by Beth Luberecki
For many people, there’s nothing better than curling up with a good book, whether it’s in the air-conditioned comfort of their living room or after a refreshing dip in the Gulf of Mexico. Whether you live in Southwest Florida year-round or are just visiting for a while, diving into the latest page-turner is one of the best ways to pass the dog days of summer.
But for some Southwest Florida residents, there’s nothing better than writing a good book. Local scribe Randy Wayne White and his Doc Ford novels deservedly get a lot of literary attention, but plenty of other writers also call these parts home. Crafting everything from science fiction–tinged romances to tense thrillers, they’ve produced enough titles to keep even the most serious of bookworms busy. In the process, they’ve helped give locals and visitors new insight into this part of the state.
“Tourists love to get books by local authors, to find something they might not have heard of in their town,” says Hollie Schmid, owner of Sanibel Island Bookshop. “I do the same thing when I go on vacation.”
“People want to know more about the area,” says Susie Holly, owner of MacIntosh Books & Paper on Sanibel. “Visitors especially want to read about where they’re vacationing; it makes it come alive a little more for them.”
We spoke with five local authors to learn more about their creative process and how Southwest Florida inspires their work.
Christine Lemmon When Christine Lemmon was in college, she wrote letters to her Sanibel-based grandmother filled with gossip about her love life. “My grandmother said, ‘Honey, these letters are so juicy, you are going to be a novelist one day,’” recalls Lemmon.
She wrote her first novel while still in college, when suffering from a case of mononucleosis. “I felt just unbelievable joy [while writing],” she says. “I felt as if I was playing. I was creating characters, and I was hooked.”
After college, Lemmon’s career usually kept her writing in some way. But she didn’t start another novel until she was living in Atlanta, faced with nine weeks of solitude while her husband traveled for work. Drawing on her own journal for inspiration, she began writing Sanibel Scribbles.
Lemmon and her husband eventually self-published the book, filling their car with copies and asking Sanibel shops to sell the novel. When they did, Sanibel Scribbles went on to become a word-of-mouth success.
Since then, the five-year resident of Sanibel and mother of three has published two other novels, Portion of the Sea and Sand in My Eyes, along with a collection of quotations from her books called Whisper from the Ocean, all of which will be sold nationwide starting this summer. “I sell a lot of Christine’s books,” says MacIntosh Books’ Holly. “She’s very popular with my customers.”
The island Lemmon visited frequently while growing up and now calls home serves as a constant source of inspiration. Using coquina shells at the beach to teach her son about colors led to a line at the opening of Portion of the Sea. Another element of the book came to her during sunset at Blind Pass.
“To me, when I get ideas for a novel, it’s like picking up a seashell and holding it to your ear,” says Lemmon. “At first, it feels like I hear a whisper from the ocean, but then I hear more.”
Lemmon pulls out her laptop when her children are sleeping, usually late at night or early in the morning. “I don’t view writing as work,” she says. “It’s my personal play time.” When editing, she’ll head to the cemetery next to Captiva’s Chapel by the Sea. “It’s a wonderful place when you’re saying good-bye to pages upon pages that you don’t like,” she says.
Tina Wainscott Pick up a book by Tina Wainscott and odds are you’ll find two characters falling in love, whether it’s on the pages of one of her romantic suspense novels for St. Martin’s Press or in one of her love stories for Harlequin. “I like having a romantic relationship in there,” she says. “I love that they have that happy ending.”
These days, the Naples native is working on a paranormal romantic suspense series under the name Jaime Rush for Avon. “I love The X-Files and Roswell and Highlander, and those TV series weren’t on anymore,” she says. “So I played around with an idea and it ended up being a series, which I had never done before.”
The first book in the series, A Perfect Darkness, introduced readers to a group of twentysomethings who possess psychic abilities, thanks to their parents’ involvement in a mysterious experiment that went wrong. Wainscott, as Rush, followed that up with Out of the Darkness and Touching Darkness, which was released in May.
“It’s kind of open-ended, but there will definitely be at least six books in the series,” says Wainscott. “The response has been great. I got an e-mail recently from a woman who said I had her in my clutches, and I love that.”
The uber-popular Twilight series has helped turn readers on to these kinds of otherworldly stories. “Paranormal is the hot genre now,” says Don Poole, co-owner of One for the Books in Cape Coral. “It’s just going bananas, so Tina’s making a good move there.”
Wainscott works mostly out of her office at her Naples home, but she sometimes enjoys a change of venue. “When I’m editing, if the weather permits, I love doing it outside,” she says. “And I go to the beach when I’m plotting. Doing laps in the swimming pool is also a great way to brainstorm.”
She may be surrounded by lots of natural beauty, but Wainscott’s work certainly takes her to a darker place, albeit one filled with what she calls safe danger. “I used to like writing about the evil that is the human race, but you hear enough about that on the news,” she says. “When you have werewolves and shape-shifters, they’re things you really don’t have to be scared about. It’s like a roller coaster—you get thrills, but you know in the end nothing’s going to happen to you.”
Ad Hudler As part of a family that’s owned a local Colorado newspaper for five generations, Ad Hudler was perhaps destined to be a writer. “Words were a dime a dozen in my family; we were all journalists,” he says. “I was writing stories by the time I was about ten. Doing anything other for a living than something that uses words just never even entered my mind.”
