Hi there, guys and dolls!  Andrea and Heather are taking over the post once again.  We’re in the final round of edits of book number three in our Poppy Cove Mystery Series.  It’s been a pleasure to write it, and it’s a story we knew we wanted to tell right from the early planning days of the Santa Lucia social set.  We are so looking forward to bringing it to you.  We’ll share more about it in upcoming posts, we promise.

It’s been an exciting time for us.  We’re getting ready to do some personal appearances and putting plans in motion, which for us includes planning out our outfits, and we’ve also been very happy to get our story out in a readable fashion.  But a funny thing happened.  We were sitting, writing conversing as we do, and all of a sudden a strange anxious, restless mood took over both of us, and we could not explain it.  Then we realized what had happened.  We were writing a scene in the new book where one of the main characters was at loose ends and we had taken on her emotions, her ennui and frustrations.  We had to laugh and dove into her feelings, describing further what she did and her thoughts. It certainly had happened before — a writer can’t help but feel, imagine, empathize with their characters, but this was the first time it had been that intense, that contradictory to how we were feeling in our own moods that day.

We became more aware of it as we moved through various scenes and situations over the next few days.  Happy, intense, sad, scary.  It was truly an amazing experience of viewing life through someone else’s eyes.  Fictional characters may be made up, conglomerates of character traits or impressions of others, but to us, the writers, (and at times, as readers) the characters feel real.  Their emotions, plights, gaffes, misadventures and joys feel real.  They cause us to react, think, and develop care and concern for their ‘lives.’ This adventure of writing is turning out to be the ride of our lives, both imagined and unexpected.  Thank you so much for being along for the journey.

Warm Regards,

Andrea and Heather

aka Barbara Jean