As I’ve said so often on my blog, I love my readers!

I heard from one of them, Autumn Fenton, on Facebook today. Autumn told me that she named one of her dogs ‘Wilkes’ after CeeCee Wilkes! I think that’s a first. I’ve named a couple of my own dogs after my books (Chapel after the Chapel House in my first book, Private Relations, and Keeper after Keeper of the Light), but I’ve never before had the honor of a reader naming a pet after one of my characters. I love it!

Wilkes is the handsome Brittany Spaniel on the left, and the name of the Maltese on the right? Story. Don’t you love it?

Continuing the theme, here’s a picture of another one of Autumn’s Brittanies. Meet Ingalls. Yes, Ingalls. I’m sitting here with a big smile on my face as I type up this post.

Now, I think we need to meet Autumn herself. Here she is, decked out in a reproduction of the green drapery dress from Gone With the Wind. Autumn wrote to me, “Along with several other ‘Scarletts’, I wore the dress in 1989 in Atlanta and other places to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the film.” She also told me about the six week camping trip she and her husband enjoyed, visiting all nine locations of the Little House books. “Since my husband never read the books as a boy, I read them aloud to him as we drove west.” I have to say, her husband sounds like quite a guy!

I’d love to hear how some of you come up with names for your pets. Are you inspired by literature when it comes to naming your pups and kitties?

Thank you, Autumn, for sharing your pictures and for your great sense of humor. I hope Wilkes lives a long and happy life.

Can we talk about sleep?

I’d love to know your falling asleep tricks, because I need some!

The first problem is that I’m a natural nightowl and always have been. As a little kid, I couldn’t wait to go to bed so I could lay awake making up stories. It probably took me two hours to fall asleep every night because I was busy weaving tales that would have curled my mother’s hair, had she known what was going on in my strange little head. When the alarm went off in the morning I was, naturally, exhausted. I had a bunch of pillows on my bed and I kept adding one to the pile behind my back until I was fully vertical. I’m not kidding. It was the only way I could make getting up bearable.

This pattern lasted well into adulthood, the only difference being I was now getting paid for making up stories, so at least my nightowlishness had monetary value. But in the mid-nineties, I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis. One of the symptoms of RA is fatigue. Soon, all day felt like first-thing-in-the-morning to me. Only people who have suffered from some version of chronic fatigue really understand how debilitating this can be. It’s a sucking down, overwhelming tiredness and the only cure is to climb back into bed. I slept for about ten hours each night and added a couple of naps during the daytime. Then the drug researchers invented the good stuff and I got my life back. Ever since then (about ten years now), I feel as though I’m making up for all the time I lost to fatigue. I may nap twice a month, if that, and I hate losing the time when I could be doing something more productive. I also am once again a nightowl, staying up until one or two . . . or three. . . working or reading for pleasure. I get up around eight, so that’s not too bad. And I don’t get tired during the day, so I must be getting enough sleep.

So what am I complaining about? I want to be tired at night, like normal people. I want to turn out the light at midnight and fall asleep instead of thinking about my book or my life or my loved ones or everything on my to-do list. I’ve tried the typical relaxation techniques. I’ve tried meditating. Listening to soft music. Counting backwards from 100. Listing the states in alphabetical order. You name it, I’ve tried it.

Am I alone in this? Are you one of those lucky people who falls asleep as soon as your head hits the pillow? Or are you a nightowl who’s found the secret to beating your internal clock? How’s your sleep?

It’s been fun having Secret Lives available as an e-book and I’ve enjoyed hearing from those of you who are reading it for the first time. Now I need to figure out which of my out-of-print books I should make available next. Whether you read e-books or not, I’d love your help in this decision. If you’ve read my early books, which was your favorite? Or if you haven’t read them, which sounds most intriguing to you? I apologize to those of you who only read print books and wish I could accommodate you as well. I hope they will be reissued some day by my publisher. Thanks so much for your help.

 The choices (with the original bookcovers) are:

 The Escape Artist: A young woman, about to lose custody of her eleven-month-old son, takes the toddler and escapes to Annapolis, Maryland to start a new life, leaving behind the man she loves. In Annapolis, she’s befriended by a mural artist with secrets of his own. When she stumbles into a dangerous situation that could cost people their lives, she’s unable to turn to the authorities because she’s on the run.

From Library Journal: “. . . a moving tale of parental love and desperation.” From Kirkus Reviews: “A sure-fire grabber.”

