Hi there, guys and dolls!  Today Andrea and Heather are taking over Barbara Jean, talking about what they know, or what they are learning to know.

There’s the old adage that says to write about what you know, and some believe that’s only what an author should write, but what is what you know?  Is it housework, 9 to 5 jobs, carpooling, budgeting, taking care of children and/or aging parents?  Or is it also a deep-seated reality in our imaginations, a calling for far away lands, places and times that drive passions in our hearts and minds, creating tangibles of what we think of as fanciful thoughts that we feel so strongly that we could swear we live in them presently?

As we wrote STRANGLED BY SILK, and are now onto more Poppy Cove tales, our souls and heads are full of love for our girls, Daphne and Margot, as well as for Santa Lucia and their place of livelihood.  We “know” every dress on the racks, as well as the layout of the town, the habits and natures of our other townsfolk, both nice and nasty, as they teach us how they behave.  There are times that we just go along for the ride, recording down and sharing what we are learning.  One of the most exciting things as we create our world and think of events for our fictional time and place is when we refer back to the actual coastal region of California and realized that we imagined as fiction turned out to have a strong basis in historical fact.  A fun, little shiver makes us laugh as we realized that what we thought we had made up turned out to be an inherent fact that we “knew” about on an instinctual level.

Where does knowing and being out of our depth differ?  At the point of learning.  When our curious nature is peaked, we go on a quest to research and explore more.  Fantasy and fleeting mind images become real as we embody and live them, to the point for us where a 50’s dress shop in a seaside town becomes as real to us as the coffee shop with free wifi.  Wouldn’t you just “know” it?

Thanks for reading and sharing our journey,

Andrea and Heather