Heather Sharfeddin, author of "Blackbelly"

I love the name Blackbelly because it's mysterious -- some people suspect it's erotic, some that it's racist. It is, in fact, a breed of sheep with black bellies that hails from Barbados. Like my protagonist, Chas McPherson, I raise Blackbelly sheep. He raises them for meat, but I just use them to keep down the blackberries on my Oregon farm.

I was working on another novel (my fourth unpublished) when I woke up in the middle of the night compelled to write Blackbelly. When people ask me where my ideas come from, I have to say they come straight out of the darkness like a bolt of lightning. Or, at least the best ideas do. There was a connection in Blackbelly that was more personal to me than just the fact that I raise sheep, though it wasn't evident until I'd finished the first draft. That's when, stepping back, I could see the web of themes I'd knitted together and their striking relevance to my life: faith vs. religion, sin and forgiveness, prejudice and rural Idaho.

I was raised in an evangelical home in remote Idaho that bordered on Pentecostal at times. Chas McPherson is the only son of the most feared preacher in that same state, a man now mute and dying of Parkinson's. Like me, Chas is ambivalent about his ties to religion, but not without his own carefully drawn conclusions about God. He is not what one would expect of a man from that environment.

The story of Chas McPherson is the story of who I wish I could be -- unchanged by public opinion, unwavering in the face of adversity. But alas, that is not me. As a matter of fact I quit writing at page 175. I had racked up so many agent rejections on my previous work that I finally threw in the towel. Eight years of writing fiction, taking classes and workshops, hiring professional editors, and exploring the art and craft had not paid off for me. I'd never worked so hard at something in my entire life, and I'd never failed so thoroughly.

But what does a storyteller do when they quit telling stories? They drink. They rage. They make everyone around them miserable. It was my husband who suggested that maybe I wouldn't be so angry about pepperoni pizza if I started writing again. He urged me to "just finish this one book. It's almost done, anyway." Sitting there that evening, listening to my husband cajole me into finishing Blackbelly I could not have imagined the glowing reviews it would received. I could not have believed strangers would write to me to tell me they loved it. But I suspected he was right about the pizza.

Heather Sharfeddin is the author of Blackbelly, a contemporary western novel that traces the consequences of a crime of bigotry. Read her blog here.