Today we learn five secrets from author Rolynn Anderson. I always love reading these because you never know what an author will reveal. Even in her first paragraph, you'll learn an interesting tid-bit. One teaser, you won't see this one coming....but there is more, much more to follow, so don't stop reading now :)
Rolynn, tell us a bit about you!
Find Rolynn:
Please tell us Five Secrets we may not know about FEAR LAND or you, but will after today!
1) Thanks for inviting me to tell secrets today. We’re always challenging our characters to let go of their secrets…make sense we should do so ourselves! FEAR LAND is a suspense novel about children and adults who suffer from anxiety. Some are born fearful and easily traumatized; others go through tragedies that cause stress syndromes. Most of us have suffered a trauma or two. I wanted to learn about the how’s and why’s of it for myself as well as for my characters. So my first secret is I used the story and heroes of FEAR LAND to understand my own issues.
2) I am an Army brat. My father, an officer, retired from the Army the year before I started college. Germany, Japan, Korea; Maryland, Wisconsin, Georgia, Minnesota were our homes. Let us not count the number of houses and schools we occupied. The secret about Army brats is that we might be adaptable and easy to get to know, but we have issues about developing deep relationships. We seem to be hard-wired to manage leaving one set of friends and moving on to the next, without suffering sadness and guilt. This is a blessing/burden dichotomy we all have to work out.
3) I work out grief by writing about it. My three-book boutique funeral planner suspense series (FADEOUT, SWOON, and FAINT), helped me not only work through the deaths of both of my parents, but the concepts and the tone of the small-town sleuthing stories taught me how to design fabulous memorials for my father and mother. It’s no secret we write what we know, but my secret is that I worked on my grief by writing about it.
4) We writers don’t see what our themes are until we step back and look at our novels objectively. Not easy to do, right? Sometimes a particularly observant friend will see our reoccurring topics and mention them, but that’s rare. Normally it’s left to us to pull out our issues. My funeral planner series highlighted father-daughter estrangement, which got me to thinking about my own relationship with my father. This question led to going through a legacy questionnaire that my sister and I took separately, then compared answers afterwards. Absolutely stunning comparisons of our visions of growing up, freeing both of us from thinking we were alone in our views of our family.
5) My biggest secret is I relish the power I have as a writer, to move my characters, settings and plots at will. My art allows me the strength and status of a puppeteer, raising and lowering tension in the action as well as between characters, as I wish. I rub my hands together every morning, excited about my task, working my people and plot lines for two or three glorious hours. After that, it’s on to my life…over which control is minimal and cause/effect hardly discernible.
Blurb :
Tally Rosella, an acclaimed psychiatrist who helps children fraught with anxiety, avoids adults because their brains rant at her. But the chance to start a second child study and connect her findings to PTSD, sets her squarely among devious colleagues at a big California university.
Army Major Cole Messer, Tally’s new neighbor, won’t admit that trauma from combat tours in Afghanistan, destroyed his marriage and hampered his ability to lead. As a teacher of college ROTC and single parent, he’s focused on enrolling his highly anxious son in Tally’s study and getting back to active duty.
Someone is dead set against Tally’s presence at the university, and blowback from her battles with co-workers put Cole and his son in jeopardy. Watch what happens when people struggling with shades of anxiety collide with corrupt, revengeful foes.
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