 

 

 

 

Reflection: Twenty years ago, a tragedy struck the Pennsylvania town of Reflection and everyone holds one woman, Rachel Huber, responsible for what happened. When Rachel returns to care for her elderly grandmother, she discovers she has only one person in her corner–a Mennonite minister who was her childhood friend. As the story shifts between past and present, secrets unfold, a romance blossoms, and both the town and Rachel are put to the test.  

From the Richmond Times Dispatch: “. . .  as the plots interlock, the reader is swept into the town’s emotion and suspense.”

 

 

 

 

Fire and Rain: The tiny southern California town, Valle Rosa, is withered by drought and ravaged by wildfires when a stranger appears, promising he can create rain. He asks only for total privacy while he works, but he becomes the center of two women’s worlds–Mia, who falls in love with him, and Carmen, who vows to learn his true identity at all costs. Neither woman realizes that their involvement with him can jeopardize far more than the future of Valle Rosa.

From Publishers Weekly: “Nearly every chapter finishes with the sort of emotional jolt that keeps the pages turning.”

 

 

 

 

Brass Ring: Claire Harte-Mathias tries unsuccessfully to save a woman who leaps from a bridge in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. As she tries to understand the reasons for the woman’s suicide,  Claire is jarred by frightening, half-hidden memories. Torn between the love and support of two men–her husband and the brother of the woman on the bridge–she tries to make sense of the images that haunt her, discovering that the past, present and future are intertwined in a way she is powerless to change.

From the Chicago Tribune: “You’d think there’s nowhere for a story to go after a distraught woman plunges to her death in an icy river, but Brass Ring will prove you wrong.”

The year was 1989 and I was about to be published for the first time. I was at the notoriously exciting Washington Romance Writers conference in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia where  I gave a workshop on Innovative Characterization Techniques, something I still teach, albeit with modifications. Back then, I identified myself as a psychotherapist and still had my private practice, since I hadn’t yet made a dime off writing. (Not quite true. I’d made $150 for an op-ed piece published in the Los Angeles Times and I’d received an advance on my two book contract, less my agent’s 15%.  So as of that conference, I’d made $4,400 and wasn’t exactly ready to quit my day job. Nor did I want to. I loved my work).  But getting back to the conference.

I wasn’t nervous as I presented that workshop even though the audience was quite large. I’d been making presentations for years as a social worker and felt at home “on stage”. When I went to bed the night after my workshop, I was happy and relaxed. When I got up the next morning, though, anxiety hit with a vengeance. Why? That morning I was going to have an event writers both crave and fear: a pitch meeting with an editor.

I was now contractless after turning in my second book, but I had an idea for a third that I was completely, utterly, head-over-heels in love with. I also had a problem: I was, and frankly still am, a terrible pitcher. I can never seem to sum up my stories in a neat package for an agent or an editor or even for a reader. I’d rehearsed what I would say, though, and was as ready as I could be.

   I waited in the ballroom for my appointment and soon it was my turn. The editor (I have absolutely no memory of who she was) and I met on the long glassed-in porch that runs along the side of the old Hilltop House where the conference was held. We sat across from one another at a small cloth-covered table overlooking the spectacular view of the rivers. Harpers Ferry is where the Shenandoah River and the Potomac River come crashing together. It’s one of my favorite places. But looking over the cliff from our table, I felt a wave of nausea.

   I began pitching.

   “It’s called Secret Lives and it’s the story of a young woman named Eden, she’s an actress, who wants to make a movie about her mother, who was a famous children’s author. She was odd. Her mother, I mean. Her name was Kate and she lived in a cavern, like the Luray Caverns near here, because she was agoraphobic. Or not agoraphobic exactly, but. . . Well, anyway, Eden wants to humanize her, make her sympathetic. But she has to live with her aunt and uncle while she’s researching her mother’s life and she hates them because something happened when she was living with them when she was a teenager. . . ”

Here, I had to pause because I was having some sort of panic attack. I couldn’t seem to breathe properly. I was swallowing in all the wrong places and the words sounded strangled as they rushed of my mouth. The editor was smiling kindly at me, nodding her head a little, but I could tell she was not catching my passion. I continued.

