Last month, my writing bestie, Liz Flaherty, and I went on our biannual retreat. Even though we talk every day on gChat, these retreats are our shared personal moments of Zen. We’ve been going on retreat together every late winter and early fall for at least ten years. The late winter is usually four nights, 5 days in a place that offers decent restaurants, a few shops, and quiet places to set up to write. Think boutique hotels and state park inns. We’ve actually been going to the same boutique hotel in the hills of southern Indiana for several years, but this year, we tried a new adventure.
We chose the hills of southern Indiana again, but this trip, we booked four nights at an inn in New Harmony, Indiana. Neither of us had ever been there before, so we were taking a chance, but the website looked good and the history looked downright fascinating.
New Harmony is the site of two early American Utopian communities formed when “out West” was the frontier in what is now the Midwest United States. George Rapp, who began the Harmony Society settled on the banks of the Wabash River in 1814. The Harmonists, a religious sect, believed that Jesus was coming back very soon, so they lived their lives in striving for perfection in everything they did. They formed a community together, building over 150 log structures and creating the town of Harmony. They were entirely self-sufficient, although they did trade goods with towns along the Wabash, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers, including places as far away as New Orleans and Pittsburgh.
In 1824, Rapp sold the community to Robert Owen, who had enough money to simply buy the whole town. Owen was more of a secularist, focused on social equality and education, as well as nature rather than perfection. The people who settled in New Harmony were progressive thinkers, scholars, even early feminists who all lived together communally. New Harmony was bastion of social progress out on the frontier. They founded one of the nation’s first co-ed public schools, they had trade schools, and they studied nature, in particular geology. The experiment thrived in some ways, but also failed due to internal conflicts, lack of strong leadership, and a lack of skilled labor and production.
The town is now a National Historic Landmark, and although it is no longer a “Utopia,” they’ve done a great job at preserving the stories of the utopias and ideals that both Rapp and Owen tried to create. The whole town just reeks of history, and Liz and I found something new to explore each afternoon after we got done writing for the day. It’s different from other small tourist towns in that it doesn’t cater to shoppers, it caters to lovers of history. The town is quite walkable. As a matter of fact, we saw more golf carts than cars.
The thing we noticed most about our stay in New Harmony was how incredibly peaceful the town was—the quiet, which could’ve been disconcerting, was actually extraordinary. We wandered–oh, how we wandered! All through an old hilly cemetery, through the spectacular cathedral labyrinth, past home after restored home, and into a lovely old church that remains open twenty-four hours. The beautiful magnolia trees, the spring flowers, the friendly folks we met while walking, the labyrinths and museums, even the restaurants exuded the harmony and peace that was the cornerstone of the town in the early nineteenth century.
This place was the frontier, the West in 1814, but it wasn’t the Wild West. It wasn’t cowboys and cattle drives and saloons and ranches. Rather it was one group of people’s vision of what paradise could be.
What’s your vision of paradise? Mine varies—sometimes it’s a house in a small town on Lake Michigan that is easy walking distance to the lake where I can walk the beach whenever I want. Other times it’s a small cottage in Provence, living among the lavender fields and vineyards. But my paradise always includes Husband, my kids, my friends, and books!
FYI: Make It Real, book 2 in my Walkers of River’s Edge series is still on sale for just 99 cents, but only for a few more days! If you haven’t been to River’s Edge yet, now’s your chance. More sweet, small town romance in beautiful southern Indiana!
I don’t write historical western romance, I write contemporary romance. But, I was curious about women’s roles in the Old West, particularly seasoned women, and how that compares to women’s roles on ranches and cattle spreads today.
Contemporary Western women of all ages fight just as fiercely and work just as hard as their nineteenth-century counterparts, although with a bit more assistance from modern technology. Wells are drilled now with machinery instead of dug by hand, fences are electrified, but they still have to be repaired, tractors beat hand plows all to heck, and 4-wheel-drivetrucks and Gators make getting around the vast acres much easier and faster. Cows still need hay, and calves still need to be birthed but computers make ranch organization much easier. Access to modern medicine, ambulances, and hospitals make live spans much longer; and although most ranch women grow big gardens even today, grocery stores make produce and dairy more readily available.
Today’s ranch women have different challenges than their nineteenth-century sisters, but the goal is the same—to make a success of the family farms and cattle spreads. When I write my contemporary heroines, I try hard to show spunky, tough ladies who can rope a cow, wrangle a herd of horses, and help birth a calf. But they’re also smart, fun, flirty women who can handle the ranch books, dance with skirts a swirlin’, and charm a cowboy right to his knees.
