Journey to Roderick Glen
It has been exactly two weeks since The Piano Teacher was released into the world. I want to thank you again for the support you've shown me. Your sweet comments have been so uplifting and encouraging. I am truly honored to know you have enjoyed Melody's story.
As I've said before, writing has been a huge part of my life since I was a little girl. Reading has also been a favorite pastime, and the books I was introduced to as a child have definitely cast a long shadow over my writing career.
Some of the first books I read were the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Anne of Green Gables series by LM Montgomery. I was fascinated by both authors' writing styles, particularly that of Montgomery. I could probably write an entire blog post describing the ways in which I admire her work, but for now I will simply say that she remains one of my most important influences as a writer.
My love for history was also developed at a young age, mostly because of my love for these books set in the 1800s. When I began writing stories of my own, it was a natural progression to compose stories set in the past. Now that I think about it, I don't believe I've ever written a contemporary story. I've dabbled a bit in fantasy, but my heart has always belonged to historical fiction.
As I grew older, I began to read the novels of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. I adored all of them, especially Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece, Jane Eyre, with its perfect blend of romance and mystery. I developed a fascination with British culture which only increased as I began reading novels written by authors like Julie Klassen and Sarah Ladd.
As I have also mentioned in an earlier blog post, in 2014 I suffered a detached retina in my left eye. It was a life changing event, one that caused me to reassess the goals I had for myself. I decided that once I recovered, I would devote myself to writing. Even if I could never be a success, I was determined to try. I had recovered enough by early 2015 that I was able to begin writing again. I worked on a couple of different novels, but didn't finish either of them. Then, in 2017, a new idea came to me.
At first, it was nothing more than a title. I play piano and have taught lessons for years, and one day as I was waiting for my next student to arrive, I began to spin a little story in my mind about a piano teacher with a mysterious past. The title, The Piano Teacher, was very simplistic, but I believed it fit the story completely.
I turned the idea over in my mind for the next few weeks. I was still plugging away on one of my other novels, but the idea of The Piano Teacher wouldn't leave me alone. I kept coming back to it and expanding on the idea, until I began to think of it as not just one book, but an entire series with multiple characters and storylines. It would be a series dedicated to highlighting independent women set at a time in history when independent women were few and far between.
The more I thought about it, the more excited I became, but still I hesitated. Even though I loved books and television shows set in England, I had never attempted to write a novel in that setting before. I have never traveled to England (though I've always wanted to) and would need to rely heavily on research and photographs to create an authentic English village in the Victorian era. I wondered if I could really step out of my comfort zone and write in this time period I had long admired but had never dared try for myself.
Despite my uncertainty, I became more and more convinced that writing these stories was something I needed to do. So began my journey to Roderick Glen, home of these quirky, wonderful characters.
It was a joy to write The Piano Teacher, and I hope to continue the journey through the next book of the series, The Dressmaker. I hope my readers will want to continue the journey with me, as well. After all, it's never fun to take a long journey alone.
And I hope, like me, you'll find that coming back to Roderick Glen means returning to a little piece of home.