![]() ![]() The next moment, in fact, the very next paragraph, I found myself writing about the four José brothers who, in a previous book, had fallen victim to a band of drug smugglers. One moment I was telling how four quarrelsome brothers were responsible for Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. And somehow, in the process of telling that story, a number of things happened that I simply can’t explain. I loved immersing myself once more in the Desert People’s origin stories and revisiting both the language and the gentle humor of the Tohono O’odham people. I loved being back in touch with the Walker Family clan-and with Joanna Brady’s too. Writing Blessing of the Lost Girls was a way of sending my heart back to that very special time. In fact, when I left to go elsewhere, one of my Tohono O’odham friends gifted me with an owl basket, one I still treasure, and told me, “Judy, if you can’t make it with your own tribe, you can always come back here.” ![]() I learned far more than I ever managed to teach. The five years I spent on the Tohono O’odham as a K-12 librarian were life-changing for me. My purpose in writing the Walkers was to make reservation life understandable to people who would never go there. In fact, when my first hardback editor read the manuscript for Hour of the Hunter, Walker Family #1, she told me on the phone, and this is a direct quote, “What you need to do is get rid of all that Indian stuff.” Excuse me? As far as I was concerned, the “Indian stuff” was the whole point. She’s not the only reader to feel that way. Today someone wrote to me saying that she had read a Goodreads Review of Kiss of the Bees, the second Walker Family book in which the reviewer apparently objected to the unnecessary “italicized stories and legends” in the book. I love writing books, but it’s STILL work! I put in countless hours of thinking and typing both before and after I hit the banana peel. Putting in that many hours with that kind of total concentration isn’t a walk in the park. And that’s one of the reasons I find being called ‘prolific’ so annoying. My only priority at that point is getting to the end of the story. That’s usually what happens when I hit the banana peel. doing an in-depth grammar/spellcheck review/rewrite. ![]() Then I put in three full days until 1 or 2 a.m. Even so I didn’t actually start writing it until June 16-of this year! I finished it this past Sunday evening-August 21st! (Also this year!). I’ll do that closer to pub date so you’ll remember it, but the idea for that book had been cooking away in the far, dark reaches of my “Waring Blender” mind for about a year and a half. I’m not ready to tell you the story about the inspiration for that book. It was one of those books that just came together.īlessing of the Lost Girls turned out to be the same thing. Bill claimed that I never slept the whole time I was writing that book because I was still up working when he went to bed, and I was up working again by the time he crawled out of bed the next morning. Unfortunately, they did NOT change their minds on the book deadline, so I buckled down and wrote like crazy. I had been writing a Brady book when the powers that be in New York changed their minds and said they wanted a Beaumont instead. The book in question was Beaumont #11, Failure to Appear, and I performed that literary feat out of necessity rather than choice. Once upon a time, I wrote a book in six weeks. ![]() Have you ever stepped off a roller coaster and been amazed to be on solid ground once more? That’s me this week-back on solid ground. ![]()
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