“But now the uncle is an archaeologist in the Shenandoah Valley and he has a partner, Ben, who Eden falls for, but Ben’s been convicted of molesting his daughter, but he swears he’s innocent and. . . ”

   Again I stopped. This time I was so freaked out that I had to excuse myself and get a glass of water, which I brought back to the table. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I seem to have something caught in my throat.” Like, the story, I thought. It wasn’t coming out right at all.

   “No problem,” said the kind editor.

   “I forgot to mention the journal! The uncle has the mother, Kate’s,  journals and they tell the story of her life, and–”

   “I’m afraid we’re out of time,” the editor said–words I’d said many times myself to my therapy clients. “I have another appointment.” She leaned toward me and spoke sincerely. “I can tell you love this story and that it means a lot to you on a personal level, but I think it’s too complex for the sort of book I’m looking for right now. Maybe you could simplify it, although I really don’t think it’s for us either way.”

Drat.  I’d blown my chance, plus made a fool out of myself in the process. When I told my agent about my failed appointment, she said I would have to write the whole book on spec. There was no other way, because every time I tried to describe the complexities of the story that were so clear in my mind, I failed, even with her.

So that’s what I did. I wrote the entire five hundred pages on the weekends and in the mornings before I headed off to work. I started with Kate’s journal, writing her story in first person, my heart breaking for her the whole time. I wrote her entire journal first so that I didn’t lose her voice. Living inside her head, I became so close to her that I could hardly bear to let her go.

Then I created Eden’s story, and Ben’s, and I filled them up with a complicated blend of love and anger toward Eden’s aunt and uncle. Yes, the characters’ stories were complex. I gave them a hundred and one obstacles to happiness. Then I threw them all together in the Shenandoah Valley and let them work it out.

   When I was finished, my agent sent the manuscript to Karen Solem, who was then an editor at HarperCollins, and I had my offer the next day. Karen saw what I saw in the book but had been unable to express to that editor in Harpers Ferry: a story too complex to easily describe, but not too complex to fall in love with.

I had a very small readership when Secret Lives came out in 1991. It sold a few copies in hardcover and a few more in paperback. Then it quietly disappeared, as so many books do. Although my current publisher is doing a nice job of reissuing my older books, Secret Lives and some of my very early books may never get to see the light of day again unless I take action myself. So that’s why I’ve arranged to publish Secret Lives in an electronic format. I apologize to those of you who prefer print. Creating an e-book is an inexpensive, relatively easy experiment. Self publishing in print is another matter, one I’m not yet ready to tackle. (You may be able to find old print copies of Secret Lives on ebay or used on Amazon or other Internet booksellers). If you are an electronic book reader, I hope you’ll try a free sample of Secret Lives on your Kindle or any other E-reader. And please let me know what you think. I’m sure you know by now that it’s one of my favorite books. Just don’t ask me to describe it to you!

I had a blast last night at the official book launch for The Lies We Told at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. Here are some pix.

1. Chatting about the book.

2. Yum!

3. my writing buds, Sarah Shaber, Brenda Witchger, Margaret Maron, Alexandra Sokoloff, and Quail Ridge Books owner, Nancy Olson, who brought us together.

4. I don’t know what I said but it must have been funny!

5. One of my very favorite book clubs! Thanks for coming out!

6. With faithful reader, Doreen.

I’m not talking about how hard it was to come up with the idea; that had been rolling around in my mind since I was twelve. I’m not talking about the challenge of structuring the story; I made it simple and told it in chronological order. I’m not talking about creating believable characters; I’d known them in my imagination for years and they were very real to me. I’m talking about the fact that I wrote that book, the first draft of which was over 700 pages, on a typewriter. How did I ever do that?

Imagine not being able to simply delete a typo. Not being able to move sentences and paragraphs around on a page.  Or change a character’s name. Or add a cool subplot that you think of around page 300 but which requires loads of foreshadowing. “Saving” in the dark ages meant putting your manuscript in the freezer, since that was the one place you could be pretty sure it wouldn’t burn if the house caught fire. “Copying” meant putting a sheet of carbon paper between your sheets of typing paper and/or standing over the Xerox machine at your local copy center for hours.  I know I’m really showing my age here. I finished my first book, Private Relations, in 1985, which is also when I bought my first dinosaur of a computer. I typed the whole book over again (onto a floppy drive) and thought I’d died and gone to heaven. 

