Real life Inspires Stories

The thing that most immersed me in the joy of reading was girls' series books such as Nancy Drew, the Dana Girls, etc. I devoured them from age 8 up. I was especially intrigued by the Judy Bolton Books. The publisher declared on the book jackets that each book was based on something which really happened. Often the author, Margaret Sutton, would add a note at the beginning of the book explaining the event which sparked the story. The first book, The Vanishing Shadow, was based on a real flood which she survived as a child--the Austin Damn breaking. I always thought, how exciting! As an author, I soon realized that my own stories often had something from my real life woven into them, too. As a teacher I was part of the negotiations team in my school district and I used some of those experiences in my traditional romance "Negotiating Love." As a member of the board of my local animal shelter for many years, I was aware of the amount of abandoned cats in the area and a cat became an important character in my book "Setting the Stage for Love." We authors use bits and pieces of our own lives and weave them into our stories--sometimes they inspire the whole book! If you've seen the movie "The Man Who Invented Christmas" you know that "A Christmas Carol" was inspired by a character Charles Dickens heard about, a miser whom people were discussing as he unashamedly listened in. Lots of real events make it into the fictional world!