a couple of things coming together that inspired Skies Like These. First, my husband and I had a combined birthday party (our birthdays are just a few weeks apart). We invited family and friends to join us for a chuckwagon dinner in the beautiful mountains by our home. It was so much fun! While we were there, one of the cowboys told us some fantastic stories about Butch Cassidy and I sat there, surrounded by friends and family, thinking "Wouldn't it be fun to write an upbeat cowboy novel that included some of these stories?"

Then, just a few months later, we took our family on vacation to Zions National Park. By chance, the house we rented for the week had a flat roof with a ladder on the side and two beach loungers up on top (just like Aunt Elise's roof!). We climbed that ladder every single night and watched the stars for hours. It was breathtaking. Western skies are like no other skies and something in me longed to pay tribute to that fact.

Finally, if you ever go to Zions National Park, you might notice a dog ranch on the main road of the town. When I saw it, I was further inspired and the story came together in my head -- right there on the road.

It's interesting to me how our normal, every day life can inspire us in directions we might never imagine. But, I guess that's the point of the novel ... we are truly guided by the by world around us :)

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