What If?

 

Sometimes, it's obvious from where the idea for a book has come. I have been thinking about this topic and then looked at books I've written and tried to figure out from where the idea for them had come. Characters? Themes? Plots? One that I hadn't thought of right away was setting. With some books, it becomes easier to figure out. You have to remember that I've been writing far longer than I've been publishing. With most, I had no idea if they were even publishing possible. They just had to be written-- following a popular pattern or not. 

The one that stumped me required delving into my own past. I kept thinking-- what made me ever write Sky Daughter? I wrote it in the mid-1990s. It had a lot of complexities. From where did all that come? Then I knew-- the beginning for it was place, the setting and a lot of What Ifs followed that. 

Years back, we had been driving through northern Idaho, with its tall peaks and trees, the beauty of the scenery, often its isolation. On one of the trips, we had the van radio on and found a show where the talk was about militia and the need to protect themselves from the outside world. I hadn't heard talk like that before. What would it be like if that's all a person heard? That part of Idaho has a very mystical feel, in a good way, but I wasn't trying to recreate what was based on reality but that question that inspires many books-- what if.

I began with a heroine (if that word can be used today). I saw her with Celtic heritage, a folk singer, who had come back to the mountain home of her grandfather. She'd had little experience there and mostly wanted to recenter herself after many losses. I was listening to a lot of Celtic music at the time. So, if that's the music she had been singing, writing, how had that influenced her soul? She was red-haired and looked much like from where her roots had been.

Then-- what kind of hero would be right for her? One of the mountain boys? Not hardly. He had to have come from outside, no more understanding its culture than she did-- although thanks to the time she'd had with grandparents, she did understand nature. What if he was from New York City, a Jewish Puertorican who was looking for healing from wilderness-- though he knew even less about it than the community into which he was heading.

From there, the story took off with more characters, some still there and some influencing who she was, the parts she hadn't recognized-- like a grandmother who had been a witch, hence the title-- Sky Daughter, what she had called her granddaughter with the time she got with her. Her mother had no use for mysticism and had sheltered her daughter from contact with it. 

At the time, I had read a book on modern witchcraft, which flowed into what the book became. Some think witches are supernatural beings but what if they are those who chose to develop natural spiritual abilities using age old rituals? What if those rituals do have power? What my heroine in this book discovers is her grandmother's Book of Shadows, which she left for her granddaughter when she died. Such books were supposed to stay in the hands of witches. The whole thing is a shock to her but does she need to learn something as that mountain has more there than she had could see-- though she felt it.

So, the What If, thinking begins with something. It might be people but it might be a place. I've had that lead to books more than once. The places are real but the rest of what is there is fiction-- or is it? What If?