Divine Inspiration, Rare and Awesome

If I waited for inspiration, I would never write anything. I think most working writers feel that way. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy my daily writing, but the will to sit and write does not come from an outside source. It probably comes from the desire as a child to be heard as well as the pleasure of spending lots of time in other worlds. 

And yet, every once in a while, the universe drops me a line and tells me to keep going. 

The first book of my historical novel trilogy, The Whispering Women, took several years of trial and error to complete. It started out as a pilot for a TV show that I wrote for a UCLA extension class. It placed as a finalist in several contests, and so I figured I had the outline for a good novel. This turned out to be a little more difficult than I expected. 

I still don’t think I got it quite right but it was as good as I could get it when we finally published it. Yes, I created my own imprint with my husband and we published it ourselves. But before that, I tried vainly to get representation. After about a hundred rejections and several “almost but not quite”s, I was utterly despondent. I’d had six books published by smaller and mid-level publishers, but I was getting nowhere with this new venture into historical fiction. 

This was during the pandemic which psychically and spiritually was absolutely weird. I’m sure I’m not the only one who experienced it that way. A couple of times I woke up with full poems in my head. One dream I had after the umpteenth rejection of my book showed me reviving a beautiful whale. I woke up with the knowledge that I would keep going and that if I wound up publishing the book under my own imprint that wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen. In fact, it has been just the opposite. I have learned so much about publishing and marketing, and I’ve enjoyed a supportive community of other authors who are also forging their own paths. 

Not long after the whale dream, I woke up one morning with the sure and certain sense that I needed to write about the sinking of an enormous ship. The first one that came to me was the Lusitania. I’m embarrassed to admit I knew almost nothing about it. But after a little bit of research I knew that was the boat. From that dream I began the book which later became Secrets and Spies and which turned out to be the third book in the series. I actually wrote book two, The Burning Bride, after the third book was almost completed. 

Those second and third books in the series came easily and were completed and published within a year. Then I thought I would take a break and write a stand-alone book, but as soon as I started doing research for that book I realized I didn’t have the love for the idea that I thought I had. Fortunately I had some material that got tossed out of the first book which I really wanted to explore. So I started on a new book in the series, one that chronologically fit between Book One and Book Two. 

It’ll be so easy, I thought, I have all this material. We went ahead and put a cover and a publishing date on Amazon and I got started. The thing about putting a date on Amazon is that then people can pre-order the book and you are locked in. And then it happened. I got stuck, my wheels spinning mud all over the place. The words fell like lead balloons. The material I had felt suddenly stale. Everything I sent to my writers group got ripped apart. 

After weeks of getting nowhere I got really caffeinated and decided I would wrestle the angel until she blessed me. I skipped my yoga class that day, the dogs didn’t get their daily walk, and lunch was some walnuts and a smoothie. I wrote conversations with my characters, asking them about their lives, their motivations. I learned that one of my characters — a young woman who loved dogs wanted to be a small pet veterinarian. In 1913! I learned that my antagonist had been trafficked as a young boy. And finally, somehow a story I actually wanted to write began to emerge. By late afternoon, I was ready for a new start. 

So the next morning I got up and began writing and researching along the way. My earlier books had so many historical events that they practically wrote themselves. So I was curious: what did happen in the summer of 1913. I googled “summer of 1913” — it was a pretty carefree time in many parts of the world. The Great War had not yet begun, and people in New York felt optimistic. I came across a painting titled Nubes de verano — Clouds of summer — by Emil Nolde painted in 1913. Wait a minute, I thought! I got up and went to my kitchen where hanging on the refrigerator was a postcard sent to me by a friend who had been traveling in Spain of the exact same painting: Clouds of summer! 

That was all the sign I needed. I was finally on the right track.