FAQs

Q: How did you come up with the heroine for Out of the Dark?

The heroine for the novel comes from personal experience. In the 1980's, I worked with a blind woman who ran the department for disabled students at a local community college. I admired how much she could accomplish in a day. While my heroine has limited sight. I wanted to challenge of writing about that experience.

Q: How do you write so realistically? Your descriptions are so great, I feel I can reach out and touch objects as I read.

Personal experiences bring realism. I write vividly of medieval times because of growing up with wash boards, home-made lye soap, canning, growing own food, feeding chickens, plucking feathers, reading and embroidering by candlelight. Growing up with an out house, a great aunt who had a root cellar, hand- pump for water and cooked on a wood-burning stove, an ice box and Saturday night baths in a metal tub with water heated on the kitchen stove with wash basins for sponge baths during the week provided me with a sense of everyday life before labor-saving devices.

It wasn’t fun. It was hard work, but we didn’t know better at the time. To us, we lived in “modern” times.

Take lye soap, for instance. It’s caustic. It sears your lungs and burns your skin if you don’t handle and mix it just right. Once it’s made, you still have to shred it into detergent flakes by scraping the bar of soap across a metal slicer. When the soap bar gets small, there’s a good chance you’ll shave your fingers.

Then there is plucking chicken feathers. The headless chicken is dunked in scalding water to loosen the feathers. The bigger feathers are easier to pull. But the little ones! Besides being hot to the touch, the pin feathers just didn’t seem to want to come out. If you leave them, they become part of your dinner.

If it was your turn to be first in the tub for the Saturday night bath, it was fun. For the second or third in line, it wasn’t so much fun. Because of the heavy work heating and lugging and dumping water, children were required to take turns. If it was your turn to be last, the water was probably cooling fast even with adding a new kettle of hot water and it definitely wasn’t as clean.

Beating dust out of rugs was fun. Grandpa would hang the rugs over the clothesline on a spring or fall housecleaning day. We kids grabbed the wooden handle of a woven-wire tool with a head about as wide as a shovel blade and beat the hell out of the rug. Dust would go everywhere. Being outdoors, it blew away. One catch—we didn’t have dust masks in those days.

 

Q: I find your writing style poetic, yet informative. How did you develop this style?

I use the language I grew up with of the 1940's to give the formal, poetic style to my writing. I impart information clearly because of business and public relations writing experience.

 

Q: How did you choose the setting for Out of the Dark?

Ainsworth is an Anglo-Saxon name originating in the 900's, having its own coat of arms with the motto "Courage Without Fear". That is why I made the dominant culture Anglo-Saxon for my heroine.

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