Have you always wanted to be a writer? When did you start writing?
I wish I’d always wanted to be a writer. I was one of those kids who had no clue what they wanted to do with their lives. As a result, I ended up in an ill-fitting, postcollege job managing restaurants. I started writing a couple of years after becoming a stay-at-home mom to stave off boredom. One of the greatest fears of being a stay-at-home mom is not being able to go back into the workforce when your kids become self-sufficient, or when they leave the nest. I’m incredibly lucky to have found a second career where age doesn’t matter, and one I actually want to work at for the rest of my life.
Who are some of your biggest influences?
Every book I’ve ever read. I don’t have one writer, or even a few writers, who have influenced me more than others. I read across genres and think that keeps me from falling into genre tropes too terribly often. Authors whose works have made me want to be a better writer, or have changed my life in some way? That’s a long list: Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edith Wharton, Anita Shreve, Larry McMurtry, J. K. Rowling, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Martin Cruz Smith, Anne Brontë, Anne Perry, Sandra Dallas, Margaret Atwood, Danielle Steel, Stephen King, Eric Larson, Stephen Ambrose, Georgette Heyer, Jacqueline Winspear, Mary Doria Russell, Rainbow Rowell … I could go on and on.
How did the characters Laura and Kindle come to you?
Neither walked into my head fully formed. I wanted a strong, independent woman as my main character, and as I researched the Civil War era I came across two interesting tidbits: stories of women dressing up like men to serve in the war, and of handsome women being turned away from nursing at the beginning of the war because it was believed they would distract the wounded from healing. I knew immediately my main character would have gone to any lengths to help the Union cause, and I also knew she was arrogant enough to believe she could do a man’s job as well or better. When I discovered sisters Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, two of the first women to earn medical degrees in the United States, and other trailblazing female doctors, many of whom were inspired by their nursing work in the war, Laura waved to me and said, “Really, Melissa. What took you so long?”
With Kindle, I needed a dashing cavalry officer to come on the scene and appear to be the requisite white knight, so I could flip the script and have Laura save him. One of the greatest challenges in writing historical fiction is keeping the characters’ opinions, beliefs, and actions true to the time without alienating the reader. Working within the nineteenth-century prism, I needed Kindle to have great strength, and enough humility and vulnerability to admire Laura for her intelligence, determination, and arrogance, instead of being threatened by her. Since Sawbones was completely from Laura’s point of view, we saw Kindle as she saw him, which was a tiny bit idealized, as is wont to happen when you’re in the first throes of love. So it was a great relief when I was breaking the story for Blood Oath that I realized Kindle had a dark side, and an interesting, complicated past. I never liked the character more than when he was making mistakes, and struggling with how his past actions adversely affected Laura. Yes, I’m a little bit in love with Kindle. Why do you ask?
Fun fact about how the characters got their names: when I started writing Sawbones, my favorite TV show, Battlestar Galactica, was in its final season. My two favorite characters were Laura Roslin and William Adama. The very, very first thought I had about this story was: “What if Roslin and Adama were dropped into the Old West?” And here we are, nearly a decade later.
This series isn’t quite like anything else out there. What inspired you to write this type of book?
I read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and was searching for another Western to read. Everything I picked up was either a male-centric perpetuation of the Hollywood mythology of the West or a straight-up romance. The West wasn’t settled only by men, and there’s more to women’s lives than finding a man. I set out to write a book from a woman’s point of view that wasn’t afraid to show the West in all its contradictions—brutal and beautiful, corrupt and honorable, built on lies by honest, hardworking dreamers—with a love story that didn’t solve the characters’ problems but ended up complicating and enriching their lives in equal measure.
What kind of research did you do for the series, and what is your writing process like?
Having an unlimited amount of time to write Sawbones meant I could read voraciously about the time period, and I did. It’s still my preferred mode of research. I read books, and study their bibliographies for further reading, which I also do on Wikipedia. Wikipedia gets a bad rap, but if you go into it with a critical eye, and know how to drill down into the notes and follow the sources, it can be a good starting point. I also find the websites for state historical societies, Texas State Historical Society, Wyoming State Archives, and so on, to be a wealth of information. And now, I’m going to confess my deepest, dorkiest research dream: to research at the Library of Congress. It’s so intimidating; I get sweaty palms thinking about it, but one day I’ll drum up the courage. I know me; I’ll have to dedicate a month to it because of the many rabbit holes I’ll fall down in the LIBRARY OF CONGRESS!
I suspect that writing a series is much different from writing a stand-alone novel. How did your writing process and author experience differ from book to book?
It took me five years of fits and starts to finish Sawbones. I had months, years, to test out different story lines, structures, tones, and so on, until I finally found the true story. I had a six-month deadline for Blood Oath and a nine-month deadline for Badlands. I didn’t have the luxury of trying different things out or even writing a terrible first draft. I had to focus my thoughts, ideas, and writing in a way I never had to before. It was the best thing that’s ever happened to me, developmentally. Not only did it prove to me I can write under that kind of pressure, it proved to me my writing can be as good, maybe better, with fear of failure on a slow burn beneath my office chair. However, now that I’ve proven I can write like that, I’m not eager to repeat the experience.
Did you have a plan for the series when you first set out to write Sawbones? If so, how did that plan change by the time you got to Badlands?
The idea to turn it into a series came when my agent said, “The publisher wants to know if this is a series,” and I said, “Of course it’s a series!” Which meant I needed a plot for two books when I hadn’t considered what happened next for Laura and Kindle besides “they ride off in the sunset and have adventures.” I had to decide whether to jump forward in time and write connected books but not sequels per se, or to pick their story up right after the events of Sawbones and make all three novels one long character arc. My writing buddy said, “The easiest thing in the world to write is a chase novel,” which was better than any idea I’d come up with. Because I don’t tend to plot novels but jump right in and hope for the best, I had no idea where Blood Oath was going, other than across Indian Territory to Independence, Missouri. When I neared the end of Blood Oath, I realized two chase novels in a row would be boring. For the third book, I wanted to bring Laura full circle by giving her a taste of the life she originally envisioned when she set out for Colorado at the beginning of Sawbones, as well as wrap up the inciting incident that kicked off the trilogy.
If you could spend an afternoon with one of your characters, which would it be and what would you do?
Just one? Tough choice. Probably Camille or Rosemond. The stories they could tell.