http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/?utm_source=rss Authors tell you what inspired their work Copyright 2009, Thinkmap Inc. All Rights Reserved. en Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 EDT http://www.visualthesaurus.com/images/common/logo_on_white.gif http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/?utm_source=rss Search for a word in the Visual Thesaurus word http://www.visualthesaurus.com Backstory http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1892?utm_source=rss For me to say that the idea for my novel Twilight of Avalon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0026WNGAG?ie=UTF8&tag=thevisualthes-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0026WNGAG) came to me in a dream seems almost too fantastic a story to be believed. But it really is true, and it happened this way. Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 EDT http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1892 Backstory http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1875?utm_source=rss I began writing fiction in 2000. I needed an outlet for my thoughts and feelings following the death of my mother. At the time, I was overwhelmed with emotion and my work counseling parents was very intense. I was writing a monthly parenting column for a Boston newspaper and working on a nonfiction parenting guide. But it's in writing fiction that I found my home. For me novel writing is a wonderful catharsis and a deeply personal means of creative expression. Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 EDT http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1875 Backstory http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1860?utm_source=rss My novel Best Intentions (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416576711?ie=UTF8&tag=thevisualthes-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1416576711) built on this kernel of an idea: What happens when you think you know what the person you love is thinking — and you're dead wrong? I think we've all experienced this in various relationships — you may act with the best intentions to make someone else happy but without real communication, the results can be disastrous. Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 EDT http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1860 Backstory http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1846?utm_source=rss Back in 1981, when I was ten years old, my life had become a foreign-language film without subtitles. Everywhere I went, people spoke English, which was a problem because all I knew was Korean. My mother, my two sisters, and I had made the trek from Seoul, South Korea to reunite with my father in New Jersey, and once we got our bearings, it was time to get to work. Fri, 08 May 2009 00:00:00 EDT http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1846 Backstory http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1812?utm_source=rss In the late 17th century, famed pirate Emer Morrisey was on the cusp of escaping pirate life with her one true love and unfathomable riches when she was slain and cursed with the dust of 100 dogs, dooming her to one hundred lives as a dog before returning to a human body — with her memories intact. Now she's a contemporary American teenager, and all she needs is a shovel and a ride to Jamaica. Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 EDT http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1812 Backstory http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1771?utm_source=rss On a foggy February morning in 1983, fourteen people were gunned down at the Wah Mee club in Maynard Alley, just shy of South King Street in Seattle's Chinatown. It was the worst mass-murder in Washington State history. Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1771 Backstory http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1729?utm_source=rss I've given birth to two children by scheduled Cesarean section, so I never had to spend a moment in actual labor. Is it true that many women forget the painful hours they spent in natural childbirth? I read somewhere that nature created some mechanism in us by which women do, indeed, forget so that we'll be willing to have more than one child. If it's true, I think I could compare the writing of Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345497694?ie=UTF8&tag=thevisualthes-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0345497694) to a kind of natural childbirth. Sometimes I look at that tidy book with its dark, evocative cover and wonder just how in the heck it got here. Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 EST http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1729 Backstory http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1677?utm_source=rss The summer I was 17, I worked at a camp in Northeast Ohio, on the Lake Erie shore. I was courting the girl who would later become (and still is) my wife, and many nights we would be up late, watching the slow progress of the oreboats and gazing at the stars over the water. I was on maintenance, and, being the only one who could drive the tractor, I had to get up at five-thirty in the morning and coax the old red Farm-All to life and hook up the homemade, plywood-sided trailer so we could collect the camp's garbage and scrub the latrines. I didn't sleep a lot that summer, but late one night, or more exactly, early one morning while I was enjoying my two hours of rest, the state police knocked on the door of the male staff's dorm. Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1677 Backstory http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1648?utm_source=rss I've always wanted to be a scientist. But in the early 1970s, the pull of the hippie movement was strong. After dropping out of the University of Michigan, I married a stoneware potter, and for several years my husband and I made our living traveling throughout Michigan and surrounding states selling his work at art shows. Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1648 Backstory http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1632?utm_source=rss My close friend is a family therapist and once told me her favorite clients are children with non-verbal learning disorders, because of their loving dispositions—naiveté, clumsiness, big hearts, and an utter inability to connect with other children. She loves that they talk too close, constantly knock things over, say the wrong thing, and still get lost on the way to the restroom down the hall in an office they've been coming to for five years. Often they can't walk up the stairs and talk at the same time, their clothes are inside out and their lack of motor skills means they can't brush their own teeth. If you tell them to jump in a lake, they probably will. Frustrating, to say the least. Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/backstory/1632