Behind The Scenes

Things about the making of SAHM I Am that you may not have known:

1) Originally, there was no Veronica. That’s right—no “howdy y’all,” no “there ya go,” nothing. Veronica came into existence because readers were feeling like Rosalyn was almost TOO villain-ish, too rotten, and they thought she needed something to make her a little more human, something they could sympathize with. So I gave her a sister that was the family favorite, the wild child, that Rosalyn always felt compared to and had to compete with. And then I made that sister get married, have children, and then find ways to subtly remind poor Rosalyn that she now had to compete on the grandchild front as well. That sister became our now-beloved Veronica. Look for her to expand her role in the sequel, @Home For the Holidays, coming November 2006.

2) Zelia didn’t use any capital letters in her emails until the final round of editing. She wrote everything in lower case except for her initial Z at the end of the email. The idea was that she, being an artsy, free-spirited kinda gal, would have her own rules for writing emails. But the type-setters at the publishing house pointed out that Z’s all lower-case emails would be rather hard to read once they were printed on a book page. And they were right. So some poor copy-editor or proofreader or somebody had to go through and re-capitalize all of Z’s emails. I am so glad they didn’t make me do it!

3) Rosalyn’s email address was originally “domesticgoddess@home.com” but I changed it to “prov31woman” because Rosalyn is far too goodie-goodie to use such a “pagan” email address as anything with the word “goddess” in it.

4) Dulcie’s Bad Day actually happened to me… over the course of a week. Actually, I’m not sure if the poopy finger-painting was that week or a different one. But the gynecologist visit, the gray hair, the “all-you-can-eat-clothes” comment…all true. However, that unfortunate comment did not come from a pastor’s wife. I chose to make it a pastor’s wife in the story because it would instantly give the reader a sense of how humiliating it was for Dulcie without having to slow the pacing down to explain the relationship between her and the bumble-tongued woman she was talking to.

5) The farm Brenna lives on is modeled after my husband’s parents’ farm in Kansas. I put her in Oklahoma, but the house her in-laws live in is supposed to be the same ones my in-laws live in. And the house she and Darren live in is one that was built by my husband’s grandfather. It sits on the same farmstead. There used to be a third house as well, which makes an appearance later in the book, but in reality it was torn down years ago. All that remains now is the basement, with a roof over it so that it can be used for storage. I think the farm in Kansas is one of the prettiest places I’ve ever been, and I’m glad to have had the chance to put it in the book.

6) I scoured the Internet to find photographs of people who looked like my characters. Some of them I found in portfolio galleries of engagement photographers, others were from personal photo album collections on the web, but most of them were stock photos. I wish I could post them all so that you could compare your mental image of the characters with the ones I came up with. But I have far too much respect for copyright laws, since I deal with intellectual property, too. But I did put the photos on index cards along with all my character information, and that really helped me keep track of all my characters as I wrote the story. I would stare at their photos and imagine their voices and how they would act. If you are a novelist and have never tried this with your characters, I would encourage you to give it a shot. It worked really well for me.

7) I scrapped the first 40-50 pages of SAHM I Am three times before I finally got the voice and pacing right. What finally helped me was reading several chick-lit books, but especially Meg Cabot’s Boy Next Door. I was searching for books told all in emails because I knew I needed some direction if I was going to actually get this book off the ground. Meg, who is the author of The Princess Diaries, had recently released Boy Next Door, and it was just the book I needed. The story was great, and the humor and pacing just crackled. My voice isn’t the same as hers, and my story and structure is totally different. But I studied her novel to see how she made the email format work for the story instead of working against it. And then when I sat down for my fourth try…it happened like magic. Thanks, Meg!

8) The first half of the book took me about 7-8 months, writing off and on. The second half took me two weeks! The editors at Steeple Hill were so excited about the book that they were emailing my agent to ask if I was done yet. So I decided I’d better kick it into high gear and finish it up. I did about 5,000 words a day for 10 days. I wrote anywhere between 5-8 hours a day, and it was exhausting, but tremendously exciting.

9) Dulcie’s 1940’s Cape Cod home is one we walked through when we were shopping for our own house. It is actually green, but I couldn’t get a photo of it when the art department needed to know what Dulcie’s house looked like, so I sent them a similar house in blue. But the actual house is across the street from St. Cecelia’s Cathedral in Omaha. When we walked through it, the backyard was entirely full of poison oak and poison ivy. I hope whoever bought it was able to get it cleaned up!

10) People keep asking me if I’m Dulcie. I tell them no. Dulcie, of all my characters, probably has the most similarities to me, but there’s a bit of me in all the email loop characters—except Rosalyn, Connie, and Veronica, of course. I’m not at all like any of them!