Behind the Scenes: The Mountain’s Shadow

Hi, there, and welcome to this week’s Behind the Scenes post!

I started writing The Mountain’s Shadow in 2004 while I was on internship at the Central Arkansas VA, and it had some unlikely inspiration. The following material is from a post I did on the subject for the now defunct Ink & Paper books blog when the book originally came out in 2013. Enjoy!

Inspiration comes in the most unlikely of places. Several months ago, I asked my fellow Twitter writing friends what they found to be the most annoying writing advice. One adage that came up repeatedly was “write what you know.”

Okay, that makes sense if you take it literally because even with research, some experiences are beyond us. For example, I’ll never know what it’s like to be fired from a dream research job in the pharmaceutical industry like Doctor Joanie Fisher, the heroine of my novel The Mountain’s Shadow. But even though I can’t know exactly what it’s like, I know the feeling of being disappointed and facing major defeat on a personal level. The year before I wrote The Mountain’s Shadow, I failed on my first try to match for a predoctoral psychology internship.

Not matching for internship doesn’t sound like that big a deal unless you know the consequences. First, it’s a requirement to graduate from a doctoral psychology program, in my case Ph.D., so it put me behind a year in both school and life and threatened my desired career path. I had a serious boyfriend (now my husband) who was waiting until I was closer to being done before he proposed because we knew we’d have to live apart, possibly far apart, for a year. I was also going to lose my cohort, the people I’d been through the ups and downs of graduate school with.

That’s the experience I brought to writing my novel, which opens with my heroine Joanie Fisher facing three huge setbacks: she’s been fired, which also causes her to lose her lover, and her beloved grandfather has gone missing. Sure, he’s left her his multimillion dollar estate in the Ozarks, but since she doesn’t know with certainty that he’s dead, and the handsome, intense Leo Bowman seems to feel he can challenge her claim on it, she can’t really believe it’s hers.

My unexpected delay also gave me the setting and another layer of inspiration for The Mountain’s Shadow. I matched the second try to the Central Arkansas VA, to which I hadn’t applied the first time. That VA draws veterans from all around including the mountains, and they loved to tell stories of the strange things they’d seen in those woods. I’d visited the Ozarks previously, but talking to these veterans gave me a good environment for my werewolves, the local flavor of “tall tales” with an element of truth, and a sense of the dialect. Placing it in the Ozarks caught my editor’s attention because she lives there, so my defeat also indirectly led to my first contract.

Trust me, it took a long time before I could look back and see how not matching for internship the first try ended up being a good thing. Our characters experience the same — initial devastation that they have to overcome so that their lives end up better. I can’t claim that all my setbacks have worked out that well. I’m grateful this one did and that it showed me how write what I know from an emotional level, from experience, and from researching through listening to the stories of others and by reading werewolf legend and lore.

So, tell me, which of your setbacks in life has led to something good? Or, if you haven’t had any or don’t wish to share, that’s cool, please let me know what your favorite type of shifter is.

Cheers!

The Mountain’s Shadow is currently available from Amazon and is free in Kindle Unlimited.