Sometimes I wonder how my writing would be different now if I couldn’t do it on a computer. I wouldn’t be turning out a book every nine months or so, that much is certain. I love being able to rearrange my chapters on a whim, go back and add details as my research nets me new information, and audition new character names whenever I like. (I remember changing one character’s name in that first book. I had to be sure I picked another name with the same number of letters so that when I replaced her name with the new one, it wouldn’t change the pagination of the entire document.)

We twenty-first century writers are a lucky lot! I’m going to give my computer a big kiss now and say good night.

 Time for the reveal! We’ve had so much fun working with our friend Elizabeth as we remodeled our Topsail Island condo. The before and after pics don’t match up perfectly–this isn’t HGTV after all!–but you get the idea.

To start with, we painted the unit a buttery yellow, replaced the sofa and loveseat, painted the coffee table and end tables and replaced the throw on the wall with John’s shell photos. It’s hard to see, but behind the loveseat is a dining room set and a new chandelier. (The wall above the bar had yet to be painted when this picture was taken). I love to write from my perch on this sofa. The wall facing the loveseat is all glass and I can watch the dolphins and pelicans as I ponder my next sentence.

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

We ditched the old enterainment unit and bentwood rocker for a clean cottage style console and comfy rattan trimmed club chair.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 We replaced the old barstools above with pretty new white ones below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Instead of replacing the kitchen cabinets, we refaced them and they look amazing.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 We left the master bedroom its pretty light green, but replaced the old headboard with a new one along with new bedding. The view stays the same!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second bedroom is my favorite makeover! Could it be any more dramatic? I love these new headboards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Above, the view from the deck, and below, the view from the balcony off the 2nd bedroom; that’s the intracoastal waterway.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I decided to set a book on Topsail Island, I never would have guessed that my research would lead to me buying a place there.  I wonder where I’ll set the next book??

About thirty years ago, I was published for the first time. Not a novel, but an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times. I was working as a hospital social worker at the time, and after a particularly moving encounter with a family in the ER, I took a break and wrote this fictionalized account in my office. I submitted it to the Times and was thrilled when they accepted it for publication. I was bitten by the writing bug then. . . Well, I’d been bitten long before that, I guess. It’s probably more accurate to say I was bitten by the publication bug. And the rest is history. 

So I thought I’d share the op-ed piece that started my writing career. I’ll try not to edit it here, although there are a few lines I would dearly love to change, but that ship has sailed!  Oh, and you know how I complain that publishers often change an author’s titles? I complained thirty years ago as well. I’d titled this piece “One Man’s Family in the Emergency Room.” Oh well.

She’s a Stranger at the Wrong Kind of Family Reunion

by Diane Chamberlain

The ambulance backs up to the emergency room door and a patient is whisked past me into the trauma room. I can see the team of blue-garbed figures surround him before the door swings shut. Someone tells me that he is a 42-year-old executive who collapsed at his desk just minutes earlier. I wait to meet his wife.

She arrives almost immediately, shaking from head to toe. She looks like the type of woman who would never be caught outside her home in the old jeans and torn shirt that she is wearing—not unless there was no time to change or put on makeup or even run a comb through her hair.

I steer her into the tiny counseling room several yards from where the trauma team is working on her husband. I tell her that I am the hospital social worker, and that I will stay with her while she waits.

I feel that gnawing sense of powerlessness that is always my companion during times like these in the emergency room. I can only bring her coffee, hold her hand, listen to her tell me what a good man he is. There is nothing more that I can do. He is on the brink and I am utterly incapable of bringing him back.

She is agitated. It is normal, I know. She can’t sit still. She walks from wall to wall in our tiny cubicle, sits in every chair, pounds every table. “This can’t be happening!” she screams. “He was fine this morning!”

I am a complete stranger to her, yet she lets me hold her. For a moment she seems to welcome my arms around her. Then she is up again, walking, pounding.

I help her focus. Together we call her teen-age sons and her brother. She weeps into the phone. They tell her they will come right over.

I ask if she would like a clergyman or a friend to come. She shakes her head no.

Her sons, 17 and 18, arrive, followed moments later by her brother. They hug one another, cling together. I feel enormous strength and love coming from their little circle. She needs me less now.

I talk with the nurse outside the trauma room to see if there is any information that I can pass on to the family. The nurse says there is little chance that he will make it. I return to the counseling room and they look at me with wet, pleading eyes. I am careful not to give them hope. They need to be prepared for what is coming. He is not doing well, I tell them. They cry more, hugging one another, pushing me out of their circle.

