Today we welcome to the Junction three authors who contributed to The Cowboy’s Bride Collection. Nancy J. Farrier, Davalynn Spencer and Darlene Spencer are here to tell us about the inspiration for their stories. And each of these lovely ladies will be doing a giveaway!
Nancy is giving away a copy of the collection and a handmade bookmark, Davalynn is giving away a $10 Amazon gift card and Darlene is giving away winner’s choice of either a digital or print copy of the collection. Now let’s learn about these authors and their inspirations!
Crazy About Cait, The Cowboy’s Bride Collection By Nancy J. Farrier
I live in Southern California. For the past few years, we have suffered a severe drought. We’ve had water rationing in some area and restricted watering of plants. In our modern day, we do have ways to conserve water that our predecessors did not have. We can also predict weather patterns more accurately.
When researching my story, Crazy About Cait in The Cowboy’s Bride collection, I wondered about the difficulties of drought in the past and how what the ranchers in the 1800’s had to face. I found out one of the dangers they faced came as a small weed, called locoweed. This little plant is poisonous to cattle and horses, so in normal years, ranchers took care to protect their livestock, making sure they grazed in pastures free of locoweed. When the feed was scarce and dying, due to drought, this hardy little plant often proved too much of a temptation for the hungry animals. The accounts I read of animals suffering and dying from poisoning were very sad.
In Crazy About Cait, Cait, faces the desperate times of drought, the possibility of her father losing their home, and of having to work alongside a man who broke her sister’s heart a few years before. Jonas knows he made a big mistake in the past, but he intends to fight for Cait, and to win her love as they work together, albeit reluctantly on Cait’s part, to save her father’s ranch.
Nancy grew up on a small farm in the Midwest amidst a close knit family. She came to love farm life including the cooking, gardening and canning, but not so much the cleaning house part. In school she often got in trouble in history class for hiding a fiction book in her text book to read during the teacher’s lecture. Nancy was shocked to later discover she had such a love for history. Now Nancy lives in Southern California and loves to research and include bits of history in her books. She is a Christian and enjoys encouraging her readers in their faith. Read more about Nancy at nancyjfarrier.com.
The Wrangler’s Woman by Davalynn Spencer
I live near Cañon City, Colorado, and the area has been cowboy country since the mid-1800s. With “high park” grasslands, relatively mild winters, and plenty of snow runoff from high country creeks that flow into the mighty Arkansas River, this was the perfect setting for the story I wanted to tell in The Cowboy’s Bride collection.
An idea for a rugged cowboy hero flashed across my inner screen in the form of a rancher driving his herd of longhorns down a small town’s Main Street. I could hear the clacking horns and scratching hooves, and taste the gritty dust on my tongue. No doubt such an event would draw the attention of local residents—particularly that of a woman from the Midwest who’d read everything she could about cowboys.
Familiar with some of the area’s ranches, I took those two characters and chose a spot off Texas Creek on the way to the Wet Mountain Valley. Today, the juncture of that old stage road at US Highway 50 is called Texas Creek. But in 1881, it was known as Ford Junction. And that’s where my lovelorn heroine stands on the porch of her sister’s boarding house as the cowboy trails his herd by in a dusty parade.
“The Wrangler’s Woman” tells the story of widowed rancher Josiah Hanacker who hires spinster Corra Jameson as a lady-trainer for his young daughter, Jess. He fears losing Jess to his wife’s sister if the girl doesn’t meet her aunt’s ladylike expectations. Turns out, Corra has everything Josiah needs for his daughter. He just never figured she’d have what he needed for himself.
Davalynn Spencer writes inspirational Western romance complete with rugged cowboys, their challenges, and their loves. She won the 2015 Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award for Inspirational Western Fiction and makes her home on Colorado’s Front Range with her handsome cowboy and their Queensland heeler, Blue. Connect with her at www.davalynnspencer.com.
The Reformed Cowboy by Darlene Franklin
I love writing about the west, but I don’t know much about cowboy life. So I created a heroine a lot like me—an easterner, shocked by the differences when she moves west to Wichita. When the cowboys arrive in Wichita at the end of the trail, she offers a class, “Learn to be a Gentleman.” What she doesn’t know is that her secret correspondent—poet and reader Wes Harper—is himself a cowboy and a student in her class.
Best-selling author Darlene Franklin’s greatest claim to fame is that she writes full-time from a nursing home. She is an active member of Oklahoma City Christian Fiction Writers, American Christian Fiction Writers, and the Christian Authors Network. She has written over fifty books and more than 250 devotionals.Website and blog Facebook Amazon author page
