Please welcome my friend and successful author, Diane Burton. She has an interesting origin tale on how her book came about.
Thanks so much, Susan, for inviting me to your blog and
asking me to tell your readers how my story came about.
One Red Shoe
started as a writing exercise during a writers’ meeting. We were given a
prompt—someone was running toward you at a train station—then wrote for a half
hour. The first thing that popped in my mind was: the man running toward her in
the subway station wore one red shoe. From there, my imagination took over.
I began writing that story back in the late 1990s. It went
through many revisions. In 2004, while at a writers’ conference, I talked some
friends into riding the NYC subway with me to check out a research point. I’m
not sure how many times I submitted the story to editors and contests with
mixed results. Finally, it was contracted with The Wild Rose Press in 2013.
This August, my rights were returned and, after more revisions, I
self-published it last month. After almost twenty years, One Red Shoe is how I envisioned it. My point? Never give up on a
story you believe in.
Blurb:
It Happened One Night
meets Knight and Day
When elementary teacher Daria Mason
left Iowa for a writers’ conference in New York City, she didn’t expect to come
home with a wounded spy. Daria’s life in Small Town, USA is too predictable.
She fears turning into a spinster living out her days with four old bachelor
brothers. Determined to change, she won’t go into her thirties the same person
who let life pass her by. She just wishes she was as strong as the kick-butt
heroine in her stories.
Sam Jozwiak works for a shadow
agency that gathers intel vital to U.S. security. From the moment he steals
digital files from a Russian Mafia kingpin, Murphy’s Law takes over. No matter
how he covers his tracks, the kingpin’s assassin finds him. Only because the
assassin’s sidekick is such a klutz does Sam escape. With intel too hot to
trust to even encrypted email and those two hot on his trail, Sam arrives at a
rendezvous in NYC to find his contact is a no-show. Then, the assassins arrive.
He’s hit twice by ricochets from the unaware klutz. What’s worse than getting
shot in the butt? Accepting help from a tourist.
When Daria races through a restroom,
she belatedly realizes someone else is there—a bleeding man. Back home, her
farm is a veritable menagerie with the injured cats, dogs, and birds she’s
rescued. She can’t turn away from a wounded man, especially when she suspects
he’s in law enforcement like her brother. She’ll patch him up and be one her
way. He asks for help getting him out of the building. She agrees, but that’s
it. He needs medical help. Okay, she’ll get him to a doctor and that’s all. She
can’t miss the chance the next morning to present her story to an editor. But
when Sam is too weak to go on, she sacrifices the opportunity.
Thus, begins a road trip that takes
them from NY to Iowa with the assassins right behind them. Daria proves she is
stronger than she thinks. When Sam’s plans keep falling through, she takes
charge and keeps him safe. Over five days of close quarters and intimacies
shared in the dark, she falls in love with him. They finally get Sam’s intel to
the right people, the bad guys are arrested and Sam returns to his old life,
leaving Daria with a broken heart.
The old Daria would have given up.
The new Daria goes after what she wants. She will rescue Sam from himself. It
just takes longer to convince him she’s the best thing that’s ever come into
his life.
One Red Shoe is
available at:
Diane Burton
combines her love of mystery, adventure, science fiction and romance into
writing romantic fiction. Besides writing science fiction romance, she writes
romantic suspense, and cozy mysteries. Diane and her husband live in West Michigan,
close to their two children and five grandchildren.
Connect with Diane Burton online
Have you ever been inspired to make a novel out of a short story or simple writing exercise? Do you have a story that your worked on for years until you polished it into what you believed it could be? Anyone else wondering how cold Diane and her family are in Western Michigan?
