I’ve had a couple of people ask me already if my latest book, A Daffodil for Angie, is about me growing up in the Sixties. The short answer: Hell, NO!
Here’s the long answer. Like Angie, I was a teenager in the Sixties, although I was a bit younger than she is. Both our dads were in Vietnam in 1966-67. But Angie’s dad is not my dad at all. We both lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina, so anyone who knows the area will recognize many locations mentioned in the book. But the high school in A Daffodil for Angie is totally fictional. I modeled the building after the junior high school I went to. And, as I mention in the Acknowledgements, thankfully my own mother and sister were nothing like Angie’s.
However, there are little nuggets from my own life like those that make it into all of my books. One of them is that when I bleached my hair blonde when I was sixteen, I suddenly got a lot of “hey, babies!” when I was behind the wheel. Fayetteville is an Army town. And during the sixties, when most people drove around with their windows down because they didn’t have AC, all those young G.I.’s would flirt with you when you came to a stoplight if your hair was blonde! Didn’t happen when my hair was brown. So I used that little tidbit in the book.
And there really was a goat man. Don’t want to spoil it for anyone. You’ll have to read the book to find out.
A Daffodil for Angie is actually classified as Historical Fiction, among other things. Which makes me feel a little funny. But where books are concerned, even if you write a novel set in the 1990s, it might be classified as Historical Fiction. Which makes me feel better.
The ebook is available and a paperback version is due out soon. To keep up with publication updates and other fun stuff, you can sign up for occasional author newsletters here.