Friendship--writing for and about women

Please welcome my Wednesday guest, Darlene Deluca, who writes women’s fiction and contemporary romance and likes to explore relationships—what brings people together or keeps them apart. Her characters have a real-life quality with issues and situations that readers can relate to. Darlene has just released her new women's novel, Second Wind.
Darlene released her debut novel, Unexpected Legacy, in January 2013, and it advanced to the quarter-finals in Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award. She has been a reader and writer since childhood. With a degree in journalism, she started her writing career as a newspaper reporter and later moved into corporate communications. “Writing fiction is a lot more fun,” she says. “It’s liberating. I can make up the people, places and the pertinent facts.” She has a daughter who just graduated from college, and a son who just started college. Darlene enjoys summers in Colorado. She tolerates living in the Midwest (that’s where the fam is), but when the temperature plummets and the ground turns white, she often longs for a distant sunny beach. Among her favorite things are books, chocolate, and a good cup of tea!

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Over the holidays I had the opportunity to get together with several different groups of friends, and it got me to thinking just how lucky I am to have these people in my life – some of them for quite a long time. Even though I don’t see some of them very often, maybe only two or three times a year, there’s an important connection that I want to keep.

Friendship. It’s a common theme in books, movies and television. Why? Because we can relate. We all want friends. We all need them. We all want people in our lives we can laugh with and share experiences with, and depend on. Families often provide the most important people in our lives, but with families, you take what you get. No choices. Families come with history and maybe some baggage.

Friends are people you choose to hang out with. How many times have you orchestrated or attended a girls’ night out or recreational shopping to get away from family – away from the kids, maybe. Friends are often our escape!

As I reflected on these groups of girlfriends, I found that common bonds keep us together. These are people I have a history with. Some of us bonded over children and school situations. Some over a bad working environment. Others, a shared love for books and writing.

The host of a women’s radio talk show recently asked me, “What’s the most important thing you want people to remember about your books?” What immediately came to mind was friendship. I want readers to know that when they open a Darlene Deluca novel, they’re going to find characters they can relate to—people they could be friends with in real life. My books, whether they are straight women’s fiction or romance, are primarily about women and for women. The stories relate to women’s careers, parenting, home, and family—issues of interest to women—and always friendship.

Meetings of Chance features sisters as friends. In The Storm Within, the main character deals with death and divorce, and it’s the love and support of her friends that get her though the dark times. My most recent romance, Something Good, is a contemporary romance, but it’s not just about finding romantic love. It focuses on Mandi’s concern for others, her generosity, and her friendships. It’s about digging deep, as women often do, to overcome struggles and keep going even when times are tough. My characters are well-rounded women who juggle careers and personal issues and find love whether it’s through romance or solid I’ve-got-your-back girlfriends. As I said, the kind of women you’d want to be friends with!

The next book in the Women of Whitfield trilogy, which features a group of friends in the small fictional town of Whitfield, releases this month. The story focuses on Dana, and includes Mary and Claire from The Storm Within. A great place to find a friend!

Second Wind

When a devastating tornado rips through the small town of Whitfield, Dana Gerard’s home is reduced to rubble and her well-ordered life to chaos. In the wake of the disaster, she finds herself in financial straits and confronted by challenges that test her limits.

With support from longtime friends, Dana begins the daunting task of rebuilding, but that’s not her only worry, and may be the least of her concerns. Change greets her from all directions – at work and within her own family. At a crossroads, Dana is forced to see her life with a new vision and to trust the one person she’s determined to push away.

Find Darlene here:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Darlene%20Deluca

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6879809.Darlene_Deluca

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Darlene-Deluca/282385088481413

http://darlenedeluca.com/

 

 

  

I’m my own guest

I usually welcome a guest author on Wednesday, with the suggestion that he or she tell us a bit about their life and work. This week, I have no guest, so I’m going to be my own guest and tell you how I ended up writing almost 60 books, a Chicago-born Midwesterner living in Texas.

I think I always knew I wanted to write—wrote my first short stories at about eight, submitted a story to Seventeen in high school (gosh, did it come back in a hurry) and in college began writing nonfiction articles for small magazines. The zenith of my magazine career was a small piece on adoption in McCall’s. By then I was the parent of two or three adopted children. I am now the proud parent of four, grandparent of seven.

I got my interest in the American West while working on my Ph.D. at Texas Christian University. One of my professors taught a class in Western American lit.—I liked him and liked the class. And I’m glad to say nearly fifty years later, he’s still a good friend.

After I got that degree, I stayed home, wanted to write and had no idea what to write about. By serendipity I read several novels that featured young girls as protagonists, and I knew what I could do—turn my friend’s mother’s memoir into a novel. It was a great leap for me, since I’d had no training in creative writing—they didn’t teach it back then.

But I did it. I wrote After Pa Was Shot, which was published by the then-prestigious New York house, William Morrow. A succession of young adult novels followed—I was cast into that pigeonhole. Most were published in Texas, but one, Luke and the Van Zandt County War, won the annual award for the best juvenile from the Texas Institute of Letters.

Then I decided to write for adults, and my first attempt, Mattie, was published by Doubleday in their Double D Western series which I truthfully think was sold to a subscriber list of mostly prisons and maybe some libraries. But it won a Spur Award from Western Writers of America and today it does nicely on Amazon these days. I published another Double D and then moved (up?) to Bantam, where I published longer historical fiction—lives of Elizabeth Bacon Custer, Jessie Benton Frémont, Lucille Mulhall (under the name Cherokee Rose), and later Etta Place—from another publisher.

The western market, at least the one I’d written for, seemed to either wither or pull away from me. I’d all along written a bit of non-fiction for young-adults—companies that published for school libraries--and in the early 21^st  century, that was all I did. But I itched to write novels, so I eventually turned to mysteries.

 

But that’s another story for another day.

Note the contorting covers for Libbie--above is the Bantam version, which shows Libbie looking like a 19th-century version of Madonna, standing in a Kansas field of lush grass fenced with barbed wire--never mind that barbed wire had barely been introduced by the time General Custer died and there was no way that Kansas was fenced. Behind her is the ubiquitous West of Arizona's red, dry land--but with a stockade fort. Libbie made the point in her writing--and so did I--that she was surprised that forts had no walls, fences, etc. Of course, the West had no sturdy logs as shown in the illustration--those might have been found a century earlier back east when the "dangerous" Native Americans were the Mohawks or Mohicans. Below is a more historically accurate cover.