Hudler’s work as a journalist is what first brought him to Fort Myers, where he met his wife, Carol. She’d go on to serve as publisher of the News-Press, but not before her work took the couple all over the country to places like Rochester, New York; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Macon, Georgia.
It was in Macon where Hudler, who stayed at home with the couple’s daughter and worked as a freelance writer, started penning his first novel. “It was like living on another planet,” he says of his time there. “I was so intrigued by Southern culture that I started taking notes; it truly inspired me to start writing. I wanted to write a book set in the Deep South because, to me, it was like living on Mars.”
Southern Living wouldn’t be the first book he’d publish, though. That would be Househusband, a semi-autobiographical novel about the adventures of a Mr. Mom that led to a sequel, Man of the House. For the Fort Myers–set All This Belongs to Me, he once again drew upon his surroundings for ideas.
“I clip a lot of stories from newspapers to use later in novels,” he says. “The newspaper is a great source for stories, especially in Florida. The crimes here are fantastic. I’m working on a humorous memoir now with a whole chapter on fantastic Florida crimes.”
Hudler’s desk in his Fort Myers home overlooks the Caloosahatchee River. Despite the great view, he manages to write at least two hundred words a day, preferably more. When he needs a break, he embraces his domestic side. “Household chores are great for writing because they’re so physical and mindless,” he says. “I’ll be writing intensely for half an hour and then get up and trim the bougainvillea bush or fold a load of laundry or make a grocery list for dinner. It helps; the two are very complementary.”
Lisa Black “I first started writing when I was in grade school, and I’ve written for as long as I can remember,” says Lisa Black. “I used to write letters to my favorite cousin and include little stories that I’d write like a comic book, with stick-figure drawings.” After college, Black banged out six novels while working as a secretary, though they’re “all still unseen and probably should remain unseen,” she laughs.
Life as a secretary got boring though, so Black got a degree in forensics and spent five years working at a Cleveland-area coroner’s office. She then moved to Cape Coral, where she’s written four mystery novels (two under the name of Elizabeth Becka) and works as a latent print examiner for the Cape Coral Police Department.
If you watch shows like CSI, you might think Black’s work would provide her with ideas for lots of twisted plots and shady characters. But she classifies most of the crimes she encounters as “mundane.” While she includes real-life details of the world of forensics, her stories come from her own imagination. “I like being able to make stuff up, to make the story go the way you want it to go, have things happen the way you want them to happen,” she says. “It’s sort of a puzzle.”
To make sense of that puzzle, Black maps things out in advance. “I do have to know the whole story from beginning to end before I start,” she says. “Planning in advance helps me to not write myself into a corner, to not panic or get writer’s block.”
When working on a novel, Black tries to write at least one thousand words a day five days a week, crafting a first draft in four to five months. Her latest book, Trail of Blood, will be published in September by William Morrow. “It uses as its backdrop a series of true-life murders in Cleveland during the Great Depression,” she says. “It was like America’s version of Jack the Ripper. The guy was very bloody, very prolific, and was never caught.”
Kristy Kiernan During her childhood, Kristy Kiernan’s family moved often, but they always stayed on Florida’s west coast. “If there’s a little beach town in Southwest Florida, I’ve lived there, probably twice, maybe even three times,” she says.
Kiernan has spent the last eighteen years residing in Naples, but she and her husband, ready for some change, are moving to Fort Myers this summer. The fondness she has for this part of the Sunshine State is readily apparent in her work.
“One reviewer said Catching Genius [Kiernan’s first book] is like a love letter to Florida, and I really agree with that,” she says. “I kind of have an over-the-top, goofy love for Southwest Florida. And it informs every page of every book.”
Kiernan was interested in writing from a young age, but she never really pursued it until her thirties, after a conversation with her grandfather while her grandmother was ill. “My granddaddy was feeling his mortality, talking about all the things he regretted not doing in life,” she recalls. “And the last thing he said was, ‘I always wish I’d written.’ I realized I didn’t want to be eighty years old telling a thirty-year-old all the things I regretted not doing. So I drove home the next day and started my first novel, which was terrible, by the way, and will never see the light of day.”
It took a few more attempts before she found success with Catching Genius, the story of two estranged sisters that Kiernan calls “the little book that could.” She followed that with Matters of Faith, which won a Florida Book Award Bronze Medal. Her latest, Between Friends, came out in April. “If readers like Jodi Picoult, we always recommend Kristy to them,” says Sanibel Island Bookshop’s Schmid.
Though the promotion of her new book will keep her busy for a while, Kiernan’s already working on something new, once again turning to the world around her for ideas. “I was always an observant kid,” she says. “I was one of those kids who heard a song once and the lyrics got stuck in my head for the rest of my life. And I’m like that with news stories and the interesting people I meet. I’m very curious and I ask a lot of questions; my husband calls me the ‘velvet interrogator.’ I find regular people just really fascinating.”
Beth Luberecki is a Venice, Florida–based freelance writer and an editor for Times of the Islands, RSW Living, Bonita Living, and Gulf & Main.