Monday, June 6, 2016

Five Secrets With Author Rolynn Anderson


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!

I write contemporary suspense novels, spiked with romance. My name, Rolynn is pronounced the opposite of ‘roll-out’ :)  In my previous life I was a high school English teacher and principal in Washington State.  Since 2001, with Central Coast California as my main hub, I write/market, golf, garden, read and travel.  Wild Rose Press is my publisher for two novels, LAST RESORT and LIE CATCHERS.  Self-pubbed are my boutique funeral planner series: (LA: I told you wouldn't see this comingFADEOUT, SWOON, and FAINT, and my stand-alone, FEAR LAND.  I delight in creating imperfect characters faced with extraordinary, transforming challenges.  My biggest hope: That you'll devour my ‘makeover’ suspense novels in the wee hours of the morning, because my stories, settings and characters, capture your imagination and your heart. 

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.

Buy Links:




12 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing your secrets, Rolynn. I'd often heard that military kids become quickly accustomed to adapting, but I'd never heard about the "not-so-silver" lining - difficulty in developing deep relationships. It makes perfect sense though. All your experiences seem to have given you a rich, deep background to explore so many issues. I love when books can entertain while helping me look at things with a different perspective! Fear Land sounds amazing.

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    1. Thank you, Leah. You should know that Army brats live a cautionary life...our action reflect on our father's Army record...and can affect promotion status. We definitely watched our P's and Q's!

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  2. Great post, Rolynn. I was never a military brat and had stable home. But we followed my Hubs' job to several cities. Your comment about difficulty in developing deep relationships really hit home. Thanks to Facebook, I can now keep in touch with those we moved away from. Thanks for that insight. I really enjoyed Fear Land. I always enjoy reading about a story's origin.

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  3. Thanks, Diane. Yup, moving about can present many problems...but also allow us to start anew, which may be exactly what we need. So glad you enjoyed Fear Land...not an easy book to write!

    I'm heading out to a golf tournament, now. Keep those comments coming and I'll reply back to you all after my game. Wish me luck!

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  4. Great post! I can relate to a lot of that.

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    1. Thanks, Ilona. We writers do seem to run parallel lives!

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  5. Very interesting, Rolynn--a psychiatrist somewhere is just warming the couch for you! LOL. No. 4 hit home for me: after I did one creative writing course in college, my professor said something about the recurring themes in my work. Quite honestly, I had no idea what he was talking about--what recurring themes?! Good luck with the book and with the much-deserved RONE

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  6. Wow, I'm late to the party. Rolynn, this was a great post. Thank you so much for being a guest on my blog. I love your secrets and was trying to pick my favorite, but couldn't.
    Hugs,
    LA

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  7. Thanks for sharing with all of us!

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  8. Andi, wouldn't it be wonderful (I think) if someone...an expert...would read our books and things like themes, progress with skill, complexity, etc. etc. This would be tough, but the results would be so interesting!

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  9. Leslie, thanks for having me here. I think this 5 secrets construct is very interesting. If anything, I think too much about this stuff. I may be wrong, but being a pantser may mean I have more subconscious, surprising stuff coming out in my writing. You planners may not get into such messiness!

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  10. Angela, always good to see you here. Thanks for reading my post!

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