No Profession For A Lady

I am often asked if Samantha Hargrave, the heroine of my novel Domina, was based on an actual historical figure. She was.

During the years I worked as an operating room nurse, I developed a keen interest in women in medicine, and particularly women doctors in history. There was a time when women were barred from the health professions in the belief that they hadn't the mental capacity for the job, and also that it wasn't ladylike. This is the theme I explore in Domina, and in doing research, I read the biographies of several pioneering women doctors of the 19th century - a time when city streets teemed with disease, labor pains were considered a punishment for sin, lethal drugs were sold without prescriptions, and many men would stop at nothing to keep a woman from becoming a doctor - even to physically throwing a female medical student from the classroom!

The Challenge of a Problem

Here is another piece of advice I always give to aspiring authors.

Early in my writing career, one of my biggest problems was composing descriptive paragraphs - where the author has to convey a visual image of location and atmosphere within a story. I adore writing dialogue, but I balked at descriptions. However, as those passages were necessary to creating a fully realized novel, I plugged away at the problem, not always enjoying the process.

Daughter of the Sun

One afternoon, years ago, I stood in the heart of an ancient canyon in New Mexico, gazing upon the ruins and artifacts of a people long forgotten. And I learned on that day, beneath a hot sun as a lone hawk circled overhead, that not only was the race who had lived there forgotten, it was never really known, for those who had lived in Chaco Canyon a thousand years ago disappeared suddenly and without a trace, leaving no clues as to their identity - where they had come from, where they went, why they had left so abruptly.