By Tess Oliver My story ideas come to me at the oddest times. Driving in a car, washing dishes, even standing in the shower. Not exactly glamorous, exciting locations but sometimes it’s those mundane activities that let my imagination go hog wild. The idea for my newest series Western Smokejumpers came to me while I was hiking on a trail near my home in Colorado. My husband and I recently picked up our belongings, our dogs, and our goats and moved to the beautiful state of Colorado from the equally beautiful state of California. My kids live in Colorado too and any chance we can get closer to nature we take it. Colorado is the perfect place for that. Unfortunately, just like California, Colorado is in the western United States a place that sees more and more heat and drought each year. Those extreme conditions fuel wildfire season, a season that grows longer and more dreadful each year. And each year brave men and women parachute into the untouched wilderness to stop the blazes before they chew up entire swaths of that nature I so dearly love. It occurred to me that those firefighters have to be some of the bravest, coolest, most badass people on earth. Sounded like the perfect fit for a new romance series. So the spark of an idea (metaphorically speaking) turned into a full fire and my newest characters, four smokejumpers who put their lives on the line on the job and fall in love off the job have come to the page. I hope you enjoy getting to know them and their stories just as much as I enjoyed conjuring them up in my imagination.
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