Guest Blogger Lori Handeland

Lori Handeland is a good friend to the Playground--she's a lot of fun, a font of information, and she let me hold her RITA last year**. Oh, and she writes great books, too! We're tickled to have her back on the Playground!


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Truth or Fiction?

One of the questions I get asked most frequently is: “Do you write about your life in your books?” This is usually accompanied by a wink and a nudge, which is just too disturbing for words.

But some are truly curious. They can’t understand how anyone could “make all that up.” It’s always interesting to me that people would rather believe that I actually know a few werewolves than that I could construct such a disturbing set of circumstances out of my boring, Midwestern, sports mom life.

However, when I look back on the forty odd novels, novellas and short stories, I’ve written, I can find quite a few instances where a few truths crept into the fiction.

The majority of my novels take place where I’ve lived or visited. Many of the characters impressions of those places are my own.

Sometimes a character is based on someone I met in my travels. For instance, when I decided to set the second trilogy of my Nightcreature Novels in New Orleans, my husband and I took a three day tour. I’d been there twice before, but I needed more specific knowledge.

The first day we were there, we ended up in an Irish bar off of Bourbon Street. The place had a terrific juke box that played Patsy Cline. The bartender was a gorgeous red head from Boston whose name was Diana.

The bar appears in Crescent Moon as Kelly’s, where Patsy Cline sings “Crazy” while the heroine, a red head named Diana, asks pertinent questions of the bartender and the patrons.

Several other incidents on that trip to New Orleans, and the one I took after Katrina, made their way into Crescent Moon, Midnight Moon, Rising Moon (check out the jazz clubs on Frenchmen; they might seem familiar) and the novella Voodoo Moon.

As for my Harlequin Superromances, there are parts of my life there, too. For instance, the dogs in Doctor, Doctor are named Jake and Elwood after the Blues Brothers. So are mine. The gun shy hound dog, Clint, in A Sheriff in Tennessee gets his behavior from my pathetic excuse for a hunting dog.

The little boy in Leave it to Max is very similar to a little boy who used to live at my house (he grew into a young man when I wasn’t looking). A lot of his best lines ended up coming out of Max’s mouth. This little guy always opened all the doors and cabinets in every room he was in. You never knew what might be in there. He was accident prone big time.

The day I went to the Fed Ex box to mail the manuscript (about a little boy with a broken arm) I returned home to a phone call from the school informing me that my version of Max had one too. That was kind of creepy. My husband begged me to “never put him in a book.”

My most recent Harlequin Superromance— a novella in the collection Mothers of the Year--is in the stores now. I got the idea for my contribution “Mommy for Rent” last year when we were taking my oldest son to visit colleges. One school was located in a small Wisconsin town--so small in fact that the entire town turns out for the college’s sports events. The main street is apple pie and hot dog America. And since America’s past time is baseball . . . Well I ended up with a baseball coach hero, a little girl who isn’t quite sure how to be a girl and a woman who’s wanted to be a mother all of her life.

Do you like books with a touch of reality or do you prefer complete and utter fantasy? If you write, do you put little tidbits of your life into your books? And as a reader how much reality is too much?

Lori will be around today to answer your questions. One lucky soul will get an autographed copy of Mothers of the Year. You can visit her website for information about all of her novels: http://www.lorihandeland.com.

**Not only did Lori let me hold her RITA, she even posed with it (And Maven Linda Winstead Jones) in a special "Guest Foot" appearance in our Yearbook.