Kate Vale

When I began writing, I didn’t think in terms of a particular genre. Rather, I wanted to share the stories that circled in my brain and floated to the surface at odd times--when I was making dinner, watching the birds at the feeders on my back deck, in the midst of watching a television show, while listening to music, driving down to see my son and his wife… Those stories included characters that had captured my imagination and I wanted to learn more about them, too. So, I started writing. The words seemed aimless at first, mostly just scenes that weren’t connected, but which seemed to illustrate something about the character in question. Soon, almost as if ordered by the characters themselves, I had a story with a beginning, middle and end.

When I finished the first draft of my first novel, DREAM CHASER, I realized I’d written a romance that was couched in a contemporary woman’s struggle to find herself. That surprised me. I’d never thought of myself as a romance writer, but there it was. In fact, I should have guessed at the genre long before I finished it, for the wedding scene of Suzannah’s son and the ending scene, too, were written long before I finished the story. I laughed at myself and figured, “why not?” So I went with the notion of creating stories about real people with real problems, who ended up happily-ever-after.

My characters are drawn from my imagination, but each of them reflects people I’ve known or situations I’ve experienced or observed. My friends probably wouldn’t be able to say with certainty, “oh, that’s me!” because I don’t write that way. However, if my readers have found themselves in similar situations, I would hope that they recognize the reality of those situations and that they appreciate how the characters deal with those experiences.

In one case, meeting a foster child captured my imagination so completely that I had to explore foster child experiences (the good and the not-so-good) in a story, which became the basis for HER DAUGHTER'S FATHER. And because my mother was herself adopted, I chose to focus on the many relationships that adoption creates in my new story, scheduled to be published later in 2014.