Wednesday Guest- Mary Vine

I met Mary at a Reader's Luncheon. We were the authors at the same table. Since then we've e-mailed an attended a signing together. Mary has interesting historical romances I"m excited to share with you.

How did your writing career start?
Many people, ideally, plan to go to college after finishing high school, start a career, and then a family. Not me, I married and started a family right away and didn’t think about the possibilities in the world around me until my sons were in high school.
A late bloomer if there ever was one, I didn’t even find a book I couldn’t put down until my mid-twenties let alone create a manuscript. When I first started writing at age 36, I was shy about telling anyone. Finally, I gained enough courage to take a few chapters to my neighbor, a retired high school English teacher. With encouragement, I kept writing and became a member and officer of a writers group. Once finding critique partners there, I was able to learn what it took to become a good writer. Three of my magazine articles on ghost towns in Northeast Oregon were published and I completed five fiction manuscripts, one of which is MAYA’S GOLD, then A PLACE TO LAND, and now WANTING MOORE, published by Black Lyon Publishing.
I eventually graduated from college and teach speech and language classes to high school students. Yes, it’s taken me awhile to make my mark in the world, but I believe I’m just getting started and many other accomplishments await me in the future.

Why are your books set in NE Oregon?
My father always said to invest in real estate. In the summer of ’96 my husband and I looked across the state of Oregon for affordable river front property and bought some acreage between Baker City and Sumpter. We spent every chance we could four wheeling, viewing the mining history amongst the junipers, pines, firs and rocky crags. MAYA’S GOLD is set in the area(s) we motored through. Later, we heard that the wolf was coming into NE Oregon from the Idaho border, so I wrote around the Eagle Cap Mountains, a handsome rancher, and a determined woman assigned to write this story no matter the danger. We have two lots on Main Street in the mining ghost town of Bourne, where WANTING MOORE takes place. The year is 1866, just after the Civil War.

What are you working on now?
I’m working on a contemporary story once again set in NE Oregon, having to do with a clash between the mayor and an attorney who just passed his bar and taking a much earned vacation. He is looking for Spanish treasure on the outskirts of Salisbury Junction.

Maya’s Gold
Love and Gold. Passion and Mystery. As a pattern of crime around Maya Valentine and the newfound gold on her property leads to mystery, her relationship with famous suspense novelist Stanton Black turns to thoughts of romance. A romance too impossible to consider.

A Place to Land
Russian beauty Ulianna is determined to make the American dream hers. When a magazine offers the perfect story to launch writing career, she travels across Oregon to see how wolf and cowboy mix. As she finds her spirit guide in the wolf and her soul mate in handsome cattle rancher Jackson Holt, a mysterious danger seems bent on finding her.

Wanting Moore
Independent beyond what’s good for her, Isabella Moore leaves her brothers and parents in Prairie City in search of her true calling. Traveling to Haines, Oregon, by way of the historic Bourne-Haines Stage Road, she runs across the type of people from whom she’d been sheltered, leading to an accident and a man she’d only dreamed about.
Blacksmith Gabriel Stone saw enough of death during the Civil War to last him a lifetime. To him, Isabella is a broken wildflower in need of his care—but caring for her may bring back unwanted memories of his former life as a doctor. And dare he entrust his heart to a woman filled with ideas of gold mining and adventure?
Thank you!
www.maryvine.com