Mixing Fact with Fiction: The Lawman's Second Chance "Story behind the story"...

Oh my stars, you know that whole mixed emotion thing I love to quote? The one from Dolly Parton as “Truvie” in “Steel Magnolias”?  

“Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion!”

That’s how I felt writing this book, “The Lawman’s Second Chance”, a tribute to my friend Lisa, a 37-year-old mother of four fighting breast cancer and Beth Endlich, the late and beloved mother of my editor Melissa Endlich. 

We’re not going to talk about our sorrow when Lisa was first diagnosed. And we’re not going to talk about the year of treatments that included a bi-lateral mastectomy, chemo (twice), radiation and reconstructive surgery that followed.

We’re going to talk about the fine line of using fact in fiction.

Fact: Lisa got sick

Fact: This is a possibly terminal condition

Fact: Hearts have broken over this disease

Fact: Children were involved, children I’ve loved and cared for since birth.

Fact: Faith is challenged when cancer walks in the door

Fact: Life goes on around you while you fight for your life and that can be a kick in the head. Mundane problems look tiny when you're facing a grim spector...
Fact: Lisa is not and says she NEVER WILL BE a Yankees fan.  :)  For those of you who've read "The Lawman's Second Chance", you'll recognize that the fictional Lisa LOVES THE YANKEES LIKE THE AUTHOR!!! The real Lisa may have choked upon reading that.  :) But hey, we authors have to have a little fun, right????

Fact: God is good, all the time. And all the time, God is good.

Lisa and the daycare moms... Taylor wanted to organize a party to lift her mother's spirits so ... with a little help from her friends....  We had a "Fight Like A Girl!" Party...
Lisa almost didn't come... She was tired, and sick but we pretended it was a shower for Beth so Jeff pushed her to show up, even if just for a little while... then:

SURPRISE!!!

The party was for her, and people came dressed in pink, lugging pink food, young and old, mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, neighbors, Grandma's, Great-grandmas... 

Taylor and Lisa...

God is good, all the time.

That last fact isn’t always obvious when people face traumatic challenges, but it is always true. And when we’d gotten into the treatment phase of Lisa’s battle, I asked if I could do a book about breast cancer, using her battle as my research. (I did reassure her that she didn’t need to go to these extremes for the NEXT book, that really, she’d gone above and beyond anything I would have asked or expected, but since she was there… right there! Jonah, in the whale’s mouth, facing a fairly nasty journey to the gut… would she mind sharing her strength and faith with others?)

For whatever reason she said yes, and I was not about to ARGUE with her… I mean really, take the “yes” and run with it! No one should argue with sick people. It's positively unseemly, right? Then I called Melissa Endlich and proposed the idea to her, sensitive to the recent loss of her mother. No matter how ill... or how old... we're never quite ready to kiss our mothers goodbye, so proposing a book about cancer right then... well, the timing was either wretchedly right or horribly wrong.

Melissa said go ahead... And we did.

Who doesn’t love Susan Boyle’s moments of fame on Britain’s Got Talent? Or Helen Keller’s monumental rise to communication in The Miracle Worker?  Or Jesse Owen's rise to Olympic fame in the 1936 track competition in Nazi Germany, home of the Aryan-race-rules?

We love the moments of triumph over adversity but when you’re dealing with real life people, it’s a fine line between admiration and invasive-ness.

So how did I do this? 

• I made the story pure fiction like any book I write, BUT….
• I used the cancer treatment and support group information I got from the real Lisa to build the character’s struggle for the fictional Lisa.
• I used some attributes of the real Lisa’s three older children, but generally relied on my vast wealth of experience with cute, bratty kids to make them real!  J
• My holy-hot-hero Lt. Alexander Steele was a delightful compilation of :

Lisa's real-life husband, my good friend Jeff Tydings... While Alex Steele is FICTIONAL, I gave him the qualities we all loved and admired in Jeff during Lisa's treatment... of course now he's gone back to being a NORMAL HUSBAND, but I wanted to have youse see him as larger than life... (kidding, Jeff!!!)

:)

Julie Hilton Steele’s name (she won it in a contest a year or so ago! So I named the hero “Steele” after her cute husband.)

The advice of NYS Trooper Chris Lana who acted as my advisor for my info on the NYS police of Troop A (the Southern Tier/Western New York region).

The reality of a church friend who passed away with a different form of breast cancer nearly twenty-five years ago… I saw her widowed husband’s struggle first-hand as he raised their family, and I used that knowledge to form Alex’s confusion. Life is so desperately hard when a whole family grieves, that often we’re blinded to reality by our own emotional overload.

In addition I layered in: 

• The individual loss of each child's mother... Because of individual personality quirks, each child is affected differently by the loss of a parent. That means they'll respond to EACH SITUATION in the book differently if you keep them in character. And that was hugely important because every thing this hero and heroine did... or thought about doing... would affect those children.
• The beauty of the Southern Tier of Western New York, a northern Appalachia wonderland.
• The need for support groups for cancer patients.
• The need to get away from cancer and put it behind you.
• The need to breathe without everyone wondering how you’re doing.
• The need to have someone put their arm around your shoulders and ask, “How are you doing?”
• Family support.
• Community support.
• Intricacies of loss concerning in-laws and extended family.

All of these factors entered into this book, a consortium of things that needed to edge the truth while merging fact with fiction.

In truth I probably came too close at certain moments, but in the end there were two people whose opinions really mattered on this work:

Melissa Endlich, my beloved editor at Love Inspired books who lost her mother to blood cancer not long before Lisa was diagnosed… This book is dedicated to Beth Endlich and Lisa Tydings, and rightly so.

And Lisa, because more than anything I didn’t want to sugarcoat the struggle behind the strength, or minimize the lessons learned. How to live like you were dying. Through all the love and support and rallying cries, it was Lisa who bore the brunt of everything. The pain, the illness, the surgeries, the extended treatments and the face-to-face battle with mortality at a young age. 

This sweet story takes a hard look at loss... at parenting... at change, at love, at life, at risk... And through it all we realize that life is a precious gift... but that home to our Savior's arms should truly be a celebration of a life well-lived.

I hope you read this book. (Click HERE to go straight to Amazon and grab it, then come back.)

Three of the real Lisa's kids were models for this cover... Taylor, McKenna and Nolan  

I hope you love it. I hope it makes you laugh and cry and run the full gamut of emotions because that's how that year of treatment seemed. We laughed. We cried. We prayed.

And we still pray every single day that God's will matches our hopes to grow old teasing Lisa and watching her laugh... and dance... and sing... as time goes by.

 Click Here for Book Trailer to Meet Lisa and her Family!

 All right, all right, grab the tissues:

Now come on inside and grab a cup of coffee.... or tea.... or a Coke. We have diet and regular and my favorite, Diet Cherry Coke!  :)  

Let me know in your comment if you'd like your name put in the cat dish (I cleaned it LAST MONTH so saw no need to do it again, right???? Overkill.) for a critique.... and I found some copies of The Lawman's Second Chance hanging around and I thought I'd like to give them away... :) And if you want to leave an honest review (I'm tough, I can take it, peeps!) on Amazon,  Christian Book.com or Barnes & Noble... I welcome your feedback!

Let's talk about that fine line of inspiration vs. fiction. I'm here to answer questions....

Well, okay, mostly I'm here for the FOOD because it's spring and Mother's Day and I've got a powerful need for my mother's favorite lemon cake... and one of my springtime faves, strawberry rhubarb pie!

RECIPE FOR LEMON CAKE HERE...

RECIPE FOR STRAWBERRY RHUBARB PIE HERE...