The doctor comes in. His words are gently spoken, yet they cut like a knife. “I’m sorry,” he says. “We did everything we could, but weren’t able to save him.”

He waits while they cry, while they say that it just can’t be so. I don’t touch them now. I don’t comment. They don’t need me. I am awed, as I always am, at the way they hold one another up, how each puts aside his or her own pain to become a backbone for the others.

When they are ready to listen, the doctor tells them what was done to try to save him. They nod and nod. I wonder what they will remember of this explanation.

She wants to see her husband. I tell her about the tubes that have to remain in place until the coroner arrives. I take her and her sons into the room where the man is covered by a sheet up to his chin. He looks younger than I expected and I see my own husband in his face. I cry just a little as I watch them say goodbye. She touches his face and smoothes his hair. One son kisses his forehead. I walk into the hallway to give them privacy.

In my mind, I have lived through the deaths of my parents, my husband and my siblings in this emergency room. I can never see the body of someone’s loved one without thinking of someone I love.

Sometimes people ask me how I can tolerate this part of my job. I tell them of the love I have been privileged to see: the 3-year-old standing on tiptoe to kiss grandpa’s cold cheek; the burly truck driver rocking the body of his infant son in his arms, humming a lullaby. Families come together, the conflicts of yesterday and tomorrow suspended for today. I feel lucky to be able to see this part of life.

The man’s family leaves, each member circled by the arm of another, and I walk back to my office hoping that one of my co-workers is there. Right now, I don’t want to be alone.

One of the worst crimes a writer can commit is to be predictable in his or her storyline and characters. This holds true even in genre fiction, where a certain formula is generally followed: In a romance, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl reunite forever. In a mystery, a crime occurs, there are many suspects, the criminal is revealed. In a thriller we have an innocent victim, a tightening noose of terror, and ultimately, escape and release. Even in these formulaic examples, predictability makes for a boring, disappointing read. And as I’ve mentioned elsewhere on my blog, I am terrified of being boring.

I’ll be blogging off and on about my work-in-progress because it’s my world at the moment and will be even moreso  as I head toward my May 1 deadline. The working title is The Midwife’s Confession, and it’s about a group of old college friends and a fight for their families. I carefully outlined this story about a year and a half ago. My editor loved the outline, but I had to put the story aside because of a scheduling probem with the publisher. I then wrote The Lies We Told, which will be out this coming June. Now, though, I return to The Midwife’s Confession with a fresh eye, and here’s what I’m discovering.

It’s an excellent and engrossing story. However, I find myself hitting a couple of points as I write that are–dare I say it–trite or possibly even boring. These elements work just fine in the outline, but I feel dragged down by them in the story itself, and if I feel dragged down, so will my reader. So these elements need to change and that’s what I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. I’m pleased to say I’ve made great progress.

Since I don’t want to give anything away, I’ll make something up so you can understand what I’m talking about. Let’s say that my story, in outline form, has a 16-year-old girl who is rebellious, hates her parents, steals beer from the fridge, and has unprotected sex. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that–the description fits plenty of 16-year-old girls. But she’s so darn predictable. The reader knows this kid too well, and I’m yawning just thinking about her. When I would start to translate the story from outline to manuscript form, this girl would probably jump out at me as Trite with a capital T. I’d then brainstorm with friends, John, or myself, looking for ways to make her different and more interesting.

When I was working on my third novel, Secret Lives, I was discussing a scene  with some writer friends. The scene involved an argument between a father and his grown daughter, and one of my friends suggested I have the daughter  react in an outlandish manner. “She wouldn’t do that!” I resisted. Well, most people wouldn’t. Most people are predictable. As I played with the scene, though, I decided to give the suggestion a try. Suddenly, I had a scene that really came to life, was populated by fascinating people, and was guaranteed to make the reader sit up and take notice.

Without revealing too much, I can tell you one of the situations in The Midwife’s Confession that was bugging me because of its triteness. I wanted to get one of the women’s husband’s out of the way of the story because I needed the woman to deal with a certain situation on her own, so I had the husband leave her for another woman. It worked beautifully in the outline. I really put the woman through the mill as she dealt with her husband’s infidelity. Yet it seemed so trite when I started to actually write his affair into the book. So I changed the story, and now he’s dead. Not that death is any less trite, but killing him off opened up a new set of intriguing possibilities for me. Did he die of natural causes? We’ll see. Did he die with a secret, perhaps? (Indeed he did!)

