Dear Ones,
Crowning Design is the last to be republished of the three romances I wrote in the mid-eighties. The other two—Ryan’s Hand and Aly’s House—were rereleased last year with prefaces, like this one, explaining that at the time of their writing thirty-three years ago I had no idea how to go about putting together a book, a deficit that I hope will not be too apparent in this one. For those of you who have never written a book-length narrative and for those of you who would like to, let me say that there is no agony like facing a blank page in a typewriter (or computer if you are of the electronically literate) with no idea of what or who to write about when you’ve been paid to do so by a certain deadline. And that’s exactly the position I found myself in when I first began to write Crowning Design. Ryan’s Hand had been published, and I was under contract to produce two more romances, never having believed I could write the first one. So there I sat racking my brain to come up with something containing characters, plot, and setting. If I failed, I could see my advance flying from my hand back to the publisher and my name forever shamed in publishing circles.
Now I chuckle at the huge and absurd importance I gave myself. My advance would hardly have covered the bill for hamburgers and fries for two at a coffee shop, and nobody in “publishing circles” had a clue or cared the slightest who I was.
But I cared and I wanted to tell an interesting story. Now those of you who’ve read my previous letters to fans and readers as introductions to Ryan’s Hand and Aly’s House already know that I don’t follow the tried-and-true rule of fiction writing that instructs writers to write what they know. I write about what I don’t know and then learn from research. So there I sat empty-brained the day the idea hit me for Crowning Design. Funny, odd, strange how a long-ago memory of a detail can leap out of the past at just the right moment and spawn a whole world (or book) of possibilities. Perhaps it only happens to writers under deadline looking at a blank page, but it happened to me. Somehow I was back in high school sitting in Miss Harbin’s biology class (we called unmarried women Miss in those days), eraser in hand bearing down hard on a pituitary gland I’d drawn in the wrong place on my rendering of the human anatomy. (No mistakes were allowed.) A classmate leaned over to me. “You are rubbing too hard. If you will erase lightly, the pencil marks will disappear entirely,” he said. And so I did and learned a valuable lesson that day. Better results can be achieved with gentle handling over hard pressure just about any time. But I digress. Ever afterward that school year, I followed my classmate’s advice, and Miss Harbin never knew my pencil lead had landed where it shouldn’t have been.
So there it was, the one detail that would set up the mystery of who done it in Crowning Design. After that, the other elements of fiction came fairly quickly. I would set my story in a place I’d once visited briefly but didn’t know much about and would like to learn more. So Colorado it was. The Rockies, the clear mountain streams and rivers and lakes, the blue columbines, the seasons! (We don’t have seasons in Texas. Not predictable ones, anyway.) What a background against which to spin a tale! Architecture was a subject I’d wanted to know more about, so I jotted that down as a possible launchpad, and then the green light flashed. I was off and shooting forward to formulate the suspense story of Crowning Design. To see how those pencil marks fit into the novel, you’ll have to read the book, but since you wouldn’t be reading this if you did not have one in hand, I’ll wish you enjoyable reading with hope this finds you well.
Leila Meacham