"Bonneville Blues" by Patricia Cooper Baker

 – still stuck on my Blue Goose

Her gas-guzzling bus-of-a-car always seemed up for adventure—crowbar and all.  

Patricia Baker lives in Maggie Valley, North Carolina, where she is a member of the Mountain Writers Coalition. She is a lifetime writer, but after teaching, consulting, and managing online communities, she now writes fulltime. The tribulations of Trish’s Burke County family during the American Revolution are reflected in her Freedom Tavern series. Her current projects include a time-travel series Top Shelf Tales (pre-teen to adult) and a new Sci-fi series, Martian Spring (young adults and up). Read about her past and ongoing work at Cooperspeak.com.

Author’s Talk

My family gave me roots set deep in the rocky clay of Burke County and their stories nurtured the stems and leaves that sprouted from those roots.  From Holy parables to the hunting yarns from my father, stories were part of the culture that bred me.

Patricia (Trish) Cooper Baker

Then came the stories written by strangers, tales about places far from Burke County and times in the future or before I was born. Those stories broadened my world, leaving me satisfied but hungry for more. Writers such as Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Alexandre Dumas, Helen MacInnes, and many who were not so famous took me to places far from Burke County and showed the perils life could bring and how people survived them. 

I owed those storytellers for expanding my world, and I promised to repay them by adding to the world’s collection of stories. Unfortunately, vowing to do so wasn’t enough. I tried early and often, but the limits of youth, inexperience in plot development, and the sad fact that word processors were a thing of the future kept me from following through. 

Writing classes, summer workshops, and intense school projects honed me a little. I wrote for school and work, and occasionally life inspired me to write a poem about the miraculous beauty around me. Kids and careers consumed my time and talent, but I never forgot the debt—the story yet unwritten. 

When one of my jobs required weekly writing with a story at the core, I discovered that I could weave a plot. When I could live without a steady paycheck, my job became honing those plots as I learned the craft of storytelling.

 That’s where I am today. With half a dozen novels under my belt, I’m still honing my craft. 

Join me in the journey at Cooperspeak.com .