Friday, February 27, 2015

Random Ramblings



Is that not a catchy title or what!!  I’m quite impressed I came with that jaunty heading.  I used to call these "Ponderings"  but I think I like this better.


Anyway – it’s Friday, my CC’s are all off which means I won’t have any new work coming to me.  I don’t have anyone sitting in my little quad pod – they are normally staffed by my missing Care Coordinators, so I’m lonely and as I’m also working the weekend, I want to have some things left to do.  Plus I’m bored.  So you get the meanderings of my mind.


I think many readers, somewhere in their psyche may have a writer in them.  I do, but I realized long ago that while I have the desire I do NOT have the talent to wright a romance book.  It would be so cliché ridden as to become a joke.  I tried to do one many years ago, got a page and a half written and it was such crap.  That’s why I admire the heck out of authors.  Even if I don’t love their books, I appreciate they can get it from their imaginations down to paper.  I have a number of stories floating around in my head that I’m constantly editing and changing, adding scenes and characters etc.  Now the two main characters of all the different stories have definite names and personalities.  And I found myself in an odd situation when my son and daughter in law decided to give the same name to their son, my grandson, to the hero of one of my oldest imagination books.  I don’t let out to people that I have imaginary stories with imaginary characters weaving through out my head so it was pure coincidence they chose the name Jace.

When they told me what they planned to name him, I was a tad flummoxed.  While I love the name, it’s in actual fact the name of an outlaw in the old west, who wants to escape his past and decides to head west when he comes across a wagon traveling west.  It was a lone wagon as they had been abandoned by the rest of the wagon train due to the illness and subsequent death of the mother and father of a young woman, Sarah.  Jace had planned on robbing the wagon and was spying on them from a distance when he saw the daughter break down, her father having just dies in her arms and her mother passed away the day before.  Jace rides to see her, still contemplating just robbing her but as inside he’s a good guy, agrees to accompany her to the next wagon train station they come across.  Of course once they get there, he can’t really leave her for one reason or another and agrees to take her on to another wagon train a few days ahead of them.

Right from the beginning he has strong feelings for Sarah, but denies them.  And Sarah sees him as her hero.

Anyway, anyway – how could I possibly tell my son that he couldn’t use that name as it was already taken…. by me????? And he was almost like Ryan’s younger imaginary brother – well – not really as this is a romance and I admit that Sarah and I may share some characteristics (Mary Sue).  I couldn’t.  So now what do I do?  Jace and Sarah have been percolating for years.  By now they are quite real.  But my little grandbaby is really real – not just imaginary real.  It’s too late to give “my” Jace a different name.

My son does not understand my passion for romances so it would have been way too odd to tell him you can’t name your son that because he’s also a character in my head.

 

I wonder if anyone else ever has this kind of thing happen to them?? 

And in acknowledgement – while there are some differences, there are many similarities in the story in my head to my MOST FAVOURITE WESTERN ROMANCE OF ALL TIME, Outlaw Heats by Roseanne Bittner – another reason I couldn’t write my own romance.  I would probably unwittingly steal from other authors whose stories I’ve loved.

Oh Happy Dance! Happy Day, Happy Dance! 
 
 
 This is one of the few books I would pay any price to buy as an ebook, but it’s not available as an ebook.  But just now, just for the hell of it I checked Amazon and I wish you could all see how excited I am at this moment, but it IS coming out as an ebook!! It is!  It is!  June 2/15 – I just pre-ordered it.
 
 
SWEET, SWEET, SWEET, SWEET.  The direction of this post certainly took


2 comments:

Wendy said...

Well brace yourself - the reason Outlaw Hearts is getting reprinted is because....SHE'S WRITTEN A SEQUEL! Do Not Forsake Me comes out in July. And according to her web site? Sourcebooks wants a third book in the series, so now she's working on that.

I read OH years ago. Pre-blogging, so sometime prior to 2003. I remember liking it (I want to say a B grade?) but as you know, the original paperback from Bantam (I think it was Bantam) had the TEENIEST TINYEST PRINT EVER. Also hardly any margin space. I think it would have been the kind of book I would want to have reread, but OMG, TINY PRINT!!! So I'm really happy about the reprint so I can get my hands on a digital copy and I can blow up the text as large as I want :)

Kristie (J) said...

A sequel! Uh,oh - she better make sure Jake and Randy are still happy and still in love. I remember years ago I read one of books and then she wrote a sequel about the children and both the hero/heroine of the previous book were........DEAD! It was even worse than what Sandra Brown did with her two books whose titles I forget. At least in them it was only the hero who died part way through the book. In the second Bittner book, both had died before the book even started.

But I know in OH, it did kind of leave the story of Randy and Jake's son up in the air.