I’m always thinking of my reader as I write.  Will she guess where I’m going? Maybe. Will she guess correctly? Heh heh. I hope not. That’s the most enjoyable part of writing a big fat novel for me: creating the puzzle, making it work, and avoiding the expected wherever I can.

Predictability in real life is a nice thing. In fiction, it’s a bore.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to share some of the research that went into the writing of my recently resissued novel, Breaking the Silence. I’ll write about the secret CIA Mind Control experiments in which my character, Sarah Tolley, was a participant, and I’ll talk about  my personal experience with selective mutism, which is five-year-old Emma’s affliction.   

Right now, though, I’m going to start on a lighter note as I describe my harrowing experience with hot air balloons. In Breaking the Silence, Dylan Geer makes his living as a hot air balloon pilot. Since he’s a point-of-view character, I wanted to understand what his world was like. During the time I was researching Breaking the Silence, my brother-in-law worked for a hot air balloon company, so I was able to quickly schedule a flight. The weather, though, didn’t care about my connections, and six flights were cancelled because of high winds or rain. A seventh had to be cancelled when we hit a traffic jam on the beltway around Washington DC on our way to the launch site. I was living in Northern Virginia at the time, and as those of you familiar with that area know, traffic can come to a standstill that lasts hours. And this one did. Darkness was falling by the time we gave up and headed back home.

Finally, it looked as though the eighth flight would be a go and we arrived at the launch site with time to spare. There were to be two flights that evening, and ours would be the second. My then-husband and I climbed into the chase vehicle while the first set of passengers–four senior citizens–were helped into the basket. I was excited to have the time in the chase vehicle, and I whipped out my pad and pen to take notes as we drove all over rural Maryland trying to keep the balloon in sight. The winds were misbehaving a bit. They would misbehave a bit more before the evening was over.

Part of the role of the chase crew is to find a landing site for the balloon. This was a challenge, since the balloon seemed to be flying farther and faster than anyone had anticipated. Finally, we found a field. The only building was a beautful, big farmhouse and the crew asked the owners for permission to land the balloon on their land. Then we all stood around and watched the distant dot in the sky as it grew bigger and bigger, heading smoothly for the field near the house.

Suddenly, a gust of wind grabbed hold of the balloon, lifting it abruptly into the air again and out of reach of the crew. Everyone on the ground and in the balloon started yelling and shouting (and maybe even screaming and ducking; that would be me) as the balloon headed directly for the chase vehicle. The basket bashed into the side of the van, and then the wind pulled both balloon and basket rapidly down the gravel driveway. The chase crew, my ex, and the adult family members from the farmhouse ran after the basket, trying to stop its sideways slide. The balloon itself smashed into the farmhouse, finally bringing the basket’s wild ride to a halt. Thankfully, injuries to the passengers were minor–a bloody gash on a leg and some very jangled nerves–but the balloon was not so lucky–it suffered tears that would require repair before it could fly again. I can’t say I was unhappy about that! No way was I going up that day.

But I was determined to have my flight. A few weeks later, I climbed into that same basket on a balmy evening and we rose into the air. I had one minor moment of “Ack! This is high!” before settling into the amazing sensation of sailing far above the ground. We were up there no more than ten minutes, though, when it started to sprinkle. The sprinkle turned to real, serious rain, and our pilot began searching for a place to land. In communication with the chase crew, he learned of a quarry not far from where we were flying.

When you think of landing a balloon, you think of a nice flat field, don’t you? Maybe there’d be a goat or a bull in the field, but that would be the worst of it. But a quarry? We had to land and land fast, and the quarry was our only choice. I was able to see firsthand the skill of our pilot as he maneuvered our balloon between two rock walls, dodged the jagged remnant of a dead tree trunk by–I swear–one inch, and brought the basket down with a thud on the narrow road that ran through the quarry. I will end my tale here, and only mention in passing that the gates leading out of the quarry were locked, with the balloon and basket and us on one side and the chase vehicle and crew on the other.

Dylan Geer, my commitment phobic character,  has one close call with his balloon, though not quite as dramatic as what I actually witnessed. It was fun getting to write about something as light-hearted as hot air balloons in an otherwise serious story.

I hope I get to fly in a hot air balloon again, but I’m going to wait until I’m someplace where there are wide open spaces and no wind and no chance of rain. Does a place like that exist?