Welcome to Christine Rice, this week’s inspiration award winner. She’s writing about her paranormal, historical fiction book, Blue Valley. Welcome Christine!
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Everyone has a story they have to get off their chest, and for me, Blue Valley was that story.
It began in (gack) 1988, when I was a directionless artist, and decided to apply for an Archaeology fellowship with a distant university. I didn’t care where it was, I was just yearning for an adventure, some productive reason to leave my house and my city and do something no one else was doing. I hoped to get sent to the Middle East, but I got sent to California to dig up the least known, least visited, California mission. Soledad.I was an emotionally immature, culturally sophisticated girl from Brooklyn, plopped in the middle of America’s salad bowl for six weeks of historical investigation.
Well, I can’t tell you much about the California missions, even though I live in Los Angeles now, but I can tell you about farming. I was enchanted by the place. The weather, the water, the earth, the people. Nothing had prepared me for the way farm country looked, felt or smelled, and I learned not just the practicalities of the business from the people that lived there, but who they were and what was important to them. I saw a place that looked desolate to my over-stimulated mind, but was actually rich in history and culture.
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Then I went home and forgot everything for, I don’t know, five or six years.
When I decided to start writing, one of the first things I wanted to write about was Soledad, but I didn’t know how. I tried drama, I tried a thriller. I tried horror. I tried to let the place tell me the story it wanted me to tell. But there was nothing, and I went on to write other things.
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On a visit to Northern California, I was describing to my soon-to-be husband my trouble in writing about such a rich, storied place, and it came to me. My trouble was that I was treating Soledad like a location. It’s not a location. It’s a character. And it’s been that way ever since.
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Blue Valley: The ElementalsAt the outset of World War 2, with the government terrified of Japanese sabotage, Will Leary is sent to California to investigate a spreading, deadly blue soil. When he falls in love with the magical woman who is unwittingly causing the destruction, he must decide between science and his soul.