Brush Off the Dust for a First Meet

By Courtney Pierce

I don’t normally write spicy romance. So when I incorporated a sparky first meet in Indigo Lake, the second book of the Dushane Sisters Trilogy, I piled on unexpected complications. The result was good clean fun, especially for me.

I write for the Baby Boomer set, of which I’m a card-carrying member. My characters have rich histories, and as a result, they drag a boatload of emotional baggage into whatever they do and say. That’s no more apparent than with my protagonist Olivia Novak, the central star of the Dushane Sisters Trilogy. She’s a widow, having suffered the loss of her husband of 35 years to a hit-and-run car accident. On the surface, she's the pinnacle of success as a best-selling romance author, but inside she’s an emotional wreck. She spends every spare minute searching for the culprit who killed her husband, and then some. Then after the death of her mother, she finds a manuscript for a murder mystery among the papers in the safe. Of course, she and her two sisters get it published. And when it becomes a bestseller, royalties spell trouble.

Olivia and her two sisters get sued for their mother’s book by a money-grubbing distant relative. Enter Woody Rainey, the small-town lawyer who filed the suit on behalf of his mother. He’s about to find out that this lawsuit is no slam dunk.

Given that Olivia has infinite patience (Not!), she storms into Woody’s office in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire with her sisters and a therapy dog in tow.  Little does she know that her life is about to change.

Here’s the first moment of discomfort from Woody’s point of view:

Olivia crossed her legs, trying too hard to act relaxed. Woody knew body language, and this

woman was wound tight.

“Why on earth didn’t you contact us before sending that threatening email to my publisher?” Olivia said. “We aren’t difficult to find—obviously—since you appear to know all about us.”

She was good. The way she cocked her head to the side made her appear genuine, her lips genuine, hint of cool smile genuine. At this moment, Woody viewed himself as a fraud.

“Going forward was at the insistence of my client.” He spread his hands in surrender. “That course wouldn’t have been my personal choice.” 

The dog trotted to him and sniffed his suit jacket. Woody assumed the dog had been dispatched for cross-examination. A team effort.

"Speaking of which, I couldn’t help but notice you have the same last name as your client.” Olive picked up his name plate and turned it to face him. “How are you related?”

“She’s my mother.”

“Ah . . . ” Olivia nodded. “No conflict of interest there.”

Woody's no longer convinced he's the smartest one in the room. The cat-and-mouse volley continues until Olivia makes an offer that Woody’s unable to refuse.

Olivia fingered Woody’s business cards in a hand-forged pewter dish. She picked one from the stack and flicked the corner with her fingernail. “After we check in to our hotel, do you want to meet us for a drink, maybe dinner, to continue our discussion?”

The situation wasn’t at all what Woody had envisioned when these women walked through his front door. He stood and rubbed his chin.

The fun part of writing this first meet is that neither Olivia nor Woody have any clue they ‘re going to fall in love.

The dinner goes well . . . too well. When Woody returns home that night, he realizes that Olivia has embedded herself in his bachelor heart. But the pull of chemistry that develops between them overrides their ability to resist. Suddenly Cupid’s frying pan to the head becomes more painful than the lawsuit.

That fourth scotch had been a serious lapse in judgment. After leaving Wolfe’s Tavern at nine, Woody climbed the steps to his colonial, his striped necktie hanging in two exhausted strands from his collar. The key fought with his fingers as he tried to match the notches in the lock.

The sisters had worn him out, especially one of them: Olivia. Unable to stop himself, he’d kissed her on the cheek before he left. A second lapse in judgment. He knew better than to get emotionally involved, to waver his focus on the matter at hand. She’d returned the gesture with a tight embrace. No conflict of interest there, he recalled of Olivia’s warning when he’d met her. Her citrusy fragrance lingered on his shirt, opening all his senses.

Under fuzzy aim to the closet, his white shirt made the rim shot into the laundry basket. Compelled by a force he didn’t understand, he pulled the white shirt from the laundry basket and wadded it into a tight ball. A whoosh of sweet lemon . . . with a hint of spice . . . ginger.

A series of emotional twists and turns now come into play: Woody needs to take a side between his elderly mother and Olivia in the lawsuit; Olivia is in a fight to protect her dead mother’s reputation; Woody is afraid his secure routine is being turned upside down; Olivia is afraid of betraying her dead husband’s memory; and Olivia fears upsetting the relationship with her two sisters.

But love conquers all. And, yes indeed, that first sleepover plays on their collective fears. The initial coupling doesn't turn out to be the cathartic experience one hopes for, but it forces Woody and Olivia to look at themselves in the mirror. 

