I surrender!

Okay, I give up. For three days now, I've been battling the Blogger Powers That Be trying to upload a pic of mom and me at my daughter's wedding. Blogger will NOT allow this. (I think maybe it doesn't like my hair in that photo!)

So onward and upward. Or at least straight aheadward.

I'm working on a Desire at the moment, the first in a new trilogy. And this one is based on three women. Great friends. Now usually, my trilogies are centered on the heroes. I love writing about brothers or cousins or...you get the idea.

But writing about this tight friendship between these three women is really a lot of fun. Heroes are where our hearts live, true. But to really capture your audience, I think a writer has to make the reader fall in love with the heroine, too. She has to be someone we could hang with. Someone we want to succeed. Someone we can identify with.

My mom says that most of my heroines remind her of ME. Not that I do it consciously, but I suppose my own character traits or personality quirks are bound to come through in my heroines.

In FINDING YOU, a single title contemporary I wrote a few years ago, the heroine, Carla Candelanno, had her morning coffee on the front porch of her home. She'd sit there and talk to her Golden Retriever, Abbey, about the world at large and how Oreos and caffeine made the perfect breakfast food. Well, yes, that was me. And it's not just Carla. Bits and pieces of me show up in all of my characters.

I wonder if that's what makes storytelling so interesting. If that''s what makes it possible for twenty writers, given the same idea, to each tell a wildly divergent story?

Fun to think about.

posted by Maureen Child @ 11:00 AM