Thursday, December 6, 2012

Fond Memories by Erica Vetsch


I am of the opinion that fiction writers are born. We just don’t all realize we’re writers at the same age/time. But if you polled writers, I bet you’d find that from an early age, we spun stories in our heads, we lived vividly through the characters in books, and that we spent more time in a fantasy world than in the real world.

Some of my fondest memories as a child revolve around books. When I was young, I lived an intense inner life populated by the characters I had come to love in Marguerite Henry books, L.M. Montgomery books, John Richard Young books, and so many more. I pioneered with Laura Ingalls Wilder, rode race horses with Alec Ramsey, and solved mysteries with Encyclopedia Brown.

I not only lived those stories with the characters, my imagination picked up where the book left off, and I created stories with those characters, taking us all to new adventures. I was always reading a book, whether in school when I should’ve been doing schoolwork or with a flashlight under the covers at night. 

It was that time spent in another world that made me feel happy. I needed that escape, and I still do, though now it isn’t only reading about made up people, it’s making them up myself that is so refreshing and exciting.

When I was explaining this to my teenage son, about how I needed to spend time in my own head to feel like things were going okay, he nodded in complete agreement and said, “Me too, but a book will get me there faster.”

He gets it. He might even turn out to be a writer himself someday.

                                                    


About the Author:
Erica Vetsch is a transplanted Kansan now residing in Minnesota. She loves history and reading, and is blessed to be able to combine the two by writing historical fiction set in the American West. Whenever she’s not following flights of fancy in her fictional world, she’s the company bookkeeper for the family lumber business, mother of two terrific teens, wife to a man who is her total opposite and soul-mate, and avid museum patron.

A Bride Sews With Love in Needles, CA
A Harvey Girl waits on True Love.
With her brother already on the front lines in France, Meghan Thorson becomes a Harvey Girl in Needles, California. Ready and willing to wait on the hundreds of doughboys heading for Europe, Meghan deems this service her way of contributing to the war effort. When a Red Cross  representative breezes through town, Meghan embraces the challenge to do even more, committing to completing a Red Cross signature quilt and canvassing the town for donations to the cause.

Horseman Caleb McBride makes his living by training stock for the US Cavalry and keeps his pride by remaining a loner. When Meghan meets Caleb, she senses something mysterious and wounded about him, piquing her curiosity. But after the townsfolk scorn him as a coward and a profiteer, Caleb feels her pity and becomes even more guarded.

When Needles is hit by an influenza epidemic and the Harvey hotel is made into a temporary hospital, Meghan discovers Caleb’s shameful secret. Will both Caleb and Meghan find a way to kill their pride before their chance of love rips them apart at the seams?