There’s so much material for an author to work with when writing about new relationships of older characters. An iceberg of life experiences can ground the love boat. But that’s why readers cheer them on. A deeper meaning lies beneath a consoling hug, a deep kiss, and the importance of just holding each other.

No matter how old we are, childlike emotions and desperate needs of the heart surface when it comes to falling in love. Suddenly, nothing makes sense. And just like when we fell in love for the very first time, we internally hyperventilate with a thumping heart.

And it hurts so good.

Photo: Micah Brooks

Courtney Pierce is a fiction writer living in Kalispell, Montana with her husband, stepdaughter, and their brainiac cat, Princeton. Courtney writes for the baby boomer audience. She spent 28 years as an executive in the entertainment industry and used her time in a theater seat to create stories that are filled with heart, humor, and mystery. She studied craft and storytelling at the Attic Institute and has completed the Hawthorne Fellows Program for writing and publishing. Active in the writing community, Courtney is a board member of the Northwest Independent Writers Association and on the Advisory Council of the Independent Publishing Resource Center. She is a member of Willamette Writers, Pacific Northwest Writers Association, and She Writes. The Executrix received the Library Journal Self-E recommendation seal.

Print and E-books are available through most major online retailers, including Amazon.com.

Check out all of Courtney's books: 

courtney-pierce.com and windtreepress.com 

New York Times best-selling author Karen Karbo says, "Courtney Pierce spins a madcap tale of family grudges, sisterly love, unexpected romance, mysterious mobsters and dog love. Reading Indigo Lake is like drinking champagne with a chaser of Mountain Dew. Pure Delight."

Coming in 2020!

When Aubrey Cenderon moves to Montana after the death of her father, the peace and quiet of Big Sky Country becomes complicated with a knock on the door from the sheriff. An injured grizzly bear is on the loose and must be eliminated before it kills again. The sheriff's insistence that she buy a gun for protection will present Aubrey with some serious soul-searching, because the grizzly-on-the-run is hunting for her too . . . for a different reason.

Disaster Turned Blessing

By Courtney Pierce

A bountiful and delicious Thanksgiving ushered in a promising Christmas season. Let the games begin! Lights, wreaths, decorating, and a daily dose of Christmas movies.

My husband, stepdaughter, and I gladly handed over the $5.00 permit fee to cut our wild Christmas tree on Montana state land. Deal of the century. There’s a lot of shopping acreage here in the Kalispell area, so we bundled up for the hunt under a gentle mountain snowfall. The tree we found wasn’t all perfect by retail standards, but that’s what gave it infinite appeal. We even snagged a small one for my stepdaughter’s bedroom. No worries about having enough decorations. Collectively, my husband and I have an ornament count that spans over forty Christmas seasons. I guess that amounts to eighty Christmases worth of decorations. We selected the best of the best, and we still had an embarrassing excess.

Over the holiday, I had planned to make huge progress on my next book, BIG SKY TALK. I was nine chapters in and excited to pick up where I left off.

Then disaster struck. 

The hard drive in my mere seven-month-old laptop crashed with a bang. I couldn’t access any of my files, including the first nine chapters of my book-in-progress, never mind the manuscripts of my previous six books.

I got a windburn zooming to my local computer to a repair shop. Two days later, the news made my stomach drop to subzero. I needed a new hard drive, and nothing on it could be saved. The squeaky-clean new drive held none of my files. However, the tech gave me back my dead one with a glimmer of hope. He suggested that I contact a specialty data recovery company with more sophisticated equipment to attempt to find my files. Luckily, there was a reputable one in Missoula.

I know, I know. I can hear your voices chastising me for not backing up my files and documents for the last six months. I never had a problem before, so I had become complacent. Shame on me. And shame on Scrivener, my writing program, for switching from storing the proprietary files in the cloud to saving them on my hard drive. The company never informed me about the change in their process.

I should’ve figured that computers aren’t the work horses they used to be. They’ve gone the way of televisions and cell phones. Count on them lasting about a year ̶ or seven months in my case ̶ with more plastic parts to lower the price tag.

After a promising discussion of my situation with the data recovery company, I mailed off my blown hard drive and crossed my fingers. I resigned myself to the real possibility that I would need to start over with my novel. After all, my head held the story. No one could take that away from me.

Then something started to happen: I actually got excited about re-writing those first nine chapters. It was a chance to start fresh. In a quandary, I had written three different opening chapters and couldn’t decide which one worked best. I had nothing to lose by shaking out the Etch-A-Sketch.

