When I begin a novel, I approach it like an eight-to-five job, five days a week, with maybe a short stint of writing slipped into Saturdays and Sundays. I am often asked to explain what prompts the story line and characters I write about, and I am at a loss. I spoke the truth when an interviewer asked me once if could answer the question in three words, and I replied, “Yes. How about ‘I don’t know.’” I have always begun a novel with a trigger that comes out of the blue and without a clue to where the story is headed. It simply evolves. My favorite example is the single line that developed into Tumbleweeds. It reads, “The call he’d been expecting for twenty-two years came at midnight when he was working late at his desk.” I looked at that line and thought, Now what?

Did the final book turn out just as you expected it to, or did it change over the course of your writing, and if so, how?

Well, as I’ve explained, I didn’t know enough when I started to have expectations, but once I had the first chapter in place, based on my research, there was only one logical way to go, and I believe the conclusion reflects that. In war, there are winners and losers, the winners not always having won the battle, and the losers not always having lost it. Endings of my books somehow have a way of concluding as they should be, or at least, I’d like to think so.

What are you working on next?

It is a contemporary story of an attractive but ordinary housewife who believes she is being stalked. The title is April Storm. Its setting is in Avon, Colorado, at the base of the Beaver Creek Resort. Unlike my other novels, the action takes place in one month, time enough to unravel the mystery of who is pursuing Kathryn Walker and why.

ALSO BY LEILA MEACHAM

HISTORICAL FICTION

Roses

Tumbleweeds

Somerset

Titans

ROMANCE

Ryan’s Hand

Crowning Design

Aly’s House