by Barbara Freethy

Please welcome Barbara Freethy (the awesome woman herself, says Anne) to the blog!

Many people have asked me where my ideas come from, and although some books seem to come out of nowhere, other books I can trace to a small seed of an idea. Of course, many of those tiny seeds of ideas never actually bloom into anything, because once I start trying to figure out the story, I realize there is no way it will work. Sometimes I don’t have this realization until well into the book at which point I turn to my writing friends and ask them why they didn’t tell me this was a bad idea when I first spoke about it. This happened when I wrote SILENT RUN, which is about a woman who suffers amnesia after a terrible car accident and is running for her life, only she doesn’t know who her enemy is, because she can’t remember anything.

I hadn’t realized the challenges that would present themselves with a heroine who had amnesia. Often writers introduce character details and themes and problems in introspection, but my heroine didn’t know anything about herself, so she was no help at all. I had to find ways through her behavior, her instincts, and how people interacted with her in order to bring her character to life. It was quite a challenge. The initial seed for that book was actually the idea that a woman gets a car accident, and there’s a baby car seat in the back, but when she wakes up, she doesn’t know who she is or where her baby is. She has to save her child, but how does she start? From there the story took birth.

Another one of my ideas came from a title for an article in a travel magazine called, “Where Dragons Dance”. It was about the Chinese New Year Parade in San Francisco. From that initial thought came my book, GOLDEN LIES. I actually wanted to call it Where Dragons Dance, but the publisher voted me down. In that story, the hero takes his grandmother to the Antique Road Show with a wagon full of junk they found in her attic. They discover that the ugliest dragon statue they have ever seen is actually thousands of years old, from an ancient Chinese dynasty, and of course there’s a legend …

My latest book, SUDDENLY ONE SUMMER, which was released last week (shameless plug ) was originally thought of as Angel’s Bay, which became the name of the series. In this book, the back story came to me first while my husband and I were driving down the California coast. I thought it would be fun to create a fictional bay and town with an interesting history. My daughter had done a project on the California Gold Rush, and I remembered the stories of the people who fled San Francisco after the Gold Rush ended. The boats were too crowded and laden with gold … I wondered what would happen if one of those ships went down. And Angel’s Bay was born. From that tiny seed, I created a town, a legend about the shipwreck which included tales of treachery on the high seas, and a few other layers including a story quilt that the survivors of the wreck put together in honor of their lost loved ones. Community quilting continues to play out in the current stories.

SUDDENLY ONE SUMMER is a contemporary novel, so once I had the back story I had to create the current story. It opens when my heroine, who is on the run with a seven-year-old, commits an impulsive act of bravery, which thrusts her into the spotlight and under the nose of a very sexy, burned-out reporter, who thought he’d lost his unquenchable thirst for the truth until he met Jenna. But his desire to expose her secrets could prove fatal. In the book, the current story intertwines with the past as some of the characters discover an unknown connection to the town and its history. And what would Angel’s Bay be without a few angels?

I’m current working on book three in the series, and my latest idea sprang from a question, what would you do if you fell in love with the worst possible person? In Brianna’s case, that person is the cop who sent her husband to jail and robbed her son of his father. I’m not sure what’s going to happen next, but I can’t wait to find out!

Thanks to the Jaunty Quills for inviting me to guest blog. Anne Mallory has spent many hours at Starbucks listening to me brainstorm, and she’s given me more than a few ideas, too!

So to the writers out there, where did you get the best idea you ever had? And for the readers out there, have you ever had an idea that you think would make a great book? And if you comment, you might win a copy of my new book, SUDDENLY ONE SUMMER!