Bette Donovan and the Battle for Wyoming
The motivation and inspiration happened over a long period of time. When I was in first grade, I wrote a series of poems and illustrations. My teacher put them up on a bulletin board in the hallway. It was the first time someone gave me positive affirmation (concerning writing) and it was a neat moment and experience for a little kid. In fifth grade, my teacher assigned us to write a children’s book. That was my favorite school assignment and the entire project and process really stuck with me. In sixth grade, we had to do a career shadow. I followed around a staff-newspaper writer and after that, I developed an interest in journalism and politics which led to a lot of non-fiction reading and biography watching. In ninth grade, I had an argument with a friend who told me I wasn’t capable of writing anything traumatic because I hadn’t experienced trauma. I wrote a poem about a woman who committed suicide because she was being abused by her husband. My librarian entered the poem in a poetry anthology and it was chosen. That was the first time I had something published and I didn’t even realize how big of a deal it was at the time! I wrote my first novel when I was fifteen. My aunt is the only person who read it, and she helped me learn about character development and plotting.
I took a huge writing pause when I got married and started a family. Eventually, the bug hit again, but I mostly stuck to non-fiction, writing lifestyle and politics for some online magazines. I wrote my second novel when I was thirty. My mom read it and encouraged me to keep trying to put stories out. She said I had a knack for telling them, and my writing was engaging. Novels three, four, and five were a Christian SFF trilogy. Those were the first stories I wrote that other people started reading and giving me positive feedback on. I started to get some ideas swirling and developed a desire to write a modernized western with a badass lady-hero, and Bette Donovan was born. I shared this book with my best friend. His grandmother was a book editor in the 90s and he gave the manuscript to her. I had no idea at the time how to find or hire an editor. She read it and contacted me, saying she wanted to edit the book and teach me a little about publishing.
Bette Donovan and the Battle for Wyoming is my debut novel, and I have plans to release the first two books (May and November respectively) of a four-book romantic suspense series called Life in the Quiet. Publishing Bette Donovan has been such a wonderful experience. I’ve learned so much taking this project through to completion. The indie-community as a whole has been so amazingly welcoming and supportive, and I’m excited and proud to be a part of it.
Altogether, years of research went into the development of this project. I didn’t start off researching with a goal to write a historical fiction story. I have a huge love and respect for the American pioneer and the people who built our country and the sacrifices they had to make in order to do it. When my kids were younger, they were homeschooled, and since I have an affinity for American history and culture, we focused on this a lot in their studies. We took them all over the country visiting different historic sites, battlefields, museums and libraries. We saw plays, read books, and watched movies. There was so much I already knew about the American West and the American Revolutionary War and the Civil War–it made a lot of sense I’d want to write something in this setting. So when I did start working on Bette Donovan, I came into it with a fairly large knowledge-base. While the research was extensive, once I actually started writing, it was also a lot more nuanced than it would have been had I not already taken in so much information about that time period.
Bette Donovan is a bit historically adjacent, so that also makes the process a little different from how you might research a typical historical fiction story. I thought it would be so interesting to develop a character who shaped the America we know from the background. What if one person influenced Abraham Lincoln to go into politics, and inspired Pablo Noriega to become the first Hispanic US Marshal, and was Buffalo Bill’s godmother, and gave Sitting Bull his name?
The research became more like pinpoints of well-known facts and players. What big events were people already familiar with? (Manifest Destiny, lawlessness, the expansion of the US railways, etc.) and who were the main characters of that time who still have name recognition today? (The Buchanans, the Vanderbilts, Buffalo Bill, Abraham Lincoln, and so on.) Then I worked backward in my own mind to knit the people and events together with whatever conspiracy-theories I could come up with. The questions in that way become very specific at times, and that certainly helped.
There’s quite a bit of historical detail in this story and small bits of information that have a deeper meaning than you might realize at first glance or read. I wanted to drop as many historical Easter eggs as I could in there for people to find, and that part of it was a lot of fun to try to figure out and orchestrate, but of course… it also meant more research.
Bette is such a fun and likeable character. She’s resilient and when bad things happen to her, she doesn’t wallow in it, she just figures out what she needs to do next. Her parents knew the political climate in America was volatile, so they sent her to Japan to a boarding school for her safety. She was trained in swordplay, equestrianism, and was taught to shoot guns. When she finds herself exiled to the west, she doesn’t come out of nowhere being good at these things. But she doesn’t ever act proud, she works really hard to achieve her eventual expert-level. And even still, she fails a lot. There are some fights she outright loses, and many battles she doesn’t really win, or doesn’t win without taking huge losses. Bette’s not a character that starts out as overpowering, she has a long and slow and hard-won heroine-arc, but she’s determined to take her life back, and protect the people she loves while she’s doing it. Her friends rally around her, not because she’s the smartest of them or the strongest, it’s because she inspires them. She refuses to give up or give in and is determined to make the life she wants despite all obstacles or odds. She starts out as Elizabeth King and Bette Donovan is her alias. Over time, she starts to see herself as Bette more than Elizabeth, so we have this really nice bookend at one point where she never goes back to referring to herself as Elizabeth again. It takes over slowly, until she truly becomes Bette Donovan.
At the end of it all, she doesn’t get to win outright. She has to compromise, and she has to deal with the implications of that and how it weighs on her conscience. I think Bette resonates because she’s a White Hat. She’s not morally gray, she’s not a feminist, she’s just an American who knows how important freedom is, and she’s willing to die in order to protect it.
It took me a long time to figure out how to plug into a writing community, and how to find people who were willing to beta read, manuscript swap, and critique. Finding those resources has been such a tremendous help and I wish I’d known years ago that these kinds of groups existed. So I would encourage people to find others who will give constructive criticism and feedback and stay connected with a writing community. It’s so much more motivating and exciting when you have a group of people all on the same journey and there’s just so much you can learn from your writing peers.
