When I announced my move to a small town nestled in a valley, I got teased a bit about having actually moved to Rydding Village. But this wouldn’t be the first time my life has ended up reflecting something I’ve written about.

In my very first published novel, the heroine is the daughter of a successful romance author and is trying unsuccessfully to write her own romance novel, but she has a big breakthrough when she realizes what she really should be writing is fantasy. It took me five published romance novels and a lot of rejected romance novels before I had that realization for myself. The very first thing I tried to write was actually sort of a Star Wars mental fanfic with the serial numbers filed off, but when I got serious about writing, it was fantasy. I got sidetracked into romance because the best organization for learning the business of publishing and the craft of writing a novel at the time was the Romance Writers of America, and since there were so many more romances published and there were romance publishers who didn’t require authors to have agents, that seemed “easier.” It took me many years of banging my head against the wall of romance writing and publishing before I had the grand epiphany that I didn’t actually like romance novels all that much and that what I really liked reading and writing was fantasy. I do like to have a love story in my fantasy, but I’m not crazy about the way love stories are told in the romance genre.

I ended up getting the job the heroine has in my third published book. I’d just made up a job based on things I knew enough about to write about, then put it in a particular setting. It wasn’t until I was working in the new job a few years later that I realized I was doing the exact job in the exact circumstances I’d written about.

One of the reasons I ended up deciding to make this move was that I realized I’d been writing a bunch of books that all involved characters living in or finding a hidden enclave nestled among mountains. Most of them haven’t been published (yet?), but it was such a strong theme that I finally realized that maybe this was something I wanted.

In a book I’ve been working on off and on for years, one of the issues the female main character is dealing with early in the book is that she feels stuck where she is and wants to find somewhere else to go. I wrote that part before I even started seriously contemplating the idea of moving, so I guess it was a subconscious thing I was wrestling with.

I think I was imagining this town more than twenty years ago because while I was trying to write romance, one of my “banging my head against the wall” books was set in a small town. I described the town’s July 4 celebration in detail (it was a major part of the book). It turns out that this town’s July 4 celebration is pretty much exactly what I described in that book (which will never see the light of day. It’s so far from what I want to write that there’s no point in publishing it, and the plot is now so outdated it wouldn’t work). Fortunately, the whole celebration takes place at the park at the end of my street, so I can walk over there to check it out and see how close to it I got with my descriptions. I guess it’s not too different from the things a lot of towns do for July 4, but it wasn’t the way the small town I was from did things, and the city where I was living at the time didn’t do things that way. I made it up entirely based on what I thought should happen in a town like that, decades before I knew this town existed.

I don’t know if I have subconscious longings that come out in my books or if there’s something else going on. With the job I wrote about before I knew it was a real job, it wasn’t actually a job I wanted to do, and it turned out to be kind of a nightmare. I do think the fantasy vs. romance was something I knew deep down inside and wasn’t ready to let myself believe. As for the move to “Rydding,” I’m pretty sure that was a longing. I’d been considering making a change for years, and when I was trying to come up with some paranormal or fantasy women’s fiction, I kept coming back to the same kind of place. I knew I wanted something like that for myself. It just took me a lot of research to find it.

Most of my books don’t come true, though. I haven’t found a job at a magical company and I haven’t connected with a hot wizard, alas.