I'm 50,000 words into the next manuscript, this one a mystery/romance. I'd written a rough draft decades ago and shoved it away in a binder on my closet shelf (I have probably twenty of such binders), so I've dug it out and am rewriting it. This one features a woman who runs an antique shop and is hired to inventory a mansion for insurance purposes but gets caught up in a case of fraud and theft.
People have asked me how much of myself is reflected in my books. I think all of them contain a bit of me---you can't really avoid that---to varying degrees. Promise of Spring had a protagonist who could fulfill my personal dream of farming and rehabilitating over-farmed land. Garden Plot arose from a real estate ad I wanted to pursue, and the main character had the irritating habit of always having a song in her head (yes, that's me. It's constant. It's never quiet in here). Beyond the White River arose from a time when I was homesick for the smell of sagebrush and reflects my love of place. The main character in Desperate Measures probably reflects my personality the most of all my writing. And it goes on...
This new manuscript lets me explore what it would be like to know about and deal in antiques, something that interests me but that I've never really pursued. That and running a bookstore were early career aspirations at one point. Then again, there were also periods where I wanted to be a veterinarian, an English teacher, a forest ranger, Grizzly Adams, a speech-language pathologist, a musician, a baker, a public speaker, a statistician, a farmer's market vendor, a textile artist, a university theology professor...
When you can't decide what to be, the only logical solution is to become a writer, and then your characters can do all of those things and follow all of those paths that interest you. So this round, an antiques expert it is!
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