Some writing coaches recommend chucking your first drafts in order to breathe new life into a blank page. And as painful as it can be, Stephen King recommends we should “kill our darlings.” First drafts are an indulgence of the author; second and third ones are for the readers.

Maybe there was a higher purpose for my data woes. But all those hours. All those outlines. And all those imaginative brain cells I had killed off. Was I being lazy? Was I trying to be a speed demon to make my own fake deadline? Possibly.

I sucked it up and started my book over while I waited to hear the verdict from the tech pros. The longer the silence loomed, the faster I wrote, convinced those draft chapters were lost. In the new ones, I incorporated more detail, evened out the flow, and cut what I thought was superfluous. The characters started to bloom with personality. My brain fired on all pistons with the freshness of it all. It was like going into a new job with oodles of direct experience. I made better decisions. I dug in with instinct, not superficial details. I let the characters lead me to bring them to life. All five senses came alive with vivid imagery. I didn't have to monitor the small stuff: the color of the protagonist's eyes, what kind of car she drove, or the style of her clothes. I was now creating living, breathing people.

As I dove into the new Chapter Four, my cell phone rang. The data recovery company calling, just like Avon.

“Good news, Courtney! Your data is 98% there,” the Tech said. "But it's going to take us about a week to extract it." 

“That’s great,” I said. "I hope my new manuscript isn't part of the 2% of roadkill. Is this going to cost me my first born child that I can't have at sixty?"

He laughed out loud. "This is a Level 2, so it'll be about $700."

Don't get me wrong, I was thrilled to get back my files, but my writing bubble deflated a bit, and not just about the price. The original drafts of those nine chapters sent my mind into a scramble. Sorting out all of the versions would be like re-installing the old toilet in a newly remodeled bathroom.

When I downloaded my Scrivner files, I created a new folder for those old chapters, but I don't think I'll open it. I'll keep going with the new version. That folder will only be a crutch in the event I get stuck.

And in the meantime, I'll enjoy the holiday with my original plan to spend the time with my family, go out for a snowshoe hike, target shoot to practice for next hunting season, and move forward writing BIG SKY TALK.

And I promise to back up my work at least once a week. The mega-capacity thumb drive I purchased should do the trick, along with the additional external hard drive my husband gave me. I’m also going to email myself the most important files as back-up to the back-up to back-up.

Happy Holidays to you all! Stay safe and warm, and I'll catch up with you in the New Year.

Photo: Micah Brooks

Courtney Pierce is a fiction writer living in Kalispell, Montana with her husband, stepdaughter, and their brainiac cat, Princeton. Courtney writes for the baby boomer audience. She spent 28 years as an executive in the entertainment industry and used her time in a theater seat to create stories that are filled with heart, humor, and mystery. She studied craft and storytelling at the Attic Institute and has completed the Hawthorne Fellows Program for writing and publishing. Active in the writing community, Courtney is a board member of the Northwest Independent Writers Association and on the Advisory Council of the Independent Publishing Resource Center. She is a member of Willamette Writers, Pacific Northwest Writers Association, and She Writes. The Executrix received the Library Journal Self-E recommendation seal.

Print and E-books are available through most major online retailers, including Amazon.com.

Check out all of Courtney's books: 

courtney-pierce.com and windtreepress.com 

Audiobook now Available!

Available Now!
Book 3 of the
Dushane Sisters
Trilogy

Audio book coming soon!

New York Times best-selling author Karen Karbo says, "Courtney Pierce spins a madcap tale of family grudges, sisterly love, unexpected romance, mysterious mobsters and dog love. Reading Indigo Lake is like drinking champagne with a chaser of Mountain Dew. Pure Delight."

Coming in 2020!

When Aubrey Cenderon moves to Montana after the death of her father, the peace and quiet of Big Sky Country becomes complicated with a knock on the door from the sheriff. An injured grizzly bear is on the loose and must be eliminated before it kills again. The sheriff's insistence that she buy a gun for protection will present Aubrey with some serious soul-searching, because the grizzly-on-the-run is hunting for her too . . . for a different reason.

"Super" Heroes

By Courtney Pierce

Superheroes are real, but in my books, they’re not swinging from spiderwebs, crushing meteors in space, or using laser beams to control the atmosphere. I leave those kinds of characters to authors who write Young Adult and Fantasy. 

My heroes are everyday people who merely overcome adversity to reach a goal. Sometimes the journey is peppered with a little magical realism or unintentional humor, but the protagonist always crosses the finish line ahead of the pack.

Earthly feats of heroism in others inspire us to be better stewards of ourselves, such as learning how to love again after betrayal, self-sacrifice to help others, beating a potentially fatal illness, or settling the score from a past conflict. These may seem like pedestrian problems, but my characters can be so obsessive-compulsive about overcoming them that they don’t always know how far along in their journey they are.

