Joanne Kennedy - Cooking Up Characters + Contest

Posted by Night Owl Reviews in

33 comments

Enter to win one of 2 copies of Tall, Dark and Cowboy!

***

Cooking Up Characters
by Joanne Kennedy

Creating characters for a novel is like following your great-grandma’s handwritten recipe. You take a pinch of this and a dash of that, and when you’re done you have something unique you could never recreate with quite the same spice.

Lacey Bradford, the heroine of Tall, Dark and Cowboy, was cooked up out of a number of people who made an impression on me. Some of her quirks come from a lady I worked with years ago, and she talks like another friend of mine. But her looks, her heart, and her smile come from a woman I don’t even know. I saw her in a coffee shop. I’m a shameless eavesdropper, and I couldn’t help listening to her conversation with a friend. She seemed sassy and vulnerable all at once. She was beautiful, but surprisingly unsure of herself.

I wondered what life experience would make a woman such a walking contradiction, and that became the seed of Lacey’s story. I decided she was a rich girl who was good at making people love her, but not very good at loving herself. She looked like a winner, but she didn’t have much in the way of survival skills. Men had always taken care of her, and she didn’t really know how to take care of herself.

I wanted to put her in a book, but the stories I stuck her in were like baggy sweaters—she could get into them all right but they just didn’t fit. They sagged at the edges and stretched at the seams, and in the end they just weren’t right for her. But even when she was just hanging out half-formed in my mind, she was stubborn and determined. She wasn’t going away until I figured out where she belonged and what she needed to do to complete herself.

Finally, I gave up and told her to get lost. I put her in a beat-up car and sent her off into the sunset all by herself. And that’s when Lacey came to life. She was running from something—I didn’t know what yet—but she couldn’t quite leave everything behind. Lacey is a homebody at heart, so she hunted down the one piece of her hometown that was missing and ran to him.

“Him” is Chase Caldwell. He’s another character who needed a story.

Chase turned up in my imagination sitting behind a cracked Formica counter at a small-town car lot. He was clearly a real cowboy, so what was he doing riding a desk chair instead of a horse?

As it turned out, Chase had left Lacey’s Tennessee hometown when his family lost their land. He took off for Wyoming, determined to start over as a rancher. It’s not easy to start a ranch from scratch, so Chase runs a car in town until he can revitalize the only piece of played-out land he could afford.
Of all the people that could turn up in Grady, Lacey is the last one Chase wants to see. Not only did she break his heart, but her ex-husband conned his father out of his family farm. So Lacey’s the reason he’s stuck behind that formica counter, struggling to rebuild his life.

Once the two of them met, I had no problem finding their story. She and Chase were meant for each other, but they both had a long way to go before they were ready for love. And they needed a lot of help along the way—help they found from each other, and from the people of Grady, Wyoming.

So next time you’re at a coffee shop, keep this in mind: You never know when some author will hijack your looks, your style, your voice and your mannerisms, match you up with a studly cowboy, and send you riding off into the sunset to live happily ever after.

If only that could happen in real life!

Did you ever meet someone you thought belonged in a story? Is there someone in your life that belongs in a book? Tell me about the most interesting person you’ve ever met.

Tall, Dark and Cowboy by Joanne Kennedy—In Stores November 2011

She’s looking for an old friend…

In the wake of a nasty divorce, Lacey Bradford heads for Wyoming where she’s sure her old friend will take her in. But her high school pal Chase Caldwell is no longer the gangly boy who would follow her anywhere. For one thing, he’s now incredibly buff and handsome, but that’s not all that’s changed…
What she finds is one hot cowboy…

Chase has been through tough times and is less than thrilled to see the girl who once broke his heart. But try as he might to resist her, while Lacey’s putting her life back together, he’s finding new ways to be part of it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joanne Kennedy is the author of three previous contemporary Western romances for Sourcebooks. She brings a wide variety of experience, ranging from chicken farming to horse training, to her sexy, spicy cowboy stories. She is a 2011 finalist in the prestigious Romance Writers of American RITA© Awards, for One Fine Cowboy. Joanne lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where she is working on her next book, Cowboy Crazy (June 2012). For more information, please visit http://joannekennedybooks.com.

ENTER THE CONTEST

Just comment on the post below and leave the first bit of your email address. You do need to be a NOR Newsletter / Fan Club subscriber to enter. USA Postage Only on shipped items. Ends - 11/25/2011