Guest Post from L.B. Gschwandtner, author of The Naked Gardener

Hi. My name is L B Gschwandtner and I wrote “The Naked Gardener.” Recently a reader asked: “Did you have the specific audience in mind when you wrote the book?”

Here’s my answer.

At a certain point in my life, I knew three women who gardened naked. They all had different takes on why they did it but they all felt it was really important to them. So I began to think about a woman named Katelyn Cross who goes to her garden naked and what that might mean and in what ways it would be liberating for her and important in her life. The garden symbolizes her world and the rocks in it keep getting in her way. So she has to deal with life's obstacles, even in her garden -- which is her sanctuary.

I chose the theme -- naked gardening -- as a way to explore how women, who so often put themselves aside in order to care for everyone else, can get back in touch with their inner spirit. I think a woman's spirit is what enables her to be there for everyone else. But she also needs to keep her true spirit accessible.

I was thinking about women in a general way for the theme, but then I developed the seven female characters to symbolize the stages of a woman's life. These characters are different ages from 20s to elderly. They're going through different life crises or changes -- son off at war & husband retired, husband cheating on beautiful wife who's coping with aging, dedicated professional woman faced with unexpected pregnancy, and the rest. And of course Katelyn, fretting over losing herself within the confines of marriage. I think these are universal themes for women. It's not about who does the laundry but of who you think you are and who you want to become and not being stifled by what society expects you to be.

Who was I writing for? Women ages 30 and up. The fact that I've gotten some five star reviews from men has actually surprised me. I never thought any man would read “The Naked Gardener” (of course I did get one review on Amazon from a guy who said: “Girl talk, Yuk.”) That gave me a good chuckle.

But he’s right. It is girl talk. I love girl talk.

Learn more about the author and the book at the author's website, her Facebook page, and on Twitter.

And in case you missed it last week, you can also read my review of The Naked Gardener or check out what amazon reviewers had to say.

Guest Post from Connie May Fowler

I am delighted to be able to share with you a guest post from the talented Connie May Fowler, whose newest book, How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, I reviewed yesterday.

I love Kristen’s wonderful blog and her very evident dedication to books, so it’s quite an honor for her to ask me about how I generate ideas for books.

One of the first rules of being a novelist is The Writer Thou Shalt Not Bore Thyself. I mean think about it . . . novelists spend years (too many hours to count) spinning a single tale that will eventually end up on your bookstore shelf. The brain expenditure and the time dedicated are simply too large for us to spend our creative energies on something we find boring.

So the most honest answer to Kristen’s question is: The ideas find us. A character, a circumstance, a moment in history—perhaps even simply a conversation I eaves dropped on—will grab hold of me and won’t let me go. For instance, in my just released novel, How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, its inception began about five years ago when I was reading about pre-Civil War Florida history and uncovered information about the 1819 Florida Purchase Treaty.


Florida was a Spanish colony and though Spain didn’t practice progressive policies throughout the New World, in Florida it did. For instance, women and black people could own land. Black men could sit on juries. It was, considering what was occurring in the United States, an imperfect Utopia. But the treaty called for Florida to be turned over to the U.S.—a place where slavery and the subjugation of women flourished—in 1821. Thanks to a real estate deal, the most basic of human rights were stripped from two groups: women and people of African descent.
That haunted me. For years, I walked around with the information in my head, creating characters who would have been directly, horrendously affected by the treaty. But I didn’t want it to be a historical novel in the traditional sense, so it also became a ghost story with Clarissa Burden being our current day heroine. Clarissa, too, has to find her path to freedom.

I was interested in what happens to people who are trapped in cruel relationships (government or familial)—how that shapes them and affects other aspects of their lives. Clarissa’s challenges are many and most of them stem from the simple fact that she is mired in a loveless, mean marriage. Her march toward freedom is tied to the past—she recognizes that—and this tension between past and present, the acceptance of cruelty or its outright rejection, forms the foundation of the novel.
Sometimes ideas for my books come from my own life, sometimes from research, sometimes from the people and places around me. And always, always, they haunt and sustain me to the very end.

Cheers and happy reading!

Connie
www.conniemayfowler.com