One of the most gratifying things I hear from readers is how deeply they connect with the characters, especially Bobbi. (Most of my readers are women, after all.)
I think it's because Bobbi is Everywoman.
She's a schoolteacher. We all know teachers. She's a wife and a mother and she takes those roles seriously, striving to do her best. We take ours just as seriously.
She has a dignity about her that we respect, but she has self-preserving guardedness we identify with. I love the sincere struggle she's willing to wage. She gives voice to those thoughts and feelings in us when faced with God's standards- we wish they weren't so high. But they are.
She's far from perfect, but she's perfect for Chuck. I'm glad he finally realized that.
How did Bobbi connect with you?
The opening of any book is critical, and with our collective Twitter-length attention span, a writer has a very short space to grab you. When editing and polishing Contingency's opening I had two goals in mind.
Contingency has been out for seven weeks now and as folks read and begin to leave reviews, I am greatly encouraged by how often the characters are mentioned. Bobbi and Chuck are very close to my heart and I'm thrilled when others connect with them.
One of the toughest things in the writing process is distilling the novel down to a few sentences. I agonized over the back cover copy for days trying to get the most out of every word. Here are the paragraph, 3-sentence and one-sentence summaries. The one-sentence became the text for my online ads. (I tried to keep it to Twitter-friendly minimum of 140 characters.).jpg)
Coming up with a title for Contingency was a challenge, but when it clicked, it fit the story perfectly. The dictionary defines it as a possibility, an event that isn't entirely unforeseen. Phil Shannon explains to Chuck, “An extramarital affair was a contingency you never considered, so there was no protection in your marriage against it. I want us to fix that.”