“Sweet Return” got off to a rocky start. All of us readers and writers of romance novels know that in romance, a book must have an HEA ending and the story must focus on the relationship between a man and a woman. But in the beginning, neither I nor my editor had a firm vision of a new story. I was forced to return to the drawing board and recall my original process, which is to have characters doing something unique and different from what is usually seen. Since most of my books are character-driven rather than plot-driven, sometimes this is challenging, especially since I like to write stories set in rural locales or small towns.

The idea of having a heroine as an egg farmer was sort of floating around in my head because of the current trend toward organic eating and I had watched some features on TV about free-range chickens. Being a daughter of farmers and ranchers, I know a little about chickens. As a child, every day of my life for many years, I accompanied my grandmother to the chicken house where she would select 2 pullets, wring their necks. Then we would clean them and cook them for dinner. In the late afternoons, we would go to a different chicken house and gather eggs. Then, when I flew to Atlanta for last year’s RWA conference, my seatmate on the plane happened to be a woman who had 9 chickens living in her backyard in a sub-division in Arlington, Texas. (I’m sure you can imagine how much her neighbors love her.) For the whole hour-plus it took to get from Dallas to Atlanta, she and I discussed chickens and eggs. And the idea for SWEET RETURN was hatched.

Now mind you, I don’t remember a lot about raising chickens. Mostly I recall my grandmother saying, “Don’t play in the chicken house. You’ll get mites.” So I had to do research. Of the many new things I learned about chickens, one thing I discovered is that the principal book on raising chickens for egg production was written in 1902 and is still the foremost compilation of information for that particular endeavor. I also learned that different breeds of chickens have different personalities. Who knew? When I was about 6, I had a pet rooster that flogged my 4-year-old cousin so badly he has scars on his back and shoulders to this day, but I had no idea that flogging incident had something to do with that particular rooster’s personality. I would like to add, that in spite of how it sounds, what with chicken slaughter and flogging roosters, I did not have a violent childhood.

Anyway, I hope you’ll have fun reading the book. It was fun to write.

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