In my first trilogy, Stitches, Brushes, and Riffs, a baby boomer couple undertakes a worldwide quest to unlock the meaning of a magical artifact. Every clue pushes them forward to the goal to learn the secret to immortality. And when they unlock the truth, they can make a choice: do they want to become immortal at the end of their mortal lives? It takes an around-the-world adventureꟷwith the FBI in pursuitꟷto discover their internal truth.

In my second trilogy about the Dushane Sisters, The Executrix, Indigo Lake, and Indigo Legacy, the story is a two-fold quest: emotional closure of a husband’s hit-and-run murder and the truth about a found manuscript for a familial murder mystery. My character of Olivia Novack and her two middle-age sisters take a wild path to find answers that is both personal and often hilarious. But it's their sibling bond that makes all three of them superheroes. Yep. They'd step in front of traffic to save each other, and then bicker about which make of car was most lethal.

In my new book-in-process, Big Sky Talk, my hero has quite a bit to tackle when the sheriff comes knocking on her door. Judith Cenderon's moving boxes aren't even unpacked before her life becomes a collision of the past, present, and future. Add in a little magic of Salish Native-American folklore, things get supremely interesting when her dead dad comes calling in the form of a reincarnated bear.

Hero quests are fun to write. Their momentum keeps readers turning the pages. And I get to sprinkle in a few of my own truths into the prose, while my characters go through multiple hoops to discover their own. But not all heroes are towers of impenetrable strength. No matter the genre, the protagonists have a chink in the armor where an arrow can get through to their heart. It can be a physical vulnerability, such as blindness or chronic pain, or it can be an emotional trauma buried deep in their psyche, such as the loss of a husband or child, a lover's betrayal, or conflicts with familial relationships. A character’s bugaboos keep us rooting for the win, but we revel in their pain.

I love to push my heroes to accomplish feats they’d never thought possible, both emotionally and physically. They dig deep for courage to face their fears or react with instinct when pushed. Just when they want to curl up in a ball of defeat, something happens to rise them to their feet.  Without question, my heroes would step in front of bullet to save a sister, lift a car to free an accident victim, or run like the wind if their lives were on the line.

And that’s the keyꟷsurvival. Heroes value life above all else, both their own and the lives of the ones they love. Bad guys don’t stand a chance with these amazing characters. For all their flaws, readers love our heroes for what they can accomplish under duress. We want them on our side, by our side, and their spirits filling our insides. They inspire us.

None of my protagonists are truly “super”heroes, though. They make a difference by never giving up, even if it means skirting the law by doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. Recognition isn’t their goal, but quests for adventure ring our heroes' chimes. Sometimes it’s magical. Other times, it’s heartwarming and poignant. 

Oh...and did I point our that all of my heroes are over the age of fifty? Whoever said that us older set can't save the day too? Yes, we are heroes by experience and wacky wisdom, but we might require at least a couple of bounds to scale the building and a double dose of BioFreeze the next morning.

Photo: Micah Brooks

Courtney Pierce is a fiction writer living in Kalispell, Montana with her husband, stepdaughter, and their brainiac cat, Princeton. Courtney writes for the baby boomer audience. She spent 28 years as an executive in the entertainment industry and used her time in a theater seat to create stories that are filled with heart, humor, and mystery. She studied craft and storytelling at the Attic Institute and has completed the Hawthorne Fellows Program for writing and publishing. Active in the writing community, Courtney is a board member of the Northwest Independent Writers Association and on the Advisory Council of the Independent Publishing Resource Center. She is a member of Willamette Writers, Pacific Northwest Writers Association, and She Writes. The Executrix received the Library Journal Self-E recommendation seal.

Audiobook now Available!

Check out all of Courtney's books: 

courtney-pierce.com and

windtreepress.com 

Print and E-books are available through most major online retailers, including Amazon.com.

Available Now!
Book 3 of the
Dushane Sisters
Trilogy

The Dushane Sisters Trilogy concludes with Indigo Legacy, available now. There's love in the air for Olivia and Woody, but will family intrigue get in the way? Ride along for the wild trip that starts in a New York auction house and peaks in a mansion on Boston's Beacon Hill. 

The Dushane sisters finally get to the truth about their mother.

New York Times best-selling author Karen Karbo says, "Courtney Pierce spins a madcap tale of family grudges, sisterly love, unexpected romance, mysterious mobsters and dog love. Reading Indigo Lake is like drinking champagne with a chaser of Mountain Dew. Pure Delight."