As mentioned last Tuesday, I originally came up with the story idea for and wrote the first draft of Love Remains back in 2003. As mentioned, the template for the character that would become Bobby Patterson was a real-life coworker of mine. So I already had his physical type/looks in mind as I developed the story idea—but by the time I started writing the story, we no longer worked together and I didn’t have any pictures of him. So I needed a similar template of whom I could find pictures.

At that time, there was a program on HGTV called Weekend Warriors that I watched not for the amateur remodeling on display but because of the host, a guy named Brien Blakely (rabbit trail: oddly enough, Blakeley was last name of the hero in my first completed manuscript, which I came up with long before this show aired). Because the real-life person who inspired this fictional character was named Kevin, and because I had a thing for the name Kevin as a teenager, I originally named the character Kevin Patterson (Patterson chosen because it’s a good, solid, easy to type/read/pronounce last name).

To be totally honest, I can’t really remember how I came up with the name Zarah. I’ve never been one for unusual/kitschy names, but I think I was stuck on Z names at that time, because I have another story idea from around the same time in which the character’s name is Zannah (short for Suzannah, of course). Anyway, to go ahead and answer the inevitable question—it’s pronounced just like Sarah but with a Z instead of an S. Again, I chose the last name Mitchell because, after years of developing and populating Bonneterre, Louisiana, I needed some easy to type, easy to read/pronounce last names. (And partly because Adam Baldwin’s character in Independence Day was Major Mitchell, so that name had stuck with me for a while.)

It’s rather fitting that I ended up casting the other two main female characters in this series from stock photos, because Zarah Mitchell was the first character I ever wrote who was cast from a catalog model rather than an actor/actress. Thank goodness for my mother’s addiction to Land’s End clothing and for sending me some stuff from there throughout the years to ensure I’d receive their catalogs, because that’s where I found the template for Zarah, in their Holiday Edition 2002 plus-size catalog (and yes, I still have the catalog—which is a very good thing, because all of my old scans had degraded badly in eight years, so I was able to rescan them all!).

I loved that she wasn’t the typical model one sees in clothing catalogs and there were other images of her as well (more than 25 just in this one 68-page catalog!), all of which started painting a picture of a personality: someone who’s quiet, demure, self-deprecating, modest (perhaps overly so), takes herself and her life a little too seriously. And I wanted a character who’s slightly larger, this time a size 14.

Needless to say, when I received this cover:

while I thought it was gorgeous, I did have to e-mail my editor back to tell her in the nicest way I could that neither person on the front cover looks like my characters.

After a new design and a few tweaks back and forth, they came up with the cover we now have, which I absolutely adore. I’ve had several people ask me if it’s actually me on the front cover. So, to answer that question:

I’m not sure where they found the stock photo of this model (I’ve searched high and low and can’t find her), but as you can see, she’s a much better representation of the template I’ve had in my head for this character for seven and a half years now than the girl on that first cover. (And yes, there is quite a bit of resemblance to me, at least, back when I had long hair.)

When I pulled the manuscript and all of my image files up when I started what I thought was going to be a rewrite/revision of the original draft, I realized that Kevin’s character no longer worked. Originally, he was a computer software programmer who’d returned to Nashville to open a branch of the company of which he was a Vice President. The problem, I realized, was that the only conflict this gave me was Zarah’s dread of having to work with him to upgrade the computers/systems/software at the agency where she worked. Not a very deep plot. And, because I needed to change his career, I had to change the reason why he came back to Nashville—and still give him some excuse for interaction with Zarah.

In the years between writing the original draft and picking it up again, a couple of things happened. I fell in love with the idea of creating a law enforcement character named Bobby (thanks to Vincent d’Onofrio’s character Bobby Goren in Law & Order: Criminal Intent), and I developed a major character-development crush on the actor Tamoh Penikett by watching him in both Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse—on which he played an FBI agent. So why not rename him Bobby and have him be with the state criminal investigation division? (So, no, there is no connection to the “actor” Robert Pattinson, as the name Patterson was chosen long before Pattinson appeared in his first movie.)

So I ended up with Zarah Mitchell, age 32, Assistant Director of the Middle Tennessee Historic Preservation Commission, and Bobby Patterson, age 34, Special Agent in Charge, Tennessee Criminal Investigations Unit.

