It was November 2012 and I signed up for NaNoWriMo again. (National Novel Writing Month) Book #8 was supposed to be the next in the Rescued...a Series of Hope saga. I started the book,
Walk Slowly Through the Dark, but just couldn't get the story to advance in an interesting way. One day, while I painted the steps from the laundry room up to our bedroom, a new book idea came to mind.
I had been watching the new television show "Nashville" and found it to be interesting. It seemed that a lot of people were watching and I saw a lot of advertisement for the show. It occurred to me that setting the next book in the Nashville area might be a good move. Perhaps people would find it while they looked for information on the television show. I had never written a contemporary book, but decided that it would be a good fit for this year's writing challenge.
When I told our sons that I was writing a modern day book set in 1974 they laughed. They told me it was hardly a current story since it was almost forty years ago. I told them it was set 100 years later than the last book I wrote so it was modern!
I wanted to write a little about how the young people in the heartland of our country felt in the 1970s while the Vietnam War was going on. I was a teen in those years and remember it well. We loved our soldiers and prayed for them all the time. We wore MIA/POW bracelets and rejoiced when one was returned home.
It was also important to me to show things about the farmers of the Oklahoma and Texas panhandle area. Some of my best friends worked the wheat harvest every summer and I was glad to get to experience it once with them. The farmers here are dedicated to their land and families. Even when other dreams of careers danced in the minds of the farmer's young, the land called them back home.
The characters of
Six Miles from Nashville became very real to me. Sweetie, the owner of the diner was based on a very sweet woman I worked for after school. Betty could have been any girl from our high school. The song writing was a very different experience for me. Because I am not really confident in those skills, I always referred to the lyrics as the rough copy that Bill would have to work over to make into a good song.
Next week will be about
Walk Slowly Through the Dark. In a lot of ways, it took me down a dark path.
Elaine Littau, author
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