Space: The Final Frontier (white space on a page, that is)

My journey into writerdom began as an exercise to block out the day's craziness in order to fall asleep. I hated my job then and the stress was eating me alive. That's how my little world of Fairlane was born.

I kinda liked the people there, and they had some interesting things going on and I decided to write it down.

My first writing project was set in historical New England. Why New England? I've only been there twice, both when I was considerably younger. To be honest, I just cannot see a whole lot of interest for stories set in rural Indiana. For the time period I'm working with, Indiana was predominately agricultural unless you were on the main waterways. My hometown is LaPorte, which means "the door." As in, someplace you pass through on your way to someplace else. I now live in Lafayette and am gradually learning about the importance of the waterways to the area. Shipping and commerce are more in the lines of what I need from my hero. He needs to be wealthy, but not just living off the family fortune. My hero needs to be able to create an empire of power, money and information that will make him a force to be reckoned with -- until our heroine shows up and twists him up in knots.

I also needed a place near the cities of importance to my characters' world. He is in business. He needs to be near big cities, shipping centers, major hubs of industry. She is a physician, a rarity for the late 1800s. The first women's college for physicians was in Pennsylvania in the 1890s. Women physicians primarily treated women and children in the beginning and those hospitals were the first to hire them. Travel by train was common, so to have our heroine working in hospitals in New York, and Boston would fit. Their worlds would overlap in a realistic fashion for the time.

The characters have evolved considerably since my first attempts to put them on a page. My hero was too perfect, too best-friend-like. He had nowhere to grow. My heroine was worse. She was a crying, fainting, weak thing. I had set aside my first draft for a few years and when I reread it, I couldn't stand her. Sure, she had room to grow, but who cared? She wasn't worthy of Mr. Perfect and the two of them together were to most boring lovestory ever told.

So I went back to the "masters." I reread and studied who I liked to read: Amanda Quick, Johanna Lindsay, and Julia Quinn with little detours to Jennifer Crusie, Janet Evanovich, Laurell K. Hamilton and Katie MacAllister.

I am older now and so is my heroine. I didn't really know myself until I hit my thirties, so I made her mature for her age and a bit older than the usual marriagable age. I wanted her to be close in age to the hero so that they grew up together, forging a bond at an early age that carried over into adulthood. What could possibly be more unnerving for the town's most eligible bachelor than someone who knows his every secret?

I'm going to break this process into a couple of posts, but I'll leave you with my worst sin from my first draft: I assumed that since my grandmother talked about making chocolate chip cookies as a child, that the cookies were around forever. What difference could 30 years possibly make? A lot apparently. Chocolate chips were not available to the public until the 20th century, so do not put them in your historical novel taking place in 1890. Do the research. We have the internet now, so some of these things are easier to find than ever.