LIGHT CHANGES EVERYTHING RELEASED TODAY

Only twelve hours late, I finally have made it to my desk. As the dear Robbie Burns said so wisely, "The best laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft agley." I have been agley since yesterday, but never far from my mind was the post for this propitious day. Suffice it to say I am trying to figure out how to connect this new Blog to my new web page, www.nancyeturner.com , and having no luck at all.

One of the questions I am asked most often is a version of "where do you get your ideas?" and though I'm tempted to say, "there's this magic tree in my yard," I know it is a genuine question, sometimes asked by the most complementary readers. Here in a nutshell is the inspiration for the beginning of any novel.

"What if . . . ?" That's it. That's the whole answer. What if you lived back then? What if you'd never seen a tree that wasn't crooked and thorny, or a cornfield, or a grassy lawn, or a debutante ball, but you'd read about them and dreamed of lives lived in books and novels? What if everything you knew about the world did not apply once you stepped foot out of Territorial Arizona and into a more "civilized" part of the country? What if you found a ticket out?

Every character needs a complication, and Mary Pearl has many, but this one came to me almost by accident: What if a young lady was so stunningly beautiful that moving about in the real world became a hassle? Surrounded by family, she's confident, but in a world where her very face is a stumbling block to relationships, she is at wit's end all the time. It's a play on a character who is  incredibly rich, and therefore doesn't trust anyone who wants to befriend them.

I found a photo of an actress from the early 1900's named Elsie Ferguson. It's not a glamour-riven name by any means, but her face! I could imagine that if a student in the same photography class as she were so smitten with her looks, and if he got too enthusiastic in his coloring so that he applied too much lip rouge and eye shadow, he could change the portrait and slander her character even if she were the most virtuous person at the school. This is the photo of Elsie Ferguson, who became the model and inspiration for Mary Pearl Prine, a girl whose face could break a heart or start a war, a Helen of Troy from Arizona, trying to learn painting and photography in an art class in Wheaton College.  (Credit: "Klimbim" colorized the portrait.)

This novel has been one I wanted to write but faced many uphill battles in doing so. My husband suffered a traumatic brain injury two years ago, and life became challenging in ways I could never have imagined. My "what if" had never gone down that path. Our lives gang agley never to be the same. Time, the Veteran's Administration doctors, and friends old and new, helped us both find strength, healing, and light at the end of that terrible tunnel. In life as in photography, LIGHT CHANGES EVERYTHING.