Family Rules

I pictured this setting when writing the first chapter of Family Rules.

This squirrel may look innocent sitting on a jump rope and munching a sunflower, but don’t be deceived.

The view I imagined from the attic window of the main character’s childhood home.

The story behind the story

I’ve always been a writer, but the journey to writing my first novel, Family Rules, began when my young daughters suggested careers for me to undertake once they were all in school, years away at the time. Their ideas were a little outside my skill set and interests as a clumsy introvert, jobs like FBI agent, professional athlete, and pop star. I told them that rather than follow their fabulous suggestions, I wanted to take a year and try to write a novel when that distant day arrived. My ten-year-old stared straight into my soul and said, “If you don’t start now, you never will.” She was right. So I started.

I gathered pieces I’d written over the years—a scene about an older woman in her attic surrounded by the relics of her life and worrying about her adult daughter, as well as many poems I’d scrawled on scraps of paper and stuffed in a tote bag that once belonged to my grandmother. I did no advance plotting, just sat at the computer late one night and started writing. I soon realized that if I worried about it being good, I’d never finish. So it wasn’t good. It was an enormous mess. But one of the happiest moments of my life was slipping silently into bed at 1:30 a.m. a year and a half later, having finished my first draft while my family slept.

Then came the work of revising, SO MUCH revising, with the aid of mentors and critique groups and partners and writing organizations and conferences and webinars and workshops and beta readers and books on the crafts of writing and storytelling and feedback from generous literary agents. And, weirdly, after I wrote the story, some of the events started happening in my real life. Fortunately not the worst ones, but there was a situation involving a squirrel and a jump rope in my backyard that closely resembled the squirrel/jump rope incident at the beginning of Family Rules.

It’s taken a lot longer than the year I originally planned to write and repeatedly rewrite this story, but I’m so glad I followed my daughter’s advice and started. Because while writing Family Rules has helped me in ways I couldn’t have imagined and introduced me to many wonderful people, it has always been for the reader. My deepest hope is that it will help someone feel seen, connected, uplifted, or simply give them a good laugh or cry on a hard day. Stories have the magical ability to find their way to the people who need them. And now Family Rules will have the chance to do the same when the time is right.

Inspiration photo gallery

Family Rules is entirely a work of fiction, including the characters and Wyoming town where the story takes place. However, there are many real-life inspirations for the story, including the photos on this page. For more photos, click below.