The Allure of Small Town Romances by Catherine Lanigan
For those of you who may know me, I spent the bulk
of my life living in cities. Houston, Los Angeles, Scottsdale, even a stint in
New Orleans. And a great many of my romances and women’s fiction novels were
set in even bigger places, Paris, London, Venice, Moscow. So, now what would
look like “all of a sudden”, I am not only living in my hometown, a small town,
but I am writing a series of romances set in the small Indiana town of Indian
Lake.
I moved back home ostensibly to take care of my
aging and ill mother whom the doctors thought only had about a year to live. My
husband and I, rented out his house in Scottsdale, packed up a very large truck
full of furniture and Christmas ornaments (a story in itself), and moved into
the home my parents built in 1950. A few months before the trek from Arizona to
Indiana, my sister and I had moved my mother to an assisted living facility
since mother was no longer able to care for herself. Within nine months of my move
back home, my sister was diagnosed with cancer and five months later she died.
Two years later, my mother died.
This first book in my series, LOVE SHADOWS, was born
out of my grief over losing my two best friends and most loving supporters in
my life. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine what my heroine and hero would endure
as they trod through days of depression before they learned to open their
hearts and love again.
Writing has always been cathartic for me, if not an
absolute escape from things I’d rather not do, especially dusting, grocery
shopping and weeding the garden. But as I began to build my idealized version
of my hometown, Indian Lake, I also looked around with new eyes to see what
small towns were all about and just who were these fascinating people that
populated them.
From the fact that my town has a thirty-one year old
female mayor, who is ex-Navy and looks like a cover girl model, to the
dedicated and energetic eighty-something-year-old woman who had been organizing
“Arts in the Park” free open-air summer concerts for decades, I found dozens of
stories without even looking. My list of strong, independent, sometimes
eccentric women and men grew faster than I could write down their names and
particular foibles. I drew out a grid of the core of the town and as I placed
each house, I knew each person had to have neighbors, which created more
characters. And those neighbors had to have children and cousins, co-workers
and dogs. Lots of dogs. A story, and a life, isn’t complete without animals, I
believe.
You would think that as I started actually putting
down each story into a synopsis, that my “running to the well” would whittle my
pile of characters and plots down to size. Not so. Each time I’ve written a
story, one of the characters who was innocently purchasing a bottle of wine at
the Crenshaw Vineyard or buying a cupcake at Cupcakes and Coffee Cafe, was soon
destined to find themselves embroiled in a tumultuous love story of their own. I like to think out of the box and stretch
myself, though sometimes, I’m a bit too elastic like that guy in the Fantastic
Four.. My very astute editors, Victoria Curran and Claire Caldwell, have given
me a green light to explore a romance between a couple who are well into their
fifties. I’ve even started to develop a sweet romance between Grandpa Sam who
is seventy-five years old and a younger woman who is about to become a widow in
my next book.
And that is what I have discovered about small
towns, large cities and even foreign capitals. It doesn’t matter where you live,
love is what makes life worth living. Without love, we just exist. A life
without love, is no life at all.
