FAQs

I remember thinking when I was asked this that it was such a beautifully straightforward question. I so wished I had a straight answer for it. But I didn’t. I read once that Tolkien said he didn’t invent Middle Earth; he discovered it. That’s sort of what happened to me with I DO. I really didn’t have any clear cut ideas when I started the book. I just had this wild urge to do a traditional gothic--it hit me all of a sudden one night, like a lightning strike. I’d never done one before, but I’d heard that Dorchester was looking for gothics, and I thought if I could pull it off I’d have a good chance of selling to them.

I set it in a castle because that’s about as gothic as you can get; but I stretched the envelope a bit (okay, a lot) by putting the castle in West Texas. One of the reasons for that was simply a labor concern. I wanted to cut down my research time. And, since I live in West Texas, I figured it would make descriptions easier. If I needed to know what the climate or terrain was like, I had only to look out the window. Besides that--and this is the curious part--I had a real life example for the thing. Several years ago, my husband and I were driving to Abilene, when suddenly I spied this castle looming up out of the prairie (and, no, I hadn’t been drinking, *smile*). It was only the facade of a castle, actually, but it DID grab my attention. I heard later it was the abandoned project of some millionaire--although what he’d been planning on doing with it, I don’t know. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but it obviously hung there in my subconscious and surfaced again when I decided to write a gothic.

That happens to me a lot. I’ve been called a walking encyclopedia of useless information. My mind is a storehouse of eccentric trivia that pops out into fiction when I least expect it. Even an oddity like the disintegration device featured in I DO was based on genuine historical reports of John Keeley’s experiments. (He was a 19th century Philadelphia inventor--which also explains where the character of Dr. Earnshaw came from.) I’ve learned not to do much plotting in advance because I’m never sure what’s going to arise as a story progresses. I DO, in particular, definitely had a mind of its own. Since the book was SUPPOSED to be a gothic, I set out writing it entirely from the heroine’s (Dorcas Jeffries) perspective, because that’s how a traditional gothic-romance is done. Spending that much time in Miss Jeffries’ convoluted and active brain, however, put a whole new slant on things. Early on I realized I had a comic heroine on my hands, and she flat out refused to be anything else.