Out of the Office: Writer At Work

From http://sscrcd.org/watershed-sonoma-creek.php

Written and posted for Day 25 the day after, I’m blatantly cheating on my 31 Day Blog Challenge.

I’m a writer. My passion is fiction. This post is real, though fiction is that I posted it on Saturday.

What’s real: I am setting a paranormal teen novel in my hometown of Sonoma. The place has been calling to me — the place I called Slow-no-ma while in high school there, the place I couldn’t wait to get out of after high school.

Saturday, I walked the high school grounds where my heroine will go, like I did. She’ll be 15, the age I was when i last attended Sonoma Valley High. The school looks almost completely different than it did when I went there over 25 years ago. But a few things stay the same: the front building, the band room. That was a relief. Part of me was sad that I didn’t run into my 15-year-old self. I wanted to comfort her, tell her things would turn out well beyond her wildest imaginings. And to reassure her that her dreams, many of them anyway, would come true.

I sat at the Swiss Hotel sipping my Cosmos, feeling so grown up, and day dreamed what my heroine would think and feel of the Sonoma of today. Would she feel the rooted-ness of the oak trees, vineyards, and tree-filled hills? Would she feel gently held by the Valley of the Moon? Would the evening air after a long hot day soothe and cradle her?

I never thought I would even want to come back to Sonoma. Now a part of me longs for the quiet, the relaxed environment, the calm. I now understand that while I grumbled about how there was nothing to do there when I was a teen, my whole sense of what is home is imbued with Sonoma air, earth, fog, heat.

From http://sscrcd.org/watershed-sonoma-creek.php

As I continued to research and draft this novel, I look forward to going back, back into my teenage years, back home, back to my roots.