The Winners of a
This one was a little bit of a departure for me—I’ve never used the enemies-to-lovers trope before. Mostly, I think because I really hate confrontation. I mean seriously hate it. I’ll go out of my way to avoid a confrontation in my real life, so writing a story based on one was a little uncomfortable.
It’s an enemies to lovers showdown between the cowboy who can’t trust and the cowgirl who won’t forgive.
Confession? I don’t know any real cowboys. I’ve read about them in the novels that my fellow western romance authors write; I’ve watched myriad TV westerns both new and old and rodeo videos galore. We had horses for fifteen years, so I’ve met lots of horsemen, some may even have thought of themselves as cowboys, some sure acted as if they thought they were. But a cattle drive in Montana is very different from riding the horse trails in a state park in the Midwest.
But as I learned more and more about cowboys, I discovered that “alpha” didn’t really define the cowboy heroes I was reading about and watching. The swaggering stereotypical cowboy I’d always imagined was so far off the mark that I was actually shocked … and delighted. That quiet strength, that determination that I’d written into my beta winemakers, veterinarians, carpenters, college professors, and chefs were also hallmarks of the cowboy persona. When I created bronc rider Del Foster and rodeo cutting champion Bo Kennedy, those qualities—gentleness, intelligence, supportiveness, loyalty, steadiness, awareness of their own emotions as well as others—were all things my cowboys could be … and are.
I was on a writer retreat with my bestie, Liz Flaherty a couple of weeks ago. It was fabulous. We wrote, we drank wine, we ate chocolate, we talked, we processed her book and mine. Our retreats are always as Liz puts it,
We talked about the little pieces of ideas that wander through our writer minds—snippets of conversations, words, things we notice that perhaps no one else notices. We share ideas about settings, even as minute as the furnishings in a specific house in a setting. That got me thinking about where my random ideas rest in my imagination—on a chintz chair, I think. Faded old flowered fabric on a huge overstuffed chair sitting in a sunny spot under the eaves. Maybe there’s an ottoman, but it doesn’t have to match because honestly, my decorating style, like my writing style, is as random as my ideas. So why would I imagine something that matches?
Everyone has word pictures in their minds—and often it takes just seeing a pair of fancy cowboy boots in a store in West Yellowstone, Montana, or a rusty pump on a ranch in Virginia City for a story to start to happen.
When 
In late July, I left my local airport at 8:30 a.m.; Carol left her local airport 10:15 a.m. and we met up in the Denver Airport. Then we flew together to Bozeman–one of the cutest airports I’ve ever seen! There are bears and moose everywhere and some crazy huge bird hanging from the ceiling! The whole airport was mountain stone and cedar beams–really pretty and lodge-y (If that’s not a word, it should be). We also saw the coolest ad for a fishing outfitters that felt like the universe was telling me that moving from River’s Edge to Montana is a capital idea! Take a look!
There are 64 mountain ranges in Montana and our condo was nestled right in the middle of the Madison Range at an altitude of 7000 feet. Lone Mountain was visible from Big Sky as well as several other mountain ranges, including the Gallatin Range and the Absaroka Range, which are part of Marietta lore.
We spent two days of our week at Yellowstone National Park, which is just overwhelming and spectacular! Carol used the term “moonscape of boiling mud and geysers” to describe the Fountain Paint Pot thermal field and Old Faithful. I can’t think of a better way to say it. It was awe-inspiring and this little Midwestern gal couldn’t stop saying, “Wow!” What a spectacular experience that national park was!
When we drove west to Virginia City the first thing I noticed was that the landscape was so very different from Big Sky. In Big Sky, it’s all huge mountains and pines. As we headed west, the terrain changed to rolling hills and pastures and wheat and hayfields. Junipers dotted the landscape and there were lots of ranches and fences and sagebrush. I absorbed it all–even-saw a ranch that reminded me of what I imagined Del Foster’s ranch to be–and oh, the cows and horses! Virginia City and Ennis were real Old West towns and just steeped in history!
I think the most important thing that we discovered there is how big the world is–Big Sky indeed! The mountains overwhelmed us every time we went outside even though we were only halfway up. We loved tramping to Ousel Falls, so I would have a picture in my head (and on my phone) of what I imagined Juniper Falls to look like. I absorbed Montana and imagined the little town of Marietta in each place we visited. We saw enough cattle ranches and guest dude ranches that I can add some authenticity to my Juniper Falls Ranch stories. The Big Sky area wasn’t as cowboy-centric as I imagined it would be, but the vibe was definitely Western.