More pictures of Zarah and Bobby here.

Secondary Characters
In addition to the grandparents, there are several important secondary characters:

Patrick “Mack Truck” Macdonald (template: former Tennessee Titans player Frank Wycheck). Patrick and Bobby played football together in high school and had planned to go on to play together at the University of Tennessee/Knoxville, but due to getting involved with the wrong kinds of kids (a judge’s son and a preacher’s son), Bobby ended up enlisting in the Army upon graduating from high school. Patrick is co-leader with Zarah of the singles group at their church.

Special Agent Chase Denney (template: actor, writer, director Tyler Perry). The first person Bobby meets at his new job, Chase not only helps Bobby settle in at the TCIU, he becomes Bobby’s sounding board, providing Bobby someone to talk to unconnected with himself or Zarah in an emotional way who can provide objective feedback on their situation. Chase is married with two sons.

Dr. Dennis Forrester (template: actor Denis Lawson). Dennis has been Zarah’s boss since she started working at the MTHPC as a graduate student. As Bobby learns in his case briefing, Dr. Forrester has his undergraduate degree in civil engineering from the University of North Carolina and worked as a city planner and zoning official in several places for the first twenty years of his career. Then he moved to Nashville to pursue a graduate degree in Historic Preservation at James Robertson University (more on that next spring when I introduce The Art of Romance). He’s been the director of MTHPC for ten years. And, according to Bobby’s boss, “he seems pretty well-to-do for someone who’s been the head of a government-funded nonprofit agency for that long.”

Caylor Evans and Flannery McNeill (templates: models from Jupiter Images). Zarah first met Caylor and Flannery because Caylor’s grandmother is friends with Zarah’s grandmother. Caylor is two years older than Zarah and Flannery is right in between them in age (Caylor and Flannery met Flan’s first year at Vandy when they were on the same hall in the dorm and had several classes together). At the end of her sophomore year of college at Vanderbilt, Zarah moved into an apartment off campus with Caylor and Flan. The three continued living together—moving from the apartment into a house when Zarah was in grad school. Five years ago, when Caylor’s grandfather died, she had to move in with her grandmother, because her grandmother can’t drive; so Zarah bought a house in the 12 South area of Nashville, and Flannery bought a condo in downtown. Caylor is a tenured professor of British Literature and Literary Criticism at James Robertson University, along with being a published romance novelist, and Flannery is an editor at a publishing house. Caylor gets her story told in The Art of Romance (May 2011), and Flannery gets her romance in Turnabout Is Fair Play (December 2011).

In the fall of 2002, I completed my second manuscript. Whereas it had taken me nine months to write the first one I’d ever completed, the second one took seven months. And by the time I wrote the ending (a hastily wrapped up conclusion, because I had grown somewhat tired of the story—I now realize that it didn’t really have a plot arc; it was very character driven, and they weren’t driving anywhere very quickly), I was burned out. I remember telling a family member at Christmas that year I wasn’t sure if I’d ever write again.

Of course, I think a lot of that had to do with the fact I was working full-time (in a high-stress job I didn’t like most days), was working as a volunteer for ACFW, was taking nine hours of undergraduate (mostly literature) college courses, was teaching Sunday school and singing in choir and at church pretty much every time the doors were open, and I had been living with severe (occasionally incapacitating) back pain for almost a year.

The Inspiration
At my job, as the executive assistant/office manager for the Retail Advertising department at Nashville’s daily newspaper, it was my job to walk new employees through the first-day process—paperwork, ID badge, parking, building tour, introductions, etc. With the high turnover our department had, this was almost a weekly thing for me. And I’d gotten to the point where I didn’t really get to know new employees until they’d been there for at least three months (so many washed out sooner than that). But there was one who, though he only worked there a few months, made an indelible impression on me.

Part of it had to do with the fact that, physically, he was totally my “type”: very tall and built like a football player, attractive without being “gorgeous,” outgoing (yes, somewhat flirtatious), and still a somewhat old-fashioned gentleman. (In other ways, he totally wasn’t my type—but that’s not important to this story.) In talking to him as we went about getting him official his first day of work, I learned he’d been in the army. Not only that, he’d been stationed in New Mexico . . . and not just anywhere in New Mexico, but at White Sands Missile Range—during the last year my dad was there. And even though I was in the death-throes of trying to get that second novel finished, I remember the “what if” scenario popping into my head: what if I’d met him when I was seventeen and he was nineteen when we both lived out there. I even went home and wrote down a few ideas.

By the end of 2002, that guy no longer worked with me. I was wallowing in that burned-out feeling, not wanting to write again any time soon. And after a year of getting no solution from my regular doctor for my back pain (all he kept telling me was to lose weight), I finally got a referral to an orthopedic specialist.

On January 3, 2003, I had an appointment to go in and get an MRI. Having had a couple of them before, I knew what to expect—and part of that was that it takes at least 30 minutes, during which you can’t read or move. I figured it would be a great time to doze off or engage in some lovely, relaxing daydreaming.

As soon as the platform moved me up into the tube, with earphones carrying the sounds of the Oldies station to me, I immediately started visualizing a story about a young woman, with a stern, unloving father (nothing like my father!!!) who’s a general in the army, meeting a young enlisted soldier and falling in love with him and sneaking around behind her father’s back and dating him. About the father breaking them up in such a way they each thought the other at fault. And about these two people coming face-to-face again unexpectedly many years later.

In the thirty minutes that MRI took, I knew who my characters were and had plotted the whole story. It was going to be my current-day tribute to my favorite Jane Austen novel, Persuasion. And I had a great title for it, too.

That Title Sounds Familiar
“Love Remains” is the title of not just one but two songs that I absolutely adored. One was by the contemporary Christian group Avalon (listen here). Their song was relatively new, and just reinforced the phrase I’d come to love from a song by someone who was one of my favorite singers through the 1990s and early 2000s, Collin Raye:

This title worked on two levels for me—the most obvious is the idea that, even fourteen years after a bad breakup, these two characters had the chance to see if their first love still remained strong and true. How many of us, disappointed in love at a young age, wonder about that? The second way in which it worked is because, as I had just finished a Middle Tennessee History seminar, I decided that the heroine would be an archaeologist/historian/preservationist who specialized in the Civil War battles that took place right here in Middle Tennessee (the Battles of Franklin, Stones River/Murfreesboro, and Nashville). So in a literal way, the title of the story reflected the heroine’s love for historical “remains” or sites that she tries to protect and restore.

I started writing the original draft of Love Remains on January 3, 2003, as soon as I got home from that MRI. I’d been told at that time that it was impossible to break into trade fiction, as a romance author, without having written category romance first. So I was going to try to write a 50,000-word novel (with my first two completes sitting at 130,000 and 120,000 words).

That spring, I was still working full-time, taking nine hours of undergraduate courses, working as a volunteer for ACFW, and teaching Sunday school and singing in choir and at church every time the doors were open. And I finished Love Remains in four months. It topped out at a hair under 75,000 words—the shortest complete manuscript I’ve ever written. Even though I worked for a couple of months with a published category-romance author on it, not even she could help me figure out how to cut it down to 50k without losing my plot/characters.

And then, as I was getting more and more frustrated with trying to figure out how to make it the appropriate length for a category romance, I watched the movie The Wedding Planner and came up with a new story idea for a wedding planner who falls in love while planning her ex-fiancé’s wedding. Do I need to tell you what happened to Love Remains after that idea hit?

Six Years Later…
Fastforward six years later to 2009. With three books under contract to Barbour (two already out), they asked for a proposal for another three book series. Because I’d been “working in” Bonneterre for about six years, even though I had ideas for another Bonneterre trilogy, I decided I needed to take a break and work with a different setting. What place more logical than where I currently live: Nashville, Tennessee? And, guess what—I already had a draft of a story written that was set in Nashville. Because Barbour wanted a pretty quick turnaround to get Love Remains scheduled for release this summer/fall, I agreed to an early spring deadline, even though I knew it would only give me two months to write it. I figured, you see, that I’d be able to take that 75,000-word existing draft and spend a few weeks revising it (as I know my writing has improved vastly since then) and filling it out with new scenes to bring it up to my 100k word-count goal. Easy-peasy, right?

Umm . . . it ended up taking me three months to write it—I turned it in one month late—because I changed so much of the story that I wasn’t able to use anything from that first draft. Well, toward the end, I pulled one scene from the first draft and heavily revised it to fit this new manuscript.

And that’s how Love